Crepuscular Rays and Tehuantepecers

The Old Man steered me to "The American Practical Navigator," mostly
referred to after the author's name, "Bowditch." If it's in Bowditch, most
ocean sailors consider it worth knowing.

Some of the following stuff we discussed, others I spent the rest of the
watch reading up on:

A "foehn wind" is a very strong seasonal wind that blows down a mountain and
over the sea and is typically warm and dry. There is much more to it, but
them's the basics. A "fall wind" is very similar, but it blows down a
mountain and out over the sea colder than a foehn wind, and can be extremely
violent.

Foehn winds in the Aleutians and around the Strait of Magellan are known as
"Williwaws." In the Straits of Georgia, in British Columbia, they're known
as "a Qualicom." The foehn wind of the Gulf of Tehuantepec, Mexico, is
known as a "Tehuantepecer," pronounced "teh-want-teh-pecker." Notable fall
winds are the "Mistral" of the western Mediterranean and the "Bora" of the
eastern Mediterranean.

Second Mate told me about his ship being stuck in anchorage for two days by
hurricane force winds that blew down a nearby mountain randomly and without
warning on a clear, warm, beautiful day- he said he could see the edge of
the wind to the east and the other edge to the west, beyond which was calm,
but where they were... a nasty fall wind.

When rays of the sun stream down from clouds in the sky (like a motivational
poster in a middle school classroom), those are known as "crepuscular rays,"
which literally means "twilight rays." If you see them shining upward, as I
sometimes see just before sunset above the Olympic Mountains at the height
of summer, those are known as "anticrepuscular rays."

A few weeks ago I erroneously referred to the constellation of Corvus as the
Southern Cross- it is actually known as "The Crow." The Southern Cross is
the constellation Crux, a full 40 degrees further to the south within the
sphere of the sky. I saw it from the equator, but not in the Arabian Sea...
my bad.

Cirrostratus clouds (or rather, one of the many cirrostratus clouds) are
known as "mare's tails." When the frozen moisture that makes up the
cirrostratus melt, they drop in altitude and become altostratus and portend
rain. When you have a bunch of different types of altocumulus in the same
sky it is known as a "chaotic sky." And that ever present, 800 foot lid of
sky fog in Seattle? That is a layer of straight-up, undiluted stratus
clouds and I dislike them very much.

We are currently west of the Grand Banks, a shelf that sticks far out into
the north Atlantic and is only about 100 meters deep. We crossed most of
"The Tail of The Bank" while on my watch- it was eerily calm and devoid of
waves and swells alike- then I hit the sack. About an hour into my sleep I
could tell when we passed back into the deep water as the swells hit again,
and they've been with us ever since.

During the watch I just finished the wind moved around into our teeth and
kicked up to 35 knots true while bands of rain and clouds washed over us.
The 3.5 meter swells were, and still are, on our port beam, but not long
after 2-4 meter wind waves built and the confused seas we're in now are
something to see: the ocean is black, the water is ink of the same hue that
churns a cloudy-summer-day blue, and the whitehorses are throwing stark
white spray straight up into the wind.

And amidst it all? 400 miles from the nearest land? Sea birds. I don't
know what brand of feather they wear, but they're out here, oblivious to the
foul weather, and it does my head in. You'll read about not seeing birds
until you're close to land and I can assure you that that is total bullshit-
they own this place and they go where they want, distance and hardship be
damned. There isn't a place I haven't seen them, skimming the massive
swells, as if their job is to provide perspective to the Extraordinary
Ordinary so that I know exactly how big these swells actually are. If they
are flying to a nest at the closest land 400 miles away, that means their
territorial range is at minimum 800 nautical miles across and 502,000 square
nautical miles in area... they are the true mariners- we aboard this ship
are mere interlopers.