Red Sky At Night To This Sailor's Delight

Anchored
44 31.98 N 073 18.24 W

It was late in the day. We were motoring quietly from Burlington to Valcour. The air was very still. To the West, we could see the Adirondacks emerging from haze for the first time today. To the East, we could see a ridge of soaring thunderclouds positioned directly over the ridge of the Green Mountains. The central valley in Vermont was experiencing intense rain, lightning and thunder.

We did something we rarely do. We decided to anchor for the night in the middle of the lake, with no shelter whatsoever. The risk of doing so is considerable because Champlain's weather is notoriously fickle. There was a substantial risk that a wind would come up during the night forcing us to get of of bed on an emergency basis to raise the anchor and move elsewhere.

We were near the mouth of the Winnooski River. The lake is more than 100 feet deep around here but we found a finger of silt only 15 feet deep extending out into the lake from the river delta. We dropped the hook there. We were about 1 mile from the Vermont shore and 6 miles from the New York shore. Happily, we were too far from land for the mosquitoes to find us.

As sunset approached the western sky reddened. Burlington, Vermont is famous for world class sunsets as the sun seeming plunges down into downtown Toronto beyond the lake, and behind the Adirondack Mountains of New York. This was one of those days. This time however, there was such thick haze in the air, that the red sunlight reflected down from on high. Instead of just reddening the sky near the horizon, the entire westward sky turned reddish orange.

The lake was so still that it became a huge reflecting pool. Soon, the red light, reflected down by the haze, was reflected up again by the lake. There seemed to be no difference in color, texture or intensity between sky and sea. We saw a huge circle of orange, bisected by a black band that was the land on the western horizon. It was as if a red giant star was approaching and threatening to engulf the Earth. The beauty was overwhelming.

That's not all. Libby and I watched this view astern as we sat in the cockpit. In the foreground, among the forest of stainless steel pipes that form our stern pulpit all the spiders came out.

If you sail in the Northeast, you know that little spiders just love boats as a friendly habitat. They are not the mean spiders that bite people. They spin webs and eat insects. I have no idea where they hide during the day. Each day their webs are destroyed new ones must be spun starting at twilight. The parallelograms formed by all those pipes make life much easier so the spiders love them. Bigger spiders (about the size of a quarter) get the choicest rectangles. The littlest spiders (about the size of a match head) get the smaller irregular spaces.

Tonight we could see the spiders merrily spinning along. We saw them silhouetted in black against the red orange back light. Can spiders be merry? They looked to me like they were having fun. Their trajectories differ sharply from those of flying insects. That made it obvious that they grasp invisible silken threads as they slide along.

The objects of their art, the webs, were completely invisible to us. I tried to discern the shape of the webs (fans, spirals, or whatever) from the sequential trajectories of the spider's motions. It was like watching an artist painting a picture in a dark room with an illuminated tip on his brush; and attempting from that to guess what he was trying to portray.

Finally the sky darkened, but we had one more visual treat before going below. Turning to the East, we could see a brilliant cloud-to-ground lightening show over New Hampshire. The flashes were too far away for us to hear the thunder so we didn't feel threatened, just enchanted once again by the beauty. Boy oh boy am I glad that we did not seek out a sheltered anchorage surrounded by trees. The sights we saw last night I'll remember always.