The Flying Dutchman. Or not

Another story of "real weird stuff" happening during an ocean crossing...

The setting: It is late 2022. We are sailing S/V Nerio, a 72ft Jongert 2200S, from Gibraltar to the Canaries.
We are three onboard: "Peter One", the skipper and owner; Hanne, a friend of the skipper; and myself "Peter Two". Hanne does not sail, but helps with the cooking and boat chores, so the skipper and I sail this thoroughbred racing cruiser with 4 hour single watches: 4 hours on and 4 hours off.

One early morning, just around sunrise, we must have been 3 days into our passage from Gibraltar to Las Palmas: As I wake up, I hear the engine running: there is no wind, we’re motoring.

I come on deck, ready to start my watch. The sea is flat calm. Not a whisper of wind. I find both Peter and Hanne in the cockpit, looking intensely towards the horizon on our port.

They look at me, as I take a seat in the cockpit. They say "Good morning", and immediately turn their heads again to our port side. I ask them "What's up? Anything wrong?!"

And Peter says: "We seem to have a Flying Dutchman" and points to the navigation screen, which shows an AIS signal close to our boat. For the non-sailors: "AIS"= "Automated Identification System", an automated data-gram transmitted via VHF radio from each boat, identifying who they are, where they are, their speed, course, and optionally destination, length-width, etc..).

And the AIS screen indeed clearly shows a solid green IAS blip of a cargo vessel which is supposed to be about half a mile off our port side.

Even though the sun is just rising, and the sky is quite bright already, in a pale-white/light grey way, we don't see any vessel. We see water and sky, all in different shades of light grey-ish, making it difficult to distinguish between sky, horizon and the sea. But no ship. Very calm sea with a light ocean swell transitioning into a rather grey sky, somewhat typical for a morning pre-sunrise.

"A Flying Dutchman", Peter repeats, "A ghost ship.. Seems there is nothing there".

Now I know it is possible AIS, like any computer system, gets screwed up, and transmits or receives wrong data. But still... this is all slightly worrying, as according to the AIS, we should have a 250m long cargo vessel about 600 meters from our port. In land-lubber terms that might sound like quite a distance between us, but when you are sailing, that is a distance --mmmmh.. slightly outside of our comfort zone.. Normally we like to keep 1 Nautical mile or 1.8 kilometers from cargo vessels, as a safety buffer zone.

We look again. And see nothing. "Yep, probably a phantom signal, showing a ghost ship on our AIS..", we conclude...

But... we keep looking... The sun is not out yet, so the sky is light-grey and there is slighter horizontal darker-grey rim, which must be the horizon, we guess. But no sight of a vessel. Just to make sure, we switch on the radar (which we only run occasionally, to save power), and gosh: the same blip we have on AIS, we can see on the radar too....There MUST be a vessel out there. No way both radar and AIS could be wrong....

And right at that moment, something happens... Some of the slightly darker grey horizontal layers in the sky we saw earlier on our port side, which we mistook for a horizon, clears up, making it now obvious what is happening: we are sailing in a really low fog-bank and had not even realized it, with all of that grey-ish-ness around us.
Like in the movies: the fog parted in just a few seconds, and like curtains on a stage opening up slowly, the mist bank clears, and we see a massive cargo ship, indeed, half a mile off our port side.

We are sailing in a fog bank without even realizing it. It was not a ghost signal from a "Flying Dutchman"... All our instruments showed the correct data... The early morning mist had fooled us.

And that is what I find intriguing about sailing. No matter my 20 years of sailing, every single day at sea, I learn something new. And nature, the elements, or circumstances, present me something new, not experienced before. And we learn. Sailing is not about training certificates, it is about experience. And no matter how much I sail, no matter how the experiences rack up, I am still learning new things, experience new stuff, e-v-e-r-y single day.

That day, I learned to trust AIS and radar, beyond relying solely on what I can see...
And there is also an other story coming up, showing that solely relying on instruments, without visual verification, is not enough either :-) :-) ...

Sailing, hey! :-)