Gently Poaching Eggs

When we peeled back our eyelids on Monday, it was to discover it was snowing.  More precisely, when I's stretched and rolled into the kitchen to see what was for breakfast I discovered F standing at the window contemplating the scene and realized white stuff was falling out of the sky .... not much of it

Snow flakes are falling gentle and slow,

Tigger says "Frying Pan, what makes it snow?

Frying Pan, confident, makes the reply

Shak'im big flour bag up in the sky

(Apologies to a "Banjo" Paterson)

Out there is wasn't so much 'flour bag' as some one plucking at the corner of a kapok cushion; small pieces of those cotton boles we saw stuck to roadsides on our travels in October.

VERY             small               pieces

And they weren't sticking to anything,

It wasn't those that F was staring at.  The 'snow' had reduced visibility over the sea to about half a mile, and the weather change had created a really strange effect on the surface of what we could see.

For a while it might have been tiny snow flurries making little clouds that seemed to cling to the sea surface and waft along in clumps, but there wasn't enough snow for that.  It eventually became apparent it was water vapour, rising from the warm sea into the cold air above - like breathing out on cold day.

Or like the surface of a saucepan of gently poaching eggs.

Visibility cleared but the water vapour effect remained.  It was particularly dense between us and Aegina, where ships looked like they were sailing in a layer of fog about 2 metres thick.  In front of us the wind on the (now clear) sea surface went from left to right, but way out to our right (over by Aegina) the vapour effect was definitely moving back in our direction.

As it moved it spread out.  From that  blanket of very low of fog the wind corralled rows of wisps and strands of vapour; their secretive presence 'unveiled' by the cold air as they escaped the water's surface. The effect lasted 2 or 3 hours and was a bit like white smoke revealing the layers of temperature in the bodies of air (associated with a weather front) moving over each other and over the sea.

It would have taken professional cameras to capture it.  All we could get was varieties of 'greyness'.  So we are just going to have to store that one in our memory banks.