Perhaps it’s because of my pilot background - not a professional pilot, but did work for pay as a commercial pilot flying skydivers, towing gliders, and giving glider rides, all for pay. Weekend thing while the job in flight test paid the bills. New types of aircraft required some amount of training and demonstration of competency. The Federal Aviation Administration also required reviews of regulations and procedures as well as a competency flight evaluation every 2 years. Learning to fly, then experiencing the differences in the handling and performance of a variety of small airplanes, gliders and helicopters helped me appreciate the experience and tutoring of the flight instructor assigned to help me gain proficiency then evaluate my performance before turning me loose. Taught me humility and kept me alive.
Anyway, before we launched on this trip from Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest we studied Jimmy Cornell’s tome on cruising routes, then we found sailors with a lot of experience doing this. The Pacific high seems to have a lot of trouble behaving itself for this time of year, and a discussion with Jamie Gifford of SV Totem (you can look him up) revealed we should just be patient and let things settle down, allow the high to finally become well established, then blast off.
We were also fortunate enough to have a dock neighbor at the Hawaii Yacht Club who has done this route around 17 times. Ronnie Simpson works as a delivery skipper moving TransPac race boats from Hawaii back to the continental USA, and he had some simple words of advice for us as well. “Sail North. Don’t be tempted to turn East and cross the high. Get around it. Avoid the Great Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, you can foul a prop on an old plastic fishing net or length of line. Get North of the high until the winds allow a turn to the East, hopefully sailing in good conditions nearly the entire trip. You should look Ronnie up. He’s an Iraq war vet, badly injured, made a strong comeback, and has an amazing life story.
Jamie and Ronnie have earned our respect because of their sound wisdom based upon experience, and honestly because they’re both just great guys. We did our best to follow Jamie’s advice but the Pacific high may have fooled us - just look at the Windy or PredictWind forecast over the next few days. We’re doing our best to follow Ronnie’s advice and so far it’s paying off. We’ve been blasting along on a generally due North course with the objective of getting up to about 40 degrees North latitude before turning Northeast then arcing around the big blue hole at the center of the “now elongated” high pressure system. North of that system is a big icky low that could get pretty ugly for folks aiming for Alaska, but if we can just ride the South side of it in the 15 - 20 knots of Westerlies AND remain South of the big band of rain closer to the center of the low pressure system we could have an awesome passage.
Fingers crossed we get past the blue hole before it migrates too far to the West, cuz if we don’t we’ll be doing a kabuki dance to worm our way North in light winds. We’ve discussed just tooling along slowly until that low arrives and lifts us to the East, and in a couple of days we’ll have a better idea of how it’s all going to play out.
Jamie, Ronnie, Jimmy Cornell and a host of other sailors learned their lessons the hard way. There’s no reason we need to reinvent the wheel or put ourselves in harm’s way just because we thought we knew better. Mentors are important but need to be picked with great care. We’re thinking we’ve done our best to absorb the wisdom of others - now let’s see if we can apply the lessons and implement a sound strategy to get this horse to the barn.
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