At night when there is no moon we can still see the trail of our boat via the bioluminescent properties of the tiny critters in the water. As our boat creates waves it stimulates these critters into producing light. This is pretty cool by itself and I've spent a long time on watch looking at the effects they create. What is even cooler than this is when a pod of dolphins joins us to play in our bow waves on a moonless night. They too disturb the water and cause it to luminese. This creates a dolphin shaped tunnel of light right below the surface. As many dolphins criss cross each other jumping in and out of the water it creates a natural fireworks show unlike anything I have ever seen before. I must have spent an hour lying over the foredeck rail watching this. When the boat is moving at a fast clip it can feel like you are flying among comets in outer space. Unfortunately as much as I tried I couldn't photograph this show. The light is just too dim. Later on in the voyage a flying fish landed on board with a belly full of these creates. It took a 30 second exposure at my cameras highest sensitivity to even register his glowing stomach in an image.
Flying fish are difficult to photograph. They are unpredictable and jump out of nowhere. I was not able to get a decent picture of a flying fish in flight. As if to add injury to insult I was hit by two large flying fish on back to back days. I love watching them fly. The little ones are usually not very graceful and tend to get blown by the wind as soon as they leave the water. It is easy to see why so many of them end up on our deck. The larger ones however are a joy to watch. Whether it is their greater mass or skill learned over a longer life these guys can really fly. When they jump out of the water they look like mini cruise missles as they flit less than a foot above the waves. The follow the contours of these swells perfectly, flying up and down as far as 100ft.
Another animal which I was unable to get a good picture of are the swallows that we see out in the middle of the ocean. These birds are tiny and it seems like they never land. It's amazing to see these creatures over 1,500 miles from shore. It's easy to see why swallows were a favorite tattoo of sailors. Since they never seem to land in the water they were a symbol of something that always returned to land. Having a swallow tattoo was good luck for finding your way back to your home port.
The last thing I wish I could photograph from the passage is the only one that is not an animal. In the middle of the ocean we would encounter huge swells. The largest we saw were over 20ft. The problem with photographing these waves is that they are so massive they completely fill the screen. It looks as if you had pointed the camera down at the water when what is actually happening the water has tilted the whole horizon. Initially as we say larger and larger swells I wondered how we would ever get over them. Somehow we would float two stories high and then back down again. Eventually it became second nature until you actually tried to take it all in.