Lucky boat

[teneicm]

Take a look at this footage of a florida waterspout captured yesterday:

msnbc.com Video Player

At about 6:20 into the tape, the main vortex is dissapearing into the clouds but there is still an invisible circulation that's whipping up the water's surface. A small sailboat gets within about 2 boatlengths of the invisible vortex and sails by without any effect. 60 feet to port and it probably would have been a different story.

Anyone ever taken a direct hit from a waterspout? Sails up or down? What happened?

[slomotion]

The story on our local Florida news station was that the boat appeared to deliberately sail toward the spout - dunno.

[Talbot]

There was a boat in one of the Round the World Volvo races a few years back that got hit by one of these. Picked the boat up and span it round a couple of times. strained the rigging and split the sails, but lucky not to lose the rig.

[Vasco]

Originally Posted by teneicm

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Anyone ever taken a direct hit from a waterspout? Sails up or down? What happened?

I was sitting at anchor in the Bahamas and saw two small waterspouts coming towards us. They were very small, looked like tumbleweed. I thought it was nothing. One of the spouts hit a Gozzard 44 anchored a couple of boat lengths from us and I couldn't believe it, it knocked the heavy boat down! It also ruined the canvas enclosure, that was the only damage I saw. The same spout went on to capsize a Bahamian racing sloop. The spout looked about a couple of feet in diameter. I have a much greater respect for waterspouts now.

[Ex-Calif]

Nothing as dramatic as that footage but we sail right off the approach end of Changi airport and the wake turbulence from landing aircraft often creates mini spouts.

We've sailed through them before and they can be quite violent - remember wake turbulence has been attributed as accident causes in airliners.

We sailed through one created by the A380 and were almost knocked flat. Definitely a disaster as we spilled 4 beers. I haven't photographed any of them before but I will try to do so.