The Atlantic at night

Atlantic Vets Blog
Paul Milnthorpe / Jim Houlton
Mon 8 Feb 2010 20:52
Good day making encouraging number of mile towards the finish.
I was even dreaming about getting clean last night, was just about go get
into a hot shower when the alarm went to get me up for the next shift
rowing- the Atlantic not even letting you imagine a warm scrub!

The Sky at night:
When the sky is clear of clouds, as it seems to be most nights, the view of
the stars is amazing.
The most noticeable thing is the complete semi-hemisphere of the sky that
you see; 360degrees of horizon and 180degrees from any point on the horizon
to straight above you and on down to the horizon on the other side.
The next most obvious thing is that there are no lights from houses, cars
boats etc to make the stares dimmer. I would guess that the stares are about
30% brighter than in rural areas of the UK. The only form of 'light
pollution' not that you can really call it that is from the moon; the number
of stars you can see is far higher when the moon is not out than with a full
moon, something I had never really taken note of on land.

The water at night:
As amazing as the stars and on some nights even more so is the
phosphorescence that you can see periodically in the water. I will not
pretend to know much about the cause of this, weather it is algae or
plankton, why or how it happens but it does look very cool. There are two
distinct types of the phosphorescence that we see:
The first is what we call the 'LED type', this is floating on the surface
and when the surface is disturbed by a wave, a fish splashing through when
it jumps, the bow of the boat or an oar tiny little flashes of light (a
similar size to a LED) flash and last for about half a second. Sometimes the
algae or plankton that causes these flashes gets washed onto the deck and
you get a lone flashing organism, that is to tiny to see when it is not
flashing, randomly flashing every 10 seconds for about a minute.

The Second type is what we call the 'phosphorescent bombs' or 'depth charge'
These are areas about a metre squared below the water (appears to be about 3
metres down that randomly flash when disturbed by the boat passing/ or the
fish swimming under the boat or who know what. If there were divers below
you would thing that it was an under water flash light or if we where on a
big boat with lights up a mast you might assume it was reflection of those
light.
However these lights are formed they are great to watch and I will
definitely try to find out more about them on my return to dry land.

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