> As for visibility - out in the weather or inside sometimes you just > can't see regardless. If it is foggy - makes no difference inside or > out. Driving rain - ditto. In neither case will a pilot house boat > be able to see any better than an unprotected aft cockpit boat because > there's reduced visibility for everyone. I wear glasses, and if I > was out in the rain, I wouldn't be able to see anything because of > water on my glasses (although I suppose I could wear my scuba mask). > Anything that you have to protect in such case - pilothouse, dodger or > whatever - the rain will obscure visibility through it.
Norm - I wear glasses too and the windshield wipers on my pilothouse windows work just fine, most of the time. When the rain is so dense that the wipers cannot keep up then visibility is so poor that the visibility through the glass is a moot point. Even the best radar can be useless in heavy rain conditions. Just such conditions were a large factor in the largest ship-based oil spill in history. Two tanker in the Caribbean, one came out of a squall, and thus hidden from radar, and ka-boom. Didn't make much of a splash in the media because the spill did not directly affect the land. Many sailors died, including the watch on the bridge of the at-fault vessel. We had memorable rain conditions last northbound trip approaching Sandy Hook about a mile off the New Jersey coast at night. A line of heavy squalls were very obviously moving in from the west with lightening a' plenty and lots of NOAA warning on the VHF WX channels. There was only one other vessel in our world, a northbound tug/tow about two miles father offshore running parallel to us. When it hit, visibility went to zero and the radar showed a big green blob. (the rain clutter control had no effect) I had no concern about the tug, there was no other traffic and no charted buoys ahead of us. I did think about fishing buoys, but we could not see them under ideal nighttime conditions anyway. We maintained speed, about 6.5 Kt, on autopilot. Actually our biggest fear was (and usually is) lightening. Nothing can be done about that and one feels the Fates are completely in charge. After about 45 minutes everything cleared off. The tug was just where we thought it would be and NYC beckoned on the horizon. >I've been in > rainstorms on land that were so bad that my windshield wipers on the > car could not keep up with the rain. In such cases, I wouldn't have a > problem because we wouldn't be out there. Norm - I don't understand how you avoid heavy rain at sea. In 30K miles I have not learned that technique. Perhaps you could fill us in. >If we were out there we > would be proceeding with extreme caution or anchored or hove to or > whatever seemed best at the time. Norm - Anchoring is not practical offshore. Anchoring or heaving-to gains no advantage unless every other vessel anchors or heaves-to also. We proceed with caution at al times. Norm S/V Bandersnatch Lying Julington Creek 30 07.695N 081 38.484W _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://www.liveaboardnow.org/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardnow.org/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
