Carib to Gib direct - Serious thoughts please :)

[Troutbridge]

Umm, it was a JOKE Mark, you know....humour.... like when we occasionally beat you blokes at cricket and laugh about it for weeks afterwards (normally the length of time before you beat us at some other sporting endeavour can be counted in weeks, providing we aren't talking about rugby....damn, I wasn't going to mention that )
But since you want to discuss the route, I don't 'get' why would you want to sail for 3000-odd miles with almost no chance of 'wind up the bum' and a counter-current which virtually guarantees you'll have to motor if there's no wind at all. I can personally vouch for the fact that they serve excellent beer in Peter's Sport Bar in Horta. Provided you leave the Caribbean mid-May onwards, the butter will stay 'pour-able' for most of the trip. I'm not sure, not having Cornell immediately to hand, but I reckon you'll find that the trip going Northwards would not take much longer (if at all) than bashing direct.....apart from time spent in Horta, of course.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by Troutbridge

Umm, it was a JOKE Mark, you know....humour.... .

Oh, sorry. We have been getting a little stir crazy here!

See the chart for today and you will see why it looks better. Trip from Bermuda to Gib via Azores is not as cosy as the books say. Remember the sailing ships of old needed one hell of a puff to get them going.
The only light weather on todays chart it between 2 storms up the northern route.

Sure it on the nose , but on many days its not close hauled.

It'll be interesting figuring it out... and then sailing it

Mark

[Joli]

Funny, I just ran the routing prediction for a Ben 375 from St Martin to Gib and it shows the track north of the Azores. I'll watch it over the next week or two and let you know what the average track looks like.

[MarkJ]

Originally Posted by Joli

Funny, I just ran the routing prediction for a Ben 375 from St Martin to Gib and it shows the track north of the Azores. I'll watch it over the next week or two and let you know what the average track looks like.

Hi

Thanks for running that again today

So in your softwear you just put the first and last waypoints and it tells you where to go? (Nicolle often tells me where to go!)

There must be a weird reason to go north of the Azores as it blowing 35 kts on the nose there. Mind you, in 2 weeks when the boat would be there the weather could have changed. So it must use pilot info wich shows going north of the Azores and then south along the Spanish coast. Thats fine for old heavy slow sailing ships, but, here's the point, we are different to this:
Rig Barque, 3 masted
Sparred Length 176 ft.
Length on Deck 135 ft. 6 in.
Length Overall 148 ft.
Draft 14 ft. 6 in.
Beam 24 ft.
Rig Height 100 ft.
Sail Area 12,450 sq. ft.
Displacement 284 GRT

That sort of boat needs 30 knots to go anywhere. 10 knots would have the boat effectivly becalmed.

Can you change you perameters for wind speed and ask it some differnt routes based on different wind directions preference too?

[Joli]

Hi Mark,

Hope all is well in the Caribbean!

The software works as follows:

I inputed the polars from a Beneteau 375, I don't have a polar for your boat but figured this would be fairly close.

I downloaded todays grib file for the North Atlantic which is a 15 day grib. Obviously predicting the weather 15 days out is not very good. Fronts stall or speed up,,, you know. We have the ability to download files enroute so some of the time vagaries are minimized.

The software then calculates the best route based on the wind direction, wind speed, sea state, currents, and future weather conditions against the polars of the boat.

It will looks to see where the boat should sail for the best weather opportunity based on how the weather system moves and how fast the boat can sail. It is a predictive software using polars of an individual boat againts a changing weather picture. I hope I'm explaining it correctly?

Anyway, if you want I'll keep running it daily and to see what the average looks like. The grib being 15 days does not show a start to finish but shows you past the Azores in 15 days.

Cheers,

Joli

Have a rum neat for me!