Our route to Half Moon Cay.

Today we are at sea, covering the distance between St. Croix and Half Moon Cay. We are now in the North Atlantic on a North Westerly course towards the Bahama Bank. Sometime tonight, we will enter between the islands and then sail up to Half Moon Cay or Little San Salvador Island as it is officially called.  As we are now in the open ocean, we can feel “the motion of the ocean”. And we are looking at what we call confused seas. This means that there are swells and waves rolling in from various directions and they mix and match all around us.

Waves are modulated water masses which means they roll over the deeper ocean surface as a wave movement. Deeper down the water also flows but then it looks more like a pressure wave. Or if you would line up a number of bricks behind each other and then start pushing the last one. They all move forward but not up and down or sideways. Move like a train. Now if those bricks would be on the surface, they would go up and down as a wave. If now two of those “trains would meet, sometimes some bricks would push each other up and sometimes they would push each other down. That is what we call confused seas because there is sometimes an extra high (waves enhancing each other) or an extra low wave or an almost flat sea moment (waves cancelling each other out)  As the pattern is not standard it makes the sailor confused and thus Confused Seas, although we should really say confused Swell.  Then the wind that blows over it can also enhance the waves or makes them flatter. More confusion. Thus today the navigators were looking out of the window and they saw all sorts of confusion around them.

I have no idea who painted or posted this but it gives a very good impression of confused seas. A thank you to whoever you are.

The ship moves on the swell, whatever the stabilizers are trying to prevent. Stabilizers deal with regular motion and their fins move on the signal of a gyroscope which figures out the angle of the ship in comparison with a true horizontal. The more reliable and constant the ocean swell is, the easier the gyroscope can predict the angles needed and give a signal to the stabilizers to counter act it. With confused swell that is not so easy and as a result the gyroscope cannot keep up on the time. (Confused Gyroscope??) As a result the ship is sometimes as steady as a rock and sometimes it makes an un-expected movement, when the stabilizers cannot handle the “two bricks” on top of each other.

Another good rendering although a bit over the top. Main thing is you cannot see a regular wave pattern.

One of the two swells is the regular swell caused by the ever blowing Trade Wind from the South East. The other swell is caused by bad weather on the eastern USA seaboard and that weather sends out waves and swell all the way down to the islands which make up the Caribbean rim. As we are not yet in the shelter of the Bahama Bank we also get that swell. The more we come under the influence from the bad weather up north, the more dominant the swell from that area will become and eventually the confusion will be gone.  We will not see that as we will already be in the shelter of the Bahamanian Islands by then.

How much or how little we will be under the influence of the bad weather up north, I do not know. By lunch time it pushed the first weather front over us, so we had some rain on deck by noon time, and now we wait and see. Thus far the local weather forecast does not look that bad but it seldom takes heavy squalls into account and thus we wait and see until we have Half Moon Cay right in front of us without any nasty black clouds hanging above and around it.