South Atlantic Ocean, January 2019
It was Day 8 of the St Helena to Brazil leg. Position: 19°55'S, 024°17'W. Deep in the South Atlantic, with no land in any direction for over a thousand miles.
We had been at sea continuously for 37 days. The watermaker had broken three days earlier, and we were rationing water to survive the remaining 1,100 nautical miles to Brazil. Trindade Island — a remote Brazilian Navy outpost, home to about 30 soldiers and a handful of scientists — was somewhere ahead of us, and we were hoping they'd give us fresh water and diesel. It was intense sailing. Not dangerous, but demanding. Every day brought a new problem to solve.
That night, between squalls, I was alone on watch. Yuka was asleep. The sky cleared for a moment — the way it does on the ocean, suddenly and completely — and I saw it.
An arc of pale light, from one horizon to the other.
A moonbow.
A moonbow is the same optical phenomenon as a rainbow. Moonlight enters water droplets suspended in the air, refracts, reflects off the back of the droplet, and exits at an angle that separates the wavelengths — the same physics Descartes worked out in 1637. The only difference is the light source. The moon, at full phase, is roughly 400,000 times dimmer than the sun. That's still enough to make a rainbow. But the human eye, operating in low-light scotopic mode, can't pick up the colours — they are there in the physics, but invisible to us. What you see is a white arc. Faint, clean, unmistakable.
A camera with a long exposure can record the colours. I tried with my iPhone. The boat was moving, and I failed. It doesn't matter.
What I got was something harder to lose.
I stood there for a long time, watching it. Five weeks at sea. 2,584 nautical miles from Cape Town. A broken watermaker. Rationed water. Three-hour solo night watches. And the ocean deciding, right then, to put on a show that most sailors never see in a lifetime of passages.
The next morning, I wrote two lines about it in the log book: "Also, in between squalls during the night I saw a very rare moon rainbow." Then immediately back to sail trim and water calculations.
That's ocean sailing. You see something extraordinary and then you get back to work.
Two days later we spotted Trindade Island on the horizon — a jagged volcanic peak rising straight out of the sea. The Brazilian Navy was kind enough to radio with us, but the swell was too rough to go alongside their dock safely. We hove to during the night, waited until dawn, then made radio contact again and finally decided it was too risky. We left Trindade at 6:30 am, caught two 14-kilogram yellowfin tunas on the trolling lines, and kept sailing west.
We made it to Brazil with water to spare.
The moonbow made the passage summary, under Unique experiences. One line. But it sits differently in memory than the fish, the squalls, the broken equipment, the Golden Globe racer we radioed somewhere off the Brazilian shelf.
Some things the ocean gives you, and you carry them for a long time.