May 25 – May 29, 2013
After Rotorua, it was time to get back to waiting for a weather window to make the jump to Fiji. While Rich is really good at using technology to predict weather (GRIBS, etc.), the area between New Zealand and the tropics is particularly challenging. It’s a volatile, ever-changing dance of highs, lows, and in-betweens stemming from Antarctica, the tropics, and Australia. What’s predicted and what actually happens are often two different things, and weather forecasting here is a bit of an art. Thus, we like to hire an expert, not just to help us pick a window, but to update us every day as the picture changes.
It’s always interesting to talk to people about their weather prediction choices. Some people prefer to do their own weather analysis, while others have good luck with Gulf Harbor Radio, an SSB radio weather guru who does general predictions and free forecasting for boats underway. He’s pretty good, but you need to be patient and listen through all the forecasts for various areas and personalized forecasts for other boats before he gets to you–sometimes a long wait.
Others of us like to hire our own weather router. Our favorite weather router, Bob McDavitt, puts out a weekly free newsletter commenting on the coming weather for the week (WeatherGram). Unfortunately, some people mistake this for weather routing and use it to make decisions. It’s not, and they shouldn’t. It can give you an general idea of what might be coming, but it’s not the same thing as using a weather router.
A good weather router makes a personalized daily forecast taking into account your boat’s speed and issuing your sail plan as close to your departure time as possible. Most important, though, are the daily updates via e-mail. Even then, it’s not a perfect prediction as your router can only make his best guess. Weather systems can suddenly stall, speed up, slow down, enlarge, dissipate, or turn in another direction. Mankind is very smart. Mankind can go to the moon. Mankind will never master Mother Nature, though, and trying to figure out what the weather will do is akin to herding cats.
By now we’d signed up with two weather routing services. This wasn’t our intention originally. We’d been using Bob Mc Davitt and liked him, but a friend of ours had consistently had great luck with Commander’s, a service based on the US east coast. He calls them and asks for clarification of weather situations even when he’s not on passage. We liked the idea of being able to call on the sat phone and decided to give Commander’s a try.
Well, they didn’t work out for us. They picked a weather window for us and sent a sail plan that had been made 48 hours earlier (we were flabbergasted by this–48 hours old might as well be a month old). That window deteriorated and we opted out, and they chided us, saying it wasn’t likely to get any better in the future. Confused and frustrated; we decided to hire Bob Mc Davitt, but also stayed with Commanders to see how they compared. It was no contest: Bob Mc Davitt ended up coming out way ahead, the most dramatic example happening while underway when Commanders failed to warn us of some dangerous weather ahead that Bob pointed out in an email in all caps – “GO WEST NOW!!!!!” (more about this in an upcoming post).
Does this mean our friend is wrong in using Commanders? Nope. Everyone has to use trial and error to find out what works for them. Some people love Commanders. Some don’t. Others of us like Bob Mc Davitt, but some don’t. Some people do their own best forecasting, while others will listen to Gulf Harbor or other radio nets. Our friend Webb Chiles doesn’t even believe in weather windows, and he’s sailed around the world 5 times! It’s a bit like religion: what works for you, works for you; but it may not work for someone else.
Finally, it looked like a good weather window was coming. During our final days, we finished provisioning and spent a lot of time at marine and home goods stores doing final small boat projects. Meanwhile, the nights and mornings were pretty darn cold, but we couldn’t complain too much as our fellow cruisers in Whangarei were seeing ice on their docks in the mornings! It wasn’t quite that cold in Tauranga, but there was one afternoon so chilly we went to Phil’s, had our lunch smack in front of the fireplace, and switched chairs during the meal so we could warm up our other sides. We were getting pretty anxious to head to the tropics.
Below is a hodgepodge of pictures from Tauranga and Mount Maunganui. I don’t know if I ever mentioned our marina was right by an airport popular with gliders and stunt pilots, and we always enjoyed watching them. The cute squid came to check us out after we splashed back into the water following our haulout. (As always click to enlarge and scroll.)–Cyndi
