Whitsunday’s to South Pacific

[Colbud]

Hi there
I’m wondering if I can get some advice on routes to the South Pacific starting from Airlie beach.
We will be leaving Airlie in late January and want to ,ultimately , end up in the South Pacific spending about a year away in total.
My thoughts were to initially head south to perhaps as far as Sydney then head across to NZ and then head north from there.
I want to avoid sailing into trade winds and be south of cyclone areas as much as possible until the season passes.
I’m wondering if this is the best option and if so how far south should I go.
We will be in a Lagoon 450.
Any advice will be appreciated.
Colbud

[Boatguy30]

If you mean French Polynesia than yes, you'll be going by way of NZ. I've met older Kiwis that reckon on alwaya crossing to Aussie via New Cal, skirting a hopefully stationary high.

Then, onward from NZ you'll need to hook into some westerlies with the passage of a cold front. Hopefully, not too strong.

[Dsanduril]

FWIW we did the trip from Christchurch to the Australs in a similar size cat, so if you want to go that far east...

Haven’t looked at or sailed the bit Oz to NZ but in general sounds about like I would expect. Leaving NZ we tried to sail the high 30s/low 40s trying to ride the edge of solid westerlies without getting too far north to lose them and without getting so far south that we were truly in the Roaring 40s. For the most part successful, we dodged north twice to the mid-30s to go around systems, then angled back S. It wasn’t a fast/great passage but at the same time nothing too unpleasant and we kept the wind at the beam or aft until the last two days.