The trade winds are present and we are moving at speeds and comfort like we have never moved before!
Day 18 and still no sight of land. The date is June 30, 2019 and we are almost there!
The trade winds seem to be stronger near shore, which means that the close we get to shore the stronger the winds will be and the faster we will be moving along. All was fine with our course until we came across a separation scheme off the northern tip of Spain. All the traffic coming out of the Mediterranean and bound for the English Channel will want to pass close to this point of land. That means that there is a lot of ship traffic and as a result there is also separation lanes dividing Northbound ships from Southbound ships.
The problem is we want to cut closer to land so that we don’t get swept away by the current and miss our harbor, but our course had us cutting right across the lanes! We sailed along in the outermost Southbound lane and once we were clear of the separation scheme and there was space between all the cargo ships, we cut along towards shore where we could be certain we would not miss our destination.
This might be our last night out at sea on the open ocean for a while, so we took special care to appreciate the sunset we were presented with. While it is beautiful, it forewarns of winds to come.
You can see that we are in a cloudless area with a relatively high pressure. The sky is clear until it reaches the wall of towering clouds in the distance. The red hue on all the clouds is caused by the refractive lens of the high pressure we find ourselves in, making everything we look at in the distance display a "red shift”.
What this tells me is that we have calm and wonderful conditions at the moment, but that will change when those clouds approach. The base of the clouds is not visible which gives some clue to their distance away. The bottom of these low level clouds tend to be around 3,300 feet above sea level. The bottom becomes visible when the clouds are about 100 miles away. The tops of these clouds can reach 60,000 feet above sea level, which can be seen from about 300 miles away. Being how we see the tops and not the bottom, we can assume that these clouds are somewhere between 100 and 300 miles away from us!
The clouds billowing up into the sky demonstrates great atmospheric instability over there and it is all occurring in a line. This means that when the cloud line approaches, the winds will jump from calm to insane in a hurry so we need to prepare ourselves for this wind before it arrives (or make it to our port before it gets to us).
