The first time I was on a sailboat at night I had a very interesting experience. As I watched the bow spray off the side of the boat it seemed like there was faint lighted objects in the spray as it hit the water. They would light up when they hit the water and gradually fade after a few seconds. After close examination and letting my eyes adjust I realized that I really was seeing some things emitting light in the sea water when it was sprayed up. I checked off the stern of the boat to see it the lights were there too. I was quite surprised to see an impressive mini light show trailing off the back of the boat. We were leaving a lighted trail for 20 or more feet though the water. It looked like many brightly glowing independent objects that gradually faded out as they swirled and twirled through the water as the boat hull passed though it.
I have experienced this similar phenomenon on every overnight sea crossing since then. Some seas are much more “rich” in these lighting creatures than others and can make for a very impressive light show. The waters of the Mediterranean Sea seem to be particularly dense and the different colors of the lights becomes more apparent. Remind me to tell you the dolphin story sometime.
I’ve done some other testing in the ocean off Jacksonville Beach, FL by swimming at night and stirring up the water to see if I could cause the light to happen. I was somewhat successful locally and I found that if you got a little piece of seaweed it would have a great concentration of these lighted beings in it.
I was told that this phenomenon was caused by bio-luminescent or phosphorescence sea creatures. Not wishing to clarify or explain this mysterious sight with “Science” I have decided to call the lights “Sea Angels”. I suggest you ask The Google if you really want to understand what they are. I don’t want to deal with facts or anything which may be construed as such in this posting. I prefer leaving it a mystery of the sea to be appreciated and enjoyed. I’m sure that the mariners of old were quite mystified by this as well. I decided to poll some of my fellow sailors from around the world and see how their cultures have thought about these Sea Angels.
I have conducted a limited and completely unscientific poll of sailors from various countries while here in Horta. John from France tells me that the French call this phenomenon trainée “something you leave behind” is the best translation he had for it. I talked with my new friend Jeremy from Vancouver Island, British Columbia about this as well. He stated that he calls them phosphorescence or “glowing plankton”. I accused him of being a sterile-thinking Canadian and told him he needs a better imagination. He was not amused and even after much prodding and peer pressure I could not persuade him to make up a more creative name for them. He does, however, have other redeeming qualities so I choose to overlook his limited imagination.
I then spoke with Phil and Heather, also from Canada, traveling with Thomas from Switzerland. They confirmed that Canadians refer to these lights as phosphorescence. Thomas did not have any suggestions from the Swiss beyond phosphorescence. I guess once you get something in your head backed by a scientific explanation it’s hard to get it out.
Charlie and I met up with a young Swiss sailor named David who had just arrived from Antigua on a 32 foot boat with a 70 year old captain. David had no good word or description of the phenomenon from the Swiss culture, I asked him to ask his captain what he called them. I decided I needed to talk to some older sailors, the ones that came before science.
I ran into an older gentleman named Charles who has been a sailor for many decades. He hailed from the UK. He told me that his grandfather, father and himself always just called them Sea Stars. He didn’t know what the scientific name was for them and didn’t seem to care. Good enough for me.
During our time in the high pressure system the surface of the sea was glassy smooth and the moon was near new so it was very dark at night. This afforded the opportunity to see very clearly into the water after dark. We were not really moving though the water very fast so the surface water behind the boat was not disturbed with bubbles and turbulence the way it usually is. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, moonless night I checked out the Sea Angel situation. What I saw was amazing. Coming from the trailing edge of the boat was a lighted glow. There were not as many independent lights as much as just a hull-shaped glow in the water. It almost looked like we had installed some under-hull special effect neon lighting. (You may laugh about that but you do see the big yachts that have installed underwater effects lighting systems.)
As I continued to observe this glow off the hull of the boat I noticed something else that was really cool. Sailboats have a large fin made of heavy metal, usually lead, that hangs on the bottom of the boat. The idea of this heavy hunk of metal is to offset the forces of the wind on the sails and keep the boat balanced and going forward in the water instead of just getting blown over sideways. The keel is as critical to the operation of a sailboat as the sails are but nobody ever talks about the poor keel. Keels are shaped in different ways intended by the designers to accomplish certain performance goals. The keel of Koinonia has a little wing at the bottom of it so if you were looking at it straight on it would look like an upside down “T”.
I noticed beneath the hull glow, deep into the water behind the boat was a keel-shaped pattern of light winding it’s way along our path. As the keel was passing through the water, it was stimulating the Sea Angels to gently light up and it left a very strange trail in the water. The keel reaches almost six feet below the water and I could make out the whole shape of the keel, including the wing on the bottom. So I was observing a lighted column in the water over six feet down. I was mesmerized. As the boat would gently rock the light column would pendulum back and forth behind us.
Then came the brainstorm, such as it was. I thought since I was observing very faint lights under the water that if I had some way of amplifying the light it would be even better. Yo! The night scope! I got out the night scope and aimed it down into the water. Wow, what a sight. Evidinkley the little sea angels put out some light without much stimulation! The sea was just rich and dense with lighted dots, some dim, some bright. All in 3D! It was just like star watching without the stars. I guess that’s why the Brits call them sea stars.
P-lines are a safety device installed on the stern (back) of the boat. The origins of the p-line as far as I know can be traced back through history to 2007 when they were invented by Charlie on our first Atlantic crossing. They are constructed of a couple of heavy lines securely tied to support structures on both sides of the stern. The lines hang loosely across the swim platform from side to side allowing one to lean out into the p-lines and hang out slightly over the water. One line hits you at about mid-chest and the other a bit lower. As the water is usually rushing past very quickly behind the boat it is essential that the p-lines be very secure and foolproof. I would not want to try to stand on the swim deck without having the p-lines installed. Falling off the back of the boat while under way would generally be a VBT (Very Bad Thing). By now you have probably figured out what the p-lines are used for..... watching the Sea Angels of course!