World ARC - Day 56 - 5th March – Goldilocks Wind
Nina
Steve and Lynda Cooke
Sun 6 Mar 2016 04:12
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05:27S 95:06W World ARC - Day 56 - 5th March – Goldilocks Wind When we planned this passage back in Santa Cruz, Galapagos, we used weather data called Grib files which give us the wind speed and direction at various points at 12 hourly intervals. Sitting in the Internet cafe there came many mutterings from the assembled skippers about the lack of wind. For most of us there is an amount of wind we call just right. Usually this is between 15 and 25 knots depending on the skipper and the vessel. The Grib files told us we would have very little and certainly nowhere near just right. This situation covered most of the first four hundred miles of our passage to French Polynesia. We knew there would be a lot of motor sailing and even outright motoring Sad to report out forecasts were all dead right and there has not been any just right wind around despite various courses being tried. Some skippers went south others west in search of consistent winds but the daily roll call reveals that very few of us have found useable winds. However today we are hearing the first reports of 10 knot winds from the south east which would be very welcome for us onboard Nina. For our part we have had a number of false starts when we thought this is it only to find the wind direction changing as it dropped away to next to nothing. One good thing about the light winds is that it was a fairly straightforward job for Steve and Peter to transfer 60 litres of diesel from the jerry cans to the starboard tank today. This means we have nearly full tanks again. Karen went fishing today but had very little success in the catching so try again tomorrow. We ended the day with a morale boosting roast chicken dinner prepared by Lynda which the girls accompanied with some discovered tinto de verano left over from our last trip to Spain. We decided to download some fleet position data today from Yellow Brick only to discover that all the positions were totally and utterly wrong. A quick email to YBhelp produced the response that this is a known bug which happens if the fleet is more than 1,000 miles across. With and early starter and one vessel back in port we exceed this limit so YB have dropped one of our number so the position maps are all OK again. We hear that some of the UK has had rather too much wind recently so perhaps we should take care what we wish for. |