Hidden Currents: Learning to Maintain Course and Speed

Note:  We have just completed a week’s tour of the Galapagos.  For the next few days, I’ll be posting some entries related to our passage here, and some of our local visits.  Here’s an essay I penned as we left the Gulf of Panama, on our way here.

March 1, 2010

A few nights ago, as we left the Bay of Panama and headed southwest to the Galapagos, we were surrounded by a “poco” ring of fire – “poco” being one of the few words of Spanish I came to learn in Panama, as in “poco Espanol.”  (I’m embarrassed – even a bit ashamed – to admit my knowledge of Spanish borders on the comical:  “basura,” since I see it on the piles of waste paper left in offices cleaned by often-Hispanic night workers; cervaza, from my beer drinking days, and the usual salutations –“ hola,” “adios,” “buenas dias,” “buenas tardes,” etc.  Lucky for me, I am married to a multi-lingual, and many in the world are capable of understanding my English)) 

That night, leaving Panama, motoring southward on a windless night, across the full 360 degrees of horizon and underneath a clear sky lit by a three-quarters moon, we saw emerge from the haze the distant tips of thunderheads – the kinds of clouds that soar tens of thousands of feet into the air, spawning thunderstorms, tornados, and lightning. 

I used to travel a lot by air, and seeing the tops of these clouds from the relative comfort of a coach seat 38,000 feet in the air was always a favorite pastime of mine.  They are spectacularly alive, and often the rising hot air’s moisture condenses before your eyes, continuously adding to the height and breadth of the cloud.  As a weather phenomenon, they’re a meteorologist’s secret fantasy, because they spawn strange and often terrible ground weather conditions, from hail to devastating and airplane-damaging downdrafts.  Modern weather prediction technologies have at least allowed forecasters to warn neighbors and pilots of these cloud/weather combinations, but if you’re a frequent flyer, you’ve felt the stomach-churning butterflies as your 747 drops 100 feet in a matter of seconds when straying too close to one of these monsters.

On a sailboat, these cloud formations bode ill as well, if you’re unfortunate enough to find yourself alongside or underneath one.  They almost always contain what Susan, our weather forecaster, calls “embedded thunderstorms,” accompanied by strong, often-violent winds and torrential downpours.  Leaving the Gulf of Panama, motoring on a windless night over a glassy sea, being surrounded on all sides by these clouds seemed unreal:  who could imagine that so much weather energy exists so close to a boat motoring under a windless, clear sky?

As a bit of a student of weather, I suspected that we’d see lightning that night – the clues were all around us.  We’re motoring across a sea whose temperature hovers in the mid-80s, drenched in an ambient humidity of about 85 percent (enough so that water drips from the sails and leaves a slick coating on the decks), and through still air whose temperature is heated by the sun over the course of a day.  Naturally, one might say, the heated moist air rises, and the moisture begins to condense as it rises, with the cooler air falling back down around the periphery to re-heat and regain moisture, while the center column of condensing air rises ever higher.  All of this happening in plain sight and out of our view throughout the long, hot day.   The afternoon horizon appeared just a darker shade of grey– without any definition or delineation;  the daytime view of our celestial hemisphere was unchanged: a blue overhead sky settling seamlessly to soft blue to grey to water.   I could sense, however, an eventful night.

By evening, as we finished dinner and stowed away the dishes, the heretofore hidden horizon slowly morphed from its hazy, indistinct blur to a gently mounded set of different hills, backlit by a setting sun, and each topped by almost-metronomic blurs of distant light flashes.  The rapidly rising air had created enough ionic friction to spawn a near-continuous staccato of cloud-top lightning flashes – heat lightning, as they might say in the Great Plains.  Electrical currents discharging in the millions of volts, hidden atop the heights of clouds too far off to see clearly.

As evening fell, I reflected:  While we motored, the moist hot air lifted.  While we ate, the clouds took visible form.  While we cleared the table, and as dusk fell, the lightning from distant thunderheads silhouetted the outlines of nearer thunderheads.  Invisible clouds made visible by others’ flashes.  By day, these clouds formed a whitish blur smudging the horizon; by evening, and all night long, a little -- a “poco” ring of electrical current came to life within these clouds, as we motored into the Pacific and its “mucho grande” volcanic Rim of Fire. 

Throughout the night, we watched the lightning; I saw two parallel strikes sizzle the ocean just 4 miles away.  Our boat is grounded, and we’re mostly non-conductive fiberglass, but a lightning strike at sea is no fun.  Even sailing in the electrically-charged air, filled with ions, can damage the sensitive electronics.  Taking a cue from basic electrical principles, we stowed our computers, our GPS, and our satellite phone in our oven – there can be little or no net charge in an enclosed metal container.

Despite the desire to avoid these thunderheads with their unpredictable weather, we did nothing.  Here, in equatorial latitudes, with their uneven Coriolus forces, the cells move at 25-30 miles an hour, or not; they move with the wind, or not; they dissipate, form anew, or not.  There was nothing we could do, but motor on; we were aware of these clouds and their potential for storms, but didn’t know enough about their intentions to justify any change of course or speed.  Maintain.

The next morning, having sailed thru the night surrounded by distant unrealized thunderstorm threats, we encountered another set of hidden weather events -- currents, passing unseen and unfelt beneath our twin hulls.  For awhile, I had noticed that to sail 235 degrees over the ground, we needed to point the boat to a heading of 215 degrees.  Clearly, we were being pushed northward by a current.  I could see this clearly by reading the instruments.

Susan’s weather forecast for our passage had mentioned the existence of micro undercurrents that ran north and south, at an oblique angle to the prevailing but diminishing north- and westward-setting Humboldt Current.  Jimmy Cornell also mentions these in his World Cruising Routes:  “The surface circulation along the Pacific coast of Central America and Gulf of Panama is more erratic, with great seasonal variations that make predictions impossible.”  Susan mentioned that the southward currents (good for us) tend to be cooler than the northward currents and counseled us to track the temperature and follow the microcurrents; we were fortunate to have a sea temperature gauge included as part of our electronics, so we could follow half her advice and measure these temperature changes.

Since leaving the Archipielago de los Perles in the Gulf of Panama, the water temperature varied between 84 degrees and 86 degrees.  I confess to not quite knowing what to do with this information on temperature variation.  Veering off course to chase a hidden temperature gradient smacks of hubris –the currents are ostensibly narrow, our boat moves slowly, and I’m not sure which direction to choose, and whether any change in direction will yield appreciable improvements in speed over the bottom.  My perhaps over-analytic mind wonders whether we’d be moving into an even higher-temperature current, at the expense of making distance toward the Academy Bay on the Galapagos island of Santa Cruz.  So, while visible in the moment, the shapes and directions and widths of these micro-undercurrents remain hidden.  Without a sense of direction, and leaving well enough be (making good progress under full sail by now), we opt for no change of course or speed.  Maintain.

Even if there’s no resulting change in course or speed, I like to be aware of these hidden electrical and ocean currents.  For me, I’ve always relied on instruments and my five senses and analytics and reports and, yes, books, to detect these hidden currents. I need facts and figures. My wife, Jennifer, on the other hand, has a sixth sense for another set of hidden currents around us.  She knows when to check our satellite phone for the message from our son alerting us to an issue at home.  She can enter the cockpit and sense the need to lay out food for a low-on-sugar crew.  She knows when I need a shock of reality against my tendency to be less-than-attentive to others’ feelings. 

She has an ability to intuit the emotional currents around her, no matter how far the distance or faint the signal.  We joke that she’s Velcro and I’m Teflon, and we’ve learned – sometimes painfully -- to embrace and leverage each others’ perspectives.  I can explain the hidden currents of thunderclouds and ocean thermoclines; she can feel the pain of a child’s dislocated shoulder from 3000 miles away.  She knows when to call her Mom, and when to visit an aging aunt about to pass away.  In the case of our daughter, Kate, who faces yet another surgery, having this Velcro awareness somehow spreads the burden for the child, and helps the Teflon in me connect me more closely to our two kids, managing on their own in Denver and Washington. 

That night, passing the ominously-named Punta Malo (even I can figure that one out), Jennifer and Kate managed to connect briefly via a passing wireless internet signal, and shared deeply personal feelings and advice on a matter of the heart.  Jennifer just knew – reading some mysterious instrument panal known only to her --  -- to check her iPhone, and Kate, blessed with her Mom’s instincts, just knew – feeling a slight shift perhaps in her own emotional currents -- to be online as well.  Separated by a Gulf, an isthmus, and a half-continent, these two souls whom I love deeply, connected via text messages and made a decision to maintain course and speed on this matter of the heart.

We can choose either to do something or nothing in the face of ephemeral thunderclouds, ocean undercurrents, or events and circumstances near or far.  Not all Puntas have cellphone coverage.  We’d love to be with our daughter as she manages thru her shoulder dislocation, and as her relationships develop and deepen, but she’s strong, and is blessed with a loving community of family and friends. 

Whether the hidden currents lie on the horizon, under the sea surface, or connect us to another person on another continent, sometimes we can only observe, embrace the present, if we’re lucky, connect via a well-placed cell tower, and ultimately choose to maintain course and speed.  It isn’t easy sometimes.  Knowing a fact or being made aware of a feeling elicits in most of us a desire to do something, but sometimes all you can do – all you should do -- is maintain course and speed. 

Postscripts:

1.        A few days after writing this, we were again surrounded by thunderheads and storms; this time they were close enough to evade, for the most part, by altering our course and speed!

2.       Kate’s surgery went well; her brother flew out to be with her, and Jennifer, after our week’s tour of the Galapagos, is headed to Denver to help Kate return to her life as a student.

3.       I’ve managed to expand my Spanish vocabulary considerably while here in the Galapagos; many folks speak a bit of English at least, and they have been generous of their time in helping me learn a bit of their language.  More on some of these folks in subsequent postings.