Moonbow Warriors

Posted by at 07:45 PM, October 31, 2004

It's 1950 hours. I'm doing my daily routine, making myself a big cup of tea to take with me on the bridge. My watch starts at 2000 hours. The Esperanza is moving a lot more than normal – rolling and pitching. When I come on the bridge there's a a weather fax from this afternoon. A very deep, big low pressure system is just off the south west coast of Ireland. It extends into the area that we're heading for. The wind is already picking up. This is going to be quite a difference to the last week, when we had relatively calm conditions.

When I come on watch it's already dark. Tonight it's a full moon. The other evenings we had a very calm sea, with a bright moon. The weather was really beautiful, especially when you think of the fact that we're out on the North Atlantic in October.

I saw some things for the first time in my life last week. One of them was a “moon bow”. The night was clear, the moon was bright and there were some showers in the distance. Just as Maite took off for her last round, I checked the radar and stared outside for a while, enjoying the silver path that the moon left in the water. I walked over to the other side of the bridge. On the horizon I see a strange kind of light. It's like a stripe, like the beginning of a rainbow. I could see showers on the horizon as well. I turned away for a minute and when I looked again, the stripe began to get the shape of a rainbow. It was amazing. As I kept looking, a rainbow in the middle of the night appeared. It was not colored as the ones during the day, but it was silverish white. I phoned the lounge to see if there were still some people up, so they could see it as well. Anne, the next watch keeper, was the only one there. She came on the bridge and caught the last minute of the moon bow.

As the captain took over the next watch, I told him what we saw. It's quite rare. He saw a couple more during his watch, I found out the next morning. I haven't seen any in the following nights.

As I said before, tonight the moon is full. It makes a big difference. The wind is force eight now and the ocean is getting rough. But because the moon shines through the clouds, it's not so dark outside. It makes the night beautiful, instead of dark and stormy.

- Maaike, 3rd Mate