Are we safe?

About a twenty years ago for Christmas, my wife Nancy happened to latch on to the Nautical Minds online bookstore store. Let me say it is an amazing store (physically and virtually), and I would guess that most sailors in the Toronto area have spent some number of hours browsing the shelves. It is located on Queens Quay West about a block from where Nancy and I live now.

Anyway, back to Christmas. Many titles were on half-price and her radar focused on all the titles related to sailing mishaps at sea. Some were cruisers crossing the Pacific bumping into whales, some were based around famous races where a weather disaster resulted in many deaths or ship losses (Fastnet in Europe, the Sydney to Hobart race), some were self-inflicted idiocy adventures like the fellow who took his steel hulled boat north and intentionally froze himself in for the winter near Devon Island. Nancy’s objective that Christmas was to educate me out of my desire for long cruising passages on sailing vessels. It is probably self-evident as Puerta Vallarta is no longer visible behind us and we are coming up to the last shoreline we may see for 3 weeks that the effort failed. I think during that Christmas 20 years ago even my daughters Kira and Devan were on my side and after about the 10^th disaster at sea book echoed “Mom, not another one!”.

The reason I share this now is that a couple of days ago as I was doing my morning walk on the beach and did a Facetime call with my mother back home in the Ottawa area. Mom and Dad had spent a year on a 36’ CS Merlin in the day, which they took from Whitby YC down the inland waterway to Miami then across to the Bahamas – so she is no stranger to life on a sailboat. She asked, “Why would you take the risk of a passage like this, at this stage in your life?” I think the trigger for the question was the news she had just received two days earlier that I was going to be a grandpa in October, or more directly that my daughter Devan and husband Nick are pregnant! So aside from mentioning how excited I am to have new crew members for our family sails, I thought I would talk about some of the reasons why we expect to be very safe, especially during this long 3-week passage.

The Weather

Let me say one of the reasons I love sailing with Bill is not only picking up on his offshore experience, but he is very meticulous in researching everything he plans to do at sea. When it comes to crossing the Pacific Ocean, I consider this an admirable attribute.

WARNING: Geeky content to follow.

So, if you look at the picture of the winds above, you will see in North America they are moving down towards the equator then westerly in a clockwise manner. In the South you see the winds coming North and then westerly in a counter clockwise manner. See the blue area of no winds? This is the transition zone or doldrums. For sailors, these suck, not blow.

When it is summer in the northern hemisphere, the waters get hotter, and you get hurricanes in the Caribbean. Northern winter/southern summer they get typhoons in Australia. So part timing here is to take advantage of the westerlies in the north for April, May and into June, then find a place where the “doldrums” are skinny – we can sneak from the north to the south through the transition zone, and travel in the cooler “south” avoiding issues until you sneak into New Zealand in October. So simply put, we will be in the right place and the right time to be safe.

So, another reason we are “safer” than all those stories Nancy had me read is weather information. It is simply amazing! There are several weather prediction models that will predict the winds for up to 10 days ahead (some of them 30) and calculate the best course for us to follow to get to our location the fastest and most comfortably. If you look at the chart above, each coloured line is one of those models and it is showing what is expected next Friday the 14^th. We download these files at least twice a day. As you can see, they are all predicting basically the same thing which gives us a high degree of confidence.

Now let’s look at what the models expect us to “experience” over the three weeks. (Sorry to make any sailors jealous).

• 98% of the time wind speed is between 8 and 20 knots and 2% less than that. AWESOME!
• 61% of the time downwind, 37% reaching (on the beam) and 1% Upwind GREAT.

The Technology

In the “old days” sailors would hope for a “window” and set sail, but they had to deal with weather when it arrived. Today the boats are safer, the communications is better (as I post this blog on Starlink) and the information we have to work with amazing. The two pics below show another amazing safety feature (AIS) – where we can see other boats around us and get their course and speed. The nav instruments automatically warn if a collision is possible.

So are we safe – amazingly so compared to those that sailed before us!

We have the main (one reef) and genoa flying on a beam reach with 13 knot winds. We are making 8.3 knots.  

The hills along the Mexico coast have already faded into the mist and we do not expect to see land for 21 days. We will have 3 weeks of glorious sailing with no expected bad weather. Expect nothing but big smiles!