Gulfstreamers
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The Gulf Stream is the huge Atlantic current which brings warm air and water northward from the equator and keeps the weather in Western Europe mild. Hi. I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook. For generations, sailors in the Atlantic and Caribbean have paid close attention to the Gulf Stream, and they still do, as Correspondent Claire Holman reports.

NARR: The Gulf Stream moves at only 3 or 4 miles an hour through the Straits of Florida, but for boaters who are sailing to the Caribbean islands, the hardest part of the trip can be getting across the 40 or 50 mile-wide current.

"That's the only time that I can remember that Al was really afraid. And he was sitting in the cockpit lashed to the wheel, with his knife and life jacket and ... that was a scary one."

"If you are ... susceptible to seasickness, you are ... uncomfortable enough so that perhaps death might be more pleasant."

"I only screamed Oh, my God twice, so it wasn't really all that bad, but I was afraid a lot of the time."

NARR: Climate scientist and meteorologist Lou McNally says the rotation of the earth and the meeting of warm equatorial water and cold North Atlantic water set the Gulf Stream in motion: (12 Sec.)

"When the warmer water comes up in the Gulf Stream, it collides with the colder water nearby, it forms eddies, almost like little storms, and some wild waves."

NARR: And there's a name for those waves. Veteran Caribbean sailors call them square waves, or the corkscrew effect. To avoid them, they watch for perfect weather, when both the wind and the Gulf Stream are headed in the same direction. The problem says, sail-boater Heather Boudreau of Halifax Nova Scotia, is the perfect conditions often come right before a cold front.

"If you don't get far enough before the cold front hits, then you get really pounded."

Thanks today to Claire Holman of Portland, Maine. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is supported generously by Subaru of America.