Only 2 weeks to go before heading to Trinidad. The last few days have been even more wild than usual: final discussions with prospective crew, packing and piling up too much stuff I don’t know where I will put, programming, bombing and reprogramming laptops, printing out charts, pushing on friends with incredible equipment deals that just don’t seem to get here, trying to make sense out of medicine lists... not to mention yet another pair of socks, calls to the yard, calls to Esa, calls to... and calls from...
Our crew is now 4 : Esa, Jorgen, Juha, and I - a solid crew.
Route/time simulations are coming in anywhere from fantastic to terrible depending (today the we might make it to Gibraltar in 3 weeks).
I went up to Stockholm last week and hauled 30kg of stuff off of Galatea II (who smiled in relief), but left the Duogen behind. Just too much weight to carry.
I am feeling a lot calmer about this trip even though it is a lot longer. 5000 miles from Trinidad to Perpignan. There seem to be two approches to the route : the classic route to Bermuda, across to the Azores and on to Gibralter and Perpignan; or the direct route NE to the bottom of the Bermuda high and then zigzagging east till we pick up the north winds on the other side. The position of the Azores High is our problem. We want it at its’ most southern limit so we can sail over it with favorable winds. If these are our conditions (which is highly unlikely) and they stayed this way for a long period (which is impossible) we would run NE from Trinidad at our most efficient angle to the wind (the most speed, as close to the direction we want to be going with the least amount of stress) and hope to catch SW winds that will run up the outer edge of the line of dark triangles (the cold front of the principle L (and subsequent Ls) and then head more ENE as the winds shift to NW after the fronts. We would be aiming for the second ring around the top of the H where we would hope to find our SW W and NW winds to carry us though the Azores to the Med. If this H is very far north we will have a more complicated route playing with the southern edge of the H till we can catch the winds from the NE then N and then NW on its eastern side. This is an overly simplified analysis because all this is moving fast and we are moving slowly. There is often another H around Bermuda which combined with the Azores H can create a barrier. In this case we would have to come very far north making it worth while stopping in Bermuda, or even ending up in Newport. This is a very simplified view but the basic approach is go as fast as possible in the right direction safely...
I am surrounded by very patient loved ones: Anne, Luca and Alix, Arik, Enrico... as I get closer to leaving I am becoming increasingly one track minded and most certainly very uninteresting to listen to.
