We’ve been underway 24 hours. So far a lovely sail, and even with the wander down the Napali coast we’ve made a lot of Northing. Looks like our average speed for the first 24 hour block from when we turned North will be in the neighborhood of 6.4 knots. Not bad for mostly light conditions.
For weeks now we’ve been waiting for the Pacific High to show a little muscle and stop being bullied by the monstrous low pressure system gales that thunder across the Pacific. They seem to originate around Japan or the Philippines. What the heck have those guys got against us? Was it something we said?
Anyway, we, along with several other boats, finally decided conditions were looking pretty good. Either that or we just got impatient, and certainly there was a little of that. In any case we’re kind of “committed” now and so far it’s working out pretty well. We’re looking at the PredictWind ECMWF and GFS forecast weather products out about 6-7 days, even though we pretty much consider everything past 3 days to be fantasy and science fiction, and we’re aiming our boat along a route to optimize our sailing experience as things evolve. This pretty much involves using OpenCPN to plot our position and the forecast positions of significant highs and lows then considering how many miles we can travel in a 24 hour period, then deciding on a direction to aim until the next forecast update.
Regardless of the direction we’d like to aim, it’s critical to keep the boat moving at good speed with the knowledge we can either harden up or crack off on the wind as things evolve. Fortunately for us we want to go North as fast as possible, and the wind and sea conditions are encouraging that objective. We’re also paying attention to bands of rain and wind intensity as we’d really like to stay in the dry and also enjoy 10 - 13 knots of wind when possible. That lower wind level ensures less choppy wind waves making for a much more comfortable ride, but ALSO allowing a wider selection of sail plans.
Today we’re been in anything from 7 to 11 knots true wind on the starboard beam, and after the last weather forecast that offered more of the same, we stowed the jib and rolled out the screecher. That bought us around 1.5 - 2 knots and now we’re blasting along at around 7 - 8 knots with 9 - 10 knots true wind. We’re “screechin’”, babeeee.
We love our screecher and hope the patches we applied while acting irresponsible at the Hawaii Yacht Club will hold long enough to make this passage. It’s so much more fun to go fast when the seas are flat and the winds are light. It’s also fun, and I know I’ve been harping on this for a long time, to go like stink in our little 38’ Seawind 1160. We’re heavily loaded with all the cruising kit and toys and months of provisions and full fuel tanks plus another 140 liters. We raised the waterline 2” when we hauled out in 2015, and we’re currently floating at the original anti-fouling paint line plus maybe a bit more, leaving around 1 - 1.5” of anti-foul paint revealed. We’re at least 10 tons according to Seawind drawings. Still, this little cat hauls ass in light air conditions, and don’t kid yourself, there are a lot of days with winds in the 6 - 10 knot range. Diesels are noisy. Sails are lovely.
Isabel and I were chatting about boat marketing this morning and it seems that the World ARC with the Atlantic crossing is where a lot of cruising boats get compared. Her point was that typically the wind is pretty robust for that route, and the big heavy Lagoons and FP’s perform quite favorably to the Outremers and other high performance cats. It’s important to note that often the high performance cats are very heavily loaded for that particular passage, and that has a lot of impact on their comparative performance versus the “condomaran” competition.
Seawind has found a great middle ground with their range of cats. Comfort, safety, and great light air performance even while heavy!
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