The First Week – Day Eight to the Marquesas

Yup, we’ve been out here a whole week now. As of this typing (about 2100 ship’s time, 0300 UTC) we’ve travelled about 1,377 miles and are nearing the halfway point for the trip.

Of course actual distance sailed will be a little more than the 2,975 Nautical Miles laid down in our original course plot back in the Galapagos. The reason for that is that you rarely sail a straight course down the rhumb line in any long trip. Winds and currents impact your course, impeding or assisting your progress. We’ve mad some broad diversions from the rhumb line course in order to seek better winds and better sailing angles.

Yesterday’s 24 hour distance (from 1700 UTC to 1700 UTC today) was 187 miles, a pretty respectable distance even if we couldn’t hit that magical 200 mile day again. Conditions have been pretty good again today and we are able to press on and make good speed in the direction we want. We’ve been gaining on all of the boats we’ve been traveling with though we won’t catch the two day head start of the first boat before we arrive in this group we may catch the rest and arrive second.

As we sail a course like this we are constantly checking weather and conditions, following predictions from places like the National Weather services for guesses at future wind directions and currents. Of course these are large scale predictions and not your local weather and represent general trends over the region. While we also use these to watch out for more extreme conditions such as large storms in general they are predictive of what is likely to happen.

Every day or two I download a new GRIB file (short for Gridded Binary) which contains some of the large scale weather predictions for the region. Our navigation software, Maxsea, allows the direct importation of these GRIB files and lets us overlay the weather predictions over our charted course area. As mentioned in other posts we also have a Routing module that uses the GRIB data and our boat information to plot what it believes to be the fastest course to where we are going optimized for best boat speed, wind conditions and sailing angles to get us there quicker than just sailing down the Rhumb Line.

The weather models we’ve been looking at and our optimized routes from the Routing Module suggest that the wind is going to shift from the Southeast (around 135 degrees) to more Easterly at around 100 degrees by the time we get closer to the Marquesas. The net effect of the wind moving in that direction would be to make us turn more left and sail South. The suggested way to handle this is to stay North and minimize Southward travel until we are forced to turn by the wind. So that is our current plan. If you follow our track you will see that we have been sailing mostly West on courses such as 260° instead of more South. We will continue this for a few more days as long as we can.

After two days of delicious Mahi Mahi dinners we decided to skip fishing today and have chili for dinner for a change. Although the fresh fish is delightful it does add a bit more work and tends to wake everyone up from their rest when a fish is on. We will probably fish again in a day or two depending on the weather. There’s no sense in it if it’s rough so we take it day by day.

Prior to this our longest off shore passage was the roughly 1,500 miles from Hampton, Virginia to the British Virgin Islands. In a few hours we’ll pass that distance on this tripand be half way there. There are also a few other key differences between that trip and this one, such as distance off shore. On the BVI passage I think our furthest from land distance wasn’t much more than 300 miles and the Rescue Assets on hand were primarily USCG.

On THIS trip the furthest we go from land is where we are now, the halfway point between the Marquesas and the Galapagos at some 1,500 miles. And those too places aren’t exactly the MAIN-land if you get my drift. The ocean is a lot bigger out here.