"I'm going to bear off round it some more." As I lay in my bunk, I can hear Alan Priddy's voice, and I assume he's simply talking about a ship or some other obstacle. Then he says "we're fifty degrees off course now!"
As I come to my senses, I become aware of what's going on. It's the early hours of Saturday morning, we're off the west coast of India, heading south, and it's as though we're on the inside of a wonky neon tube. The clouds which cover the sky are flashing with the diffused blue-white glow of sheet lightning. Then every so often an orange bolt of forked lightning sparks from the base of the cloud to the sea. It's an intense flash, blindingly bright, but with a complete absence of sound.
Alan has been using the radar to try and steer around the worst of it. It shows up as huge splodges, miles across, and even though we're trying to skirt around the edge of the storm, it still seems frighteningly close, with massive flashes going off all around us. Even on the radar, there's no escaping the power and the beauty of it. Every time a bolt of forked lightning cracks across the sky, it shows up on the radar as a thin blue line arcing from one side of the screen to the other.
It's at this point I begin to wish there'd been a Trivial Pursuit question which goes something along the lines of "what happens when a stainless steel tank containing hundreds of litres of diesel is hit by several million volts of lightning?" I'd really rather not find out the hard way.
I know from experience in the mountains that when the electricity gets really close, you can feel it. The air crackles and your hair stands on end. That's the time not to be holding on to anything metal. We don't appear to be at that stage yet, but I make a mental note to sit on my hands rather than grab any of the four steel upright poles in Spirit of Cardiff's cabin.
As we move further away from the storm, we hear one or two rumbles of thunder for the first time, and then, as with any decent fireworks display, the best comes last. The cloud ahead of us seems to explode, its entire surface covered with a crazy paving network of thousands of orange glowing electrical pathways. For a moment, it looks like some alien electronic brain from a sci-fi movie.
After two hours, the flashes subside. Then down comes the rain - torrents of it.
Clive Tully
Copyright Clive Tully ©2002
Picture credits: Alan Carter
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