| At sea. Atlantic Rowing Race: Dolphins, sea birds & becalmed seas |
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| Thursday, 08 December 2005 | |
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Teresa Page: As the race moves into week 2, tales of wonderful marine wildlife and spectacular sunsets are beginning to take over from the dome of gloom reports of sea sickness and the monotony of rowing, rowing and more rowing! Quite a few teams have reported visits from intrigued pods of dolphins that have played happily alongside for the amusement of the rowers. Richard Mayon-White and Liz O’Keeffe from Boat No. 33 – Row 4 Cancer report on their first experience of the ocean wildlife, timed nicely with them sitting down for dinner: “Later on when we were just setting ourselves up for dinner suddenly ... Whoosh, a massive (say 20ft) pilot whale surfaced about 10ft behind the boat, and then again and again! It was great to see him as I was starting to wonder if all Atlantic fish (and mammals) had headed off on hols for December, muttering something about "unseasonable hurricanes in the Caribbean and that the weather down in the South Atlantic is much better this time of year!!" Then it was only about 2 hours later that we were set upon by another pilot whale which surfaced this time about 12ft a beam of the boat! It was only after Liz was also shocked at 4am this morning by a dolphin doing the same thing that we decided that we have been singled out by the general whale / dolphin / porpoise community as target practice for 'human scaring games'!! We reckon there are a bunch of ASBO wielding porpoises around here out to pounce on unsuspecting rower types”! Meanwhile, Chris Andrews & Clint Evans from Boat No. 8 – C˛ have reported seeing two different types of sea birds which have revisited them on a number of occasions. Perhaps they are naturally attracted to the cow like appearance of C˛ which is confusing them between them land and sea! Elsewhere in the fleet, Boat No. 11 – Rowgirls.com had a near miss last night with a passing tanker! Despite all their efforts to raise the crew of the tanker via VHF, this was to no avail and they were forced to resort to drastic measures. Row Girl, Jo Davies was very quick to react and immediately set off a white parachute anti collision flare into the night sky closely followed by a white handheld flare. These had the desired effect and the tanker changed course. However, this somewhat scary moment was completely forgotten later on, in the distress caused by the loss of boats poo bucket. We can only imagine what is being used as a replacement! The weather conditions in the last 24 hours have been somewhat becalmed and right across the fleet, there has been many reports of flat calm seas, very little wind and incredibly hot temperatures. Richard Dewire from Boat No. 14 – Atlantic Prince described the ocean as some sort of liquid metal and single handed Rower, Roz Savage from Boat No. 15 – Sedna Solo, refers to the sea conditions yesterday as like rowing through treacle. This is a possible effect of Hurricane Epsilon, as a low pressure further out in the Atlantic, which creates higher sea level around the eye of the hurricane and allows adverse currents to flow further out towards the area of the race fleet. Although, it’s always nice to have a day of calm conditions to catch up on the maintenance jobs around the boat, the fleet are now looking forward the return of the trade winds and increased daily mileages towards their final destination. http://www.atlanticrowingrace.co.uk |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 08 December 2005 ) |
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