Night Apparitions

Saint Augustine, Florida
29 53.353 N 081 19.317 W

We both continue to rejoice at the nice weather here.  60 at night, 80 in the afternoon.  What could be better?

I'm writing today about how difficult to be to recognize things on the water at night based on their lights.  I'm sure you know that the basic lighting scheme for boats is the same world wide and has been uncanged for centuries.  One red light visible to port.  One green light visible to starboard.  One white light visible from behind.   Therefore, you should always be able to see either red/green, red/white, green/white, or just white and from that you can tell which way the other boat is pointing.  Things like buoys and lighthouses mostly have blinking lights.  But real life is a lot more complicated.

The other night at sea, Libby saw what appeared to be a fishing vessel.  They usually use lots of white lights to illuminate the work.  According to Libby this one showed an arrow, then it swung around with the arrow pointing the other way, so she was despeately turning Tarwathie this way and that to avoid collision..   It was time to switch watch, so when I came up, I found and AIS signal for the vessel.  It was anchored.  As I sailed past it, I could see no red or green lights, just lots of white lights.  There was no arrow.  It just seemed that way to Libby.

When it came time to anchor, I was the one fooled.  There were a whole bunch of multicolored lights near our planned anchorage.  It looked to me like one of those giant dredges, with cranes and steam shovels on deck and with a three story hotel for the workers.   I anchored far away, not wanting to be too close to such a floating city.  The next morning, when I looked it was just a cluster of anchored sailboats.  I think some of them had blue LED lights on that added to my confusion.

Numerous times at sea we have been fooled by the orange color of a rising moon.  It looks like a giant ship heading for us.

Coming into Fernandina, Libby said "Is that a cruise ship coming out?"   I looked at where she pointed.  "No," I said, "It is a paper factory on land."

Once down in the keys I interpreted headlights of cars coming up and over the hump of a bridge as landing lights of a series of planes landing.

Strangest of all was one night when Libby was alone on deck and she saw a single orange light right in front of us and very close.  It turned out to be a surfaced submarine.

The point is simply that it can be devilishly difficult to correctly identify what you see at night.