Gulf Stream turns fall to summer, but not without bumps

I was lying in my bunk, pale and seasick, when the boat surged and the boys in the cockpit let out a whoop.

"Eight and a half knots!" came the cry. "Nine and a half! Ten knots!"

Skipper Tom Vesey was calling out boat speeds, which rocketed to rare double figures as his heavy, 25-year-old cruising sailboat slashed across the western border of the most important meteorological phenomenon in the lives of everyone on the East Coast. A hundred miles east of Norfolk, he'd finally found the Gulf Stream, where much of our daily weather originates.

Crewman Hank Weed, monitoring separate instruments, barked out confirmation. "Eighty-four degrees," he reported, noting an abrupt, double-digit rise in sea water temperature as the 44-footer lurched across the Gulf Stream's west wall into freshly turbulent seas.

Sick as I was, I couldn't stay put and bounded up the companionway ladder in stocking feet to get the first whiff of warm salt air swooping up from the Caribbean. The boat kicked and bucked in the ruckus of wind against wave and I lost my footing, collapsing on the lifelines at the leeward rail, which was convenient because I'd soon be offering up my dinner over the side there.

It was black night when Jackrabbit found the stream, a pity because you like to see it. The water goes from sea green to cobalt blue, clouds puff up overhead like giant, bruised cotton balls and streams of Sargasso seaweed trail off to mark the tide line. It is the most amazing monument to relentless nature you will ever encounter, if you're into that sort of thing. And it's out there all day, every day.

The Gulf Stream starts off the African coast, rolls across the Atlantic and turns north when it bumps into the U.S. coastline. By the time it hits Cape Hatteras, N.C., and veers east, it's a 45-mile-wide river within the sea blasting along at up to five knots and bearing 150 million cubic meters of water per second, about 300 times the total amount of water that comes from all the freshwater rivers that feed the Atlantic.

The stream is at one of its narrowest points off Hatteras and runs hardest along its western edge, where the delineation with ambient seawater is sharpest. Water temperature shoots from the low 70s to the mid-80s in the space of a few hundred yards, and almost instantly you go from foul weather gear to flops and shorts.

When we left the Chesapeake this month to take Jackrabbit home to Bermuda, where Vesey lives, we bundled up in fleece hats, long underwear, gloves, boots and oilskins. Picking our way down the Bay past brilliantly lit tugboats and freighters, we shivered in the bitter night air. Water temperature was in the high 50s.

A fresh northeast breeze whooshed us through the Bridge-Tunnel at the mouth of the Bay, which looms at night like a 20-mile-long necklace of twinkling lights linking Norfolk to the lower Eastern Shore. Twenty-four hours later it was pitch dark night with nary a star in the sky when the Gulf Stream lurched up out of nowhere and turned late fall to summer.

The 45-mile ride across the stream was boisterous. It usually is. With 20-knot winds from the north smacking directly into strong currents from the south, waves build to towering, short, breaking seas that turn life aboard into a survival drill. It was one hand for the ship, one for yourself if you planned to make it through intact.

Life gets gentler on the eastern side. Water temperatures gradually dip back into the 70s and stay there all the way to Bermuda. By dawn we were exiting the stream, seas were calmer and Vesey felt comfortable setting out a pair of stout trolling lines with lures. By mid-day we had our dinner, a brilliant, golden 10-pound mahi-mahi that came skimming across the waves to the net.

By then I was emerging from digestive misery. The lads handed me the filet knife and, as senior fisherman aboard, I set to work on hands and knees filleting the barely expired catch on the rolling cockpit floor, a bloody and nauseating task.

That evening while shoveling down our fresh fish dinners we spied the first white-tailed tropicbird hanging off the stern, angling for a handout. This graceful sea bird, also known as a Bermuda longtail, rarely if ever ventures to the cold side of the stream. "Nasty birds," said Vesey. "I hate 'em." But they sure are pretty.

Bermuda lay three days away, with Jackrabbit battling 20- to 28-knot headwinds all the way. It's lonely out there -- we saw just two ships, far off in the distance, in five days at sea.

Vesey has a little transponder mounted on the deck that records his position from time to time and sends it off to the Internet, so friends ashore can monitor progress. With the contrary winds there were many inexplicable zigs and zags on the route as we tacked back and forth. Late in the fray, Weed's girlfriend called my wife to ask if there was a chance we'd got lost and couldn't find the island.

"I just want to call and tell them: 'It's just two inches over to the right,' '' she said.