From the calm of the ebbing tide, described in the previous chapter, we move on here to the ravages of an equinoctial gale, with wind over a flooding tide making conditions extremely hazardous. This too is a spring tide, when the new moon ensures the greatest variation between high and low tides.

This time, I have chosen blank verse as the form. No rhyme just the steady beat of the iambic pentameter's waves, pounding against the page's breakwater. I felt that the verse style used by Shakespeare throughout most of his dramatic texts (he occasionally let some of his less exalted characters, like Macbeth's porter, lapse into prose) was a good style to use when the sea, as described here, is at its most dramatic.

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