July 29, 2022
The weather turned great for a trip out to the lagoon, but still not good enough for a seven-day passage to Australia. We would only get two good days before more frontal activity and strong trade winds came our way. It turns out, two days was just a tad optimistic – more on that in a bit.
After all the cruising we’ve done in the lagoon in six visits to New Caledonia, Cyndi still has more places on her cruising New Cal bucket list. This time, it would be two tiny islands called Redika and Atiré. Here are some pics of Redika from the air…
Our next stop was another tiny island called Atiré. While we didn’t go ashore, we did enjoy the anchorage (for a while, at least) and the view from the air…
We look at six different weather models on PredictWind. We mostly pay attention to the ECMWF model and lately, the GFS model as well. The ECMWF model predicted winds around 12 knots and what we were actually experiencing (in the real-life app, as Cyndi likes to call it) was about 4 or 5 knots like GFS predicted. That’s what we expected overnight, but that’s not what we got.
Here’s a screenshot of the two models taken as I write this an hour after our return to safe harbor…
It’s very definitely blowing more like ECMWF predicts as it started to do after we (tried) to go to sleep last night. About 4AM, with the seas building and the wind blowing at about 15 knots, we pulled the anchor and headed back to town. This kind of thing happens when you try to thread the weather needle but even with the rude wake-up call this morning, this little trip was still great.
Okay, I’m sure you’ve noticed that we have a drone. It’s a DJI Mavic Air 2 and we love it. It seems like it’s impossible to get a bad picture with it and the video is amazing as well. It’s well worth the terror.
Yep, terror. That’s about what I feel every time I fly it. I’m not even talking about flying from a moving boat – just taking off and landing on Legacy at anchor. We flew while underway once when we first got the drone and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s a video.
I don’t think that flying while sailing is really worth the risk (to the drone and to my adrenal system). We all know what boats look like when they sail. That said, if we get a windless day on a glassy ocean during our next passage, I might try again.
Why the terror – fear of wasting about a grand and not having a drone for the rest of a trip. I have actually flown it a lot of hours now and I’m getting better, but my fingers still shake on the controls when I come in for a landing on our dodger-top solar panel (a great landing pad with the boom pulled over to starboard). -Rich
