November 4, 2019
We arrived in Nelson last Saturday night at 1 AM (Sunday morning?) after a 43 hour motorboat ride from Christchurch. The weather window we got was a total surprise to us. I was working on our new Iridium Go satellite modem and downloading GRIBs from Perdict Wind and just happened to spot suitable weather if we departed the next day. We did and it was a very nice trip.
We’re happy to be back in Nelson (we were here in 2016) but sad to leave Lyttelton and Christchurch. We had a great time there and it really felt like home. Te Ana Marina is wonderful and we’ve really come to love Christchurch.
We wanted to make a few stops in the Sounds on the way to Nelson, but the forecast called for conditions to turn nasty. If we’d stopped, we could have been stuck in the Sounds for days, so we pressed on.
Speaking of satellite phones and Predict Wind, above is the free tracking site we got from them. The Iridium Go sends them our position every hour and their software updates the tracking page (here – note that this page shows current wind and not the wind we had on our trip). We can even add little “blog posts” to the tracking page. We can even add some photos as we go. We’ll post a link to this from now on when we set off on a long passage.
I can’t say enough about how great Predict Wind has been for us. We’ve been using it for about four years. Each time we’ve had a question for them, their customer service has gone beyond our expectations and well into excellence! When we saw that we could buy an Iridium Go from them to replace our old Iridium 9575 sat phone (here’s our review of that piece of junk), we jumped at the chance. While I still hate Iridium, Predict Wind made the new purchase experience and installation much less painful.
We used Predict Wind’s PWG weather model for our trip and as is usually the case, it was very accurate. (You can also view three other weather models on their site, including ECMWF.) We have the weather routing preferences tuned such that it very accurately predicts our boat speed and capabilities. -Rich
