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Displaying items by tag: Seaspout

#WEATHER - The Irish Times reports on video of what appears to be an over-water tornado or 'seaspout' off the coast of Sligo last week.

The video above was captured at Rosses Point on the afternoon of Monday 7 May by Graeme Salter.

“I’ve been going to Rosses Point since I was a child and have seen some mad weather, but never anything like this,” he said.

Seaspouts or waterspouts are most often associated with dark, flat-bottomed cumulus cloud formations. They are not true tornados in the strictest sense, as they are not formed by the rotating updraft of a supercell thunderstorm.

The footage is the second occurrence of a waterspout in Ireland in recent weeks, following the mini-twister filmed at Bray Head last month as a massive thunder, lighting and hail storm hit the capital, as previously reported on Afloat.ie.

Published in Weather

About Commander Bill King, Solo Circumnavigator

William Donald Aelian King was the last surviving submarine commander in the Second World War - in charge of the British Navy's T-class Telemachus that sank a Japanese sub in the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Sumatra, in 1944.

Decorated many times for his service by the end of the war, King became a trailblazing solo sailor.

At the age of 58, he was the oldest participant in The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race sailing Galway Blazer II, a junk-rigged schooner he designed himself.

After a number of abortive attempts, including an incident with "a large sea creature", he finally completed his solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1973.

Beyond his aquatic escapades, King settled with his wife Anita (who died in 1984, aged 70) at Oranmore Castle outside Galway after the war, where he later developed a pioneering organic farm and garden to help tackle his wife's asthma.

The round-the-world sailor and Galway native Bill King died on Friday, 21 September, 2012, aged 102.