Lake Erie Excitement

Remedios survived its first gale on Wednesday night. Or more accurately put, Remedios, with Rob’s help, survived its first gale Wednesday night. Now for starters, sailors don’t throw words like gale around lightly. There is a world wide wind scale known as the Beaufort scale that is used to rate wind conditions.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaufort_scale

Our first clue that this was going to be a bad 24 hours was when the Coast Guard issued its weather forecast and all the boats on Lake Erie started heading back in to port. We, of course, were heading out into the middle of the lake because we need the practice.

Conditions weren’t too bad during the day and we even had a hot lunch if I remember correctly but later in the evening nobody seemed to want dinner – smart thinking on our part, in retrospect. The wind started to build and it started to get black in the west instead of that nice orange glow you prefer at sunset.

We divide the night into three watches – first is from 9 to midnight, second is from midnight to 3, and last is 3 to 6.

So, shortly after 12, the winds built to over 40 knots and the light show started. Rob told us it looked like daylight at times and he didn’t want to touch any metal when the boat got hit by a strike because he was sure it would. He said it was the longest continuous session of lightning he had ever seen. I really should have come up on deck and shot some video but I was somehow trapped curled into a little ball in my cabin calling mommy over and over. The boat was going a lot faster than comfortable and it was tough to tell which way was up at times.

This was truly Rob’s storm because the winds really came on after midnight and it was almost all over by 3 AM when the next guy came on watch.

Here’s our man Rob the day after.

 

Here is a photo of Pat and Tom relaxing, much later in the day, and glad they are not at the bottom of Lake Erie.

And, here is a quick video Rob and I made after I finally figured out how to work my Mattel Pirates of the Carribbean camera yesterday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9O3driYWas

We will work on our video production quality next.


And, the ultimate injustice - while Rob was working to keep us on top of the lake Wednesday night, there was a storm in St. Cloud Minnesota where he lives and two trees blew down in his yard.


Today we are at the east end of Lake Erie and will take the Welland Canal around Niagra Falls (instead of the other alternative). Pat says this is a sign our judgement as a team is improving.