Destiny is a fickle
thing. Just when you’re convinced that
you’re living under a dark curse, it turns out that all the bad things
happening to you are actually sparing you greater troubles. Thus began our first multi-day crossing of
the Bay of Biscay.
As we approached the meeting
point we had set with our friends making the crossing with us, we realized that
our vhf marine radio was not working.
After a few telephone calls, we agreed that it would be folly to try to
head out without the means to contact each other (or emergency services) and so
we called our electrician and re-routed to a nearby port to look at the
problem. Our friends were on a schedule
and had to go on without us.
After 2 days, the
problem was solved and the weather looked pretty good so we decided to go ahead
and cross to Bilbao by ourselves. After
meeting up, we learned that they had a much rougher crossing than we did, and
if we had been with them, we probably would have been traumatized.
As it was, we were none
too happy. We agreed that we would
never, ever do something so stupid again.
It’s too stressful, too tiring, and no fun! Why on earth are we doing this to ourselves? Then there were moments of grace: the first day was gorgeous and we were
sailing wing-and-wing from morning to sunset on a flat sea, the sky was full of
shooting stars, the ocean turned a deep royal blue as we moved into 2000 meters
of water, and the next morning, dolphins came to play with us.
When we were 50 miles
off the coast of Bilbao, the wind died down and it began sprinkling. The sky roared with thunder and lightning
lit up the sky as far as we could see along the coast. Late in the evening, we saw a strange tubular
cloud develop in front of our eyes like a tornado turned on its side. I quickly ran below to look at cloud pictures
in our marine atlas but couldn’t identify it. I suppose it is caused from northerly winds laden with humidity hitting the mountains and being lifted up, condensing, sinking and getting re-hit by northerly winds, creating a roll. Once the roll gets heavy enough, it takes on a life of its own and rolls "downhill" with a wind shear. Or not. Will look it up later...
While the wind was from behind, this thing was moving towards us, very
quickly. We didn’t know what it was but were
certain that we didn’t want to have any sail up when it hit. We briefly thought about trying to sail
around it or run away, but it was too large and moving too fast. We decided the best strategy would be to
charge at it perpendicularly to pass under and out as quickly as possible.
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| The not-so welcoming site over the north coast of Spain. |
Under the cloud roll,
the winds rose to 35 knots and the rain pelted down but the winds were in the
nose and there was no swell, so it actually wasn’t so bad. A few minutes later, a second roll hit but it
was less structured than the first and the winds lighter. After those few harrowing minutes, things
calmed down to what a friend calls “dog breath weather” … warm, humid, and
un-breathable. We motored through the
rest of the night in relative calm with light steady rain and a pink and yellow
lightning display dancing along the coast but without any strikes in the
area. We finally decided we could trust
the pilot to steer, which allowed us to get some much needed rest for the final
leg of the journey. The industrial
harbor of Bilbao appeared at dawn and those red and green channel lights were
the most beautiful sight we’d seen in a long time.
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| Bilbao harbor entrance after a rough night. |
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| Post-crossing dry out and nap. |
With a few days behind us now, and several hours of psycho-therapy with our friend who has a couple of solo trans-Atlantic crossings under his belt, we've decided it wasn't so bad after all and that we're now better prepared to tackle those rought spots that frighten us. But being capable of doing something and actually wanting to do it are not the same thing. We'll revisit this theme again soon, I suspect.
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