@intrepid

1/5 itap of a monster that chased us for what felt like an eternity. We sailed away as fast as we could, running at a tangential angle to the shelf cloud to try to escape the system. The closer it got, the darker that leading edge became. Waterspouts are hard to describe to anyone who has not seen them. The emotions of sailing away from one, with your family on board a small sailboat, are even harder to convey. This thing had more than enough power to do serious damage and potentially flip our sailboat. Technically, waterspouts are rotating columns of air that organise beneath the storm base, often showing a funnel descending from the cloud while a bright spray ring rises from the sea. We had seen a few waterspouts while sailing, but I had never watched the spout “meet” so dramatically in the middle. That apparent interface is usually the condensation boundary rather than a physical join, the point where the pressure drop and humidity tip vapour into droplets, thickening the funnel above it (even though it looks like the dark cloud is being sucked down and the lighter water spray is being sucked up). Turbulent eddies along that boundary can fling condensed cloud outward in a ring or arc, and the darkness deepens as ragged fragments of scud and rain curtains are pulled in, stretched, then shed again, sometimes giving the impression the spout is spitting sideways.

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