Night Sailing

September 18-19, 2022  

Our first couple of nights at sea were the nicest because we still had a sliver of the waning moon in the sky for part of the night, and the sky was clear, showing us a spectacular starry sky.  With absolutely no light pollution, we got one of the best views of the night sky that I have ever seen, 180 degrees completely uninterrupted.  It was spectacular!   

One interesting thing that we noticed was that just after sunset, as all of the stars were coming out, we could see a perfectly straight line of “stars”.  Since there are no stars that we know of or have ever seen in a perfectly straight line, it is our assumption that it was a line of Elon Musk’s satellites. 

As we got further south, and as the presence of the moon faded completely from our night sky, we found that it would usually cloud over in the first few hours after dark and remain cloudy with a thick marine cloud layer through the whole night.  We were left, sailing south, in utter darkness.   

The only thing that broke the darkness was the bioluminescence.  Seeing spectacular bioluminescence at sea had always been one of the things that I was looking forward to about our ocean journey, and it definitely did not disappoint.  It was present every night, but some nights were definitely more spectacular than others.  Any surface disruption caused the area to glow; water that flowed past our hull lit up in a sparkle of green glowing light, the wake left behind us was a fading line of green glow, and any waves that crested and broke around us, or even out across the water, burst into light that travelled with the wave.  

On one particularly dark night, when many waves were breaking around us, the view out from the cockpit made me think of watching white horses galloping across a pitch black, rolling prairie field.  As each wave crested at the top and rolled down the front of the wave the glowing light was like a running horse with a long flowing mane and tail.  It was quite spectacular.   

The most incredible thing that we saw, however, was when the dolphins would visit us during the night, which they did almost every night, and often several times throughout the night.  Not only could we hear them, both through the hull and in the cockpit, but also they created the most dazzling light display, and in my opinion, one of nature's most wonderful displays.   

As the dolphins swam, the water around them exploded into a glowing light leaving fading trails like shooting stars.  Each time a dolphin would make a sudden movement, a hard turn, or an underwater flip, the explosion of light was even more intense and twice as bright, and following their movements under water, even though we could not actually see them, was very easy to do.  Watching them as they flew around our boat, zigzagging this way and that, from one side to the other, up to the bow, and back alongside, was a never-ending source of amazement and enjoyment that broke up the otherwise long dark nights.