Frightening moment Auckland sailor metres away from eye of wild waterspout. Video / Daniel Leech / Jenna Smith
A beautiful sight greeted morning walkers in Auckland’s Ōrewa as a spectacular water spout danced on the ocean at sunrise.
Photographer Grant Birley was walking on Ōrewa’s main beach in front of the Surf Club when he spotted the water spout lighting up in the sun’s rays while the cloud bank overhead remained dark.
“There were clouds covering and some rays coming through, so it made it quite nice,” Birley said.
He said the other walkers looking on had to be quick as it only lasted a few minutes.
Zooming in with his long distance lens, he didn’t at first notice a paddler coming into his photo’s frame and thought it would ruin the picture.
“But then it actually turned out that it was a great image as he was going past,” Birley said.
The water spout is the latest in a series of recent lucky photography breaks for Birley, who was lucky enough to recently video a kiwi out and about in the middle of the day and also saw morepork owls and dolphins around the same time.
Birley said he typically focuses on astrophotography - taking moving nighttime photos of the heavens above.
Waterspouts are similar to tornados but occur over water.
Metservice forecaster Lewis Ferris said they typically occur in unstable conditions and humidity when an updraft mixes with showers so that the warmer air moving up cools and condenses into vapour.
Ferris said MetService’s rain radar showed an intense burst of showers near Ōrewa this morning.
That together with an updraft likely caused the water spout, he said.
Photographer Grant Birley captured a beautiful sunrise and waterspout off Auckland's Ōrewa Beach on December 20. Photo / Grant Birley
Waterspouts are associated with smaller, localised weather, not major systems. But given the humidity around this week, there could be more springing up, Ferris said.
“The last couple of days it felt very humid, so that humidity has just made this a lot more likely because there’s now already a lot more moisture around the surface of the water.”
Last June and May also saw waterspouts photographed.
“You could see all the water coming up from the ocean and how high it was - but it was cool watching the two of them move around each other like a little dance.”
One of the most frightening recent encounters was when an Auckland sailor captured the the moment his boat nearly got caught in the direct eye of a waterspout November last year, watching it roar past just a stone’s throw away.
Daniel Leech was out sailing on the Hauraki Gulf on November 21 when a waterspout appeared from nowhere during a storm.
The waterspout can then be seen coming toward the boat’s crew of five.
“Do you want to drop the main [sail]?” Leech’s colleague can be heard saying.
Leech told the Herald at the time the main concern for the five-person crew was getting out of the way of the waterspout.
“I had to make sure the crew were safe and have a plan if it came to the worst.
“We headed as fast as we could out of the path of it. It was looking like [it was coming] down the middle of the main channel which is where we were at at the time it formed, which was between Rangitoto and the main shoreline.
“We knew we had to get the sails down to reduce the risk of any major disaster to boat and crew.”
A passenger on a nearby ferry happened to capture the moment Leech’s boat got agonisingly close to the waterspout, with one passenger heard saying: “It’s literally going to go right into that boat.”
This is the moment a sailing crew came close to the eye of a waterspout in Auckland. Photos / Daniel Leech, Jenna Smith
