Within seconds visibility was down to a true zero
and the cold rain was finding its way through to my
neck, up my sleeve and somehow into my right
boot. Nowhere to stop, the hard shoulder was
about four feet wide and the fact I couldn’t
actually see it, or any resemblance of the 8 inch
concrete blocks that make up a rumble strip
between the ‘slow’ lane and some kind of safety,
didn’t help.
As if by magic, the only bridge spanning the
highway for miles was the gateway to hell. The
rain hit as the temperature dropped and what
seemed like a solid wall of water filled with a
million needles reduced my forward speed like
falling headlong into a lake.
My riding suit was classed as waterproof, but as
with many off the peg, multi layered, high
specification outfits, there are many variations of
waterproof.
As the only bike on the road, I was between a rock
and a hard place. Another 120ft long, 70 ton
Peterbilt truck, came up behind me in the outside
lane, the driver was not affected by the rain or the
even slightly concerned about my predicament. It
seemed he had not bothered to switch off his
cruise control and carried on at 75-80 MPH creating
an even bigger wall of wet fog that reduced my
visibility to the edge of the screen a foot and a half
away, and no further. Riding past one of these
mobile villages on wheels in dry weather is bad
enough. The whole bike skips around as if on a
cobbled street as the air is thrown around in a
whirlwind. Add the rain and your life has no time to
pass through your mind, this is scary.
The wide screen on the Honda Goldwing, famed for
its protection from wind, rain and flying sheep,
worked to a degree, but the area behind the screen
has a strange vacuum effect that collects globules
of water like a scene from Apollo 13. The water
floats in a slow motion dance just in front of my
chest, then without warning it gets too heavy to
glide and hits me right in the face.