Sleepless in the Pacific

TIME: 2021/05/26 02:36
LATITUDE: 01-04.46S
LONGITUDE: 151-49.68W
AIMING FOR WAYPOINT: 05N-152W
COURSE (COG): 358T
BOAT SPEED (SOG): 3.7 kn
WIND SPEED (AWS): 13 kn
WIND ANGLE (AWA): 60 degrees
SEA STATE: 1.5m E Swell
COMMENTS: After a night of thick clouds, high wind, huge swells, pouring rain, and running downwind heavily reefed we emerged into sunlight this morning and confused seas with a 2.5M E swell on a short period punctuated by 1M NE and 1M S swell on a longer period. That has settled and we are sailing slowly N. We are managing our speed to avoid weather N of the equator which is expected to improve around June 3.


One of our cruising friends sends us a daily "Thought to ponder" email, just a brief one sentence that generally makes us smile. The girls highly anticipate receiving these! Iris loved the recent one about sign language as she has been teaching herself ASL and in fact knew how to sign that phrase!!

So in being inspired by Sarah's daily thoughts, I had one of my own last night. How accurate does a meteorologist need to be to stay employed?? The times we have set out on a passage anticipating certain weather conditions based on forecast and have been surprised by at times completely opposing reality have been plentiful. And we hear similar stories from fellow cruisers time and again so it is not just our bad luck. Well last night can be added to our list of inaccurate forecasts. We have two other cruisers sending us forecasts plus the grib files we download using the GFS model, so it is not like we didn't have multiple sources. (Yes, Nat, I know you will not be surprised that the GFS was off!!!) All the forecasts we received appeared fairly in line showing us having 14 to 18 knots of wind for the 26th and into the 27th. I would have given up an opportunity at that Turkish bath to have seen that forecast come to fruition. Instead we saw for nearly a 24 hour period with sustained winds of 25 to 35 knots, which combined with 2.5M seas to make for a, shall we say, unpleasant? night. We were averaging 6kn of boat speed with two reefs in the head sail and three reefs in the main. Sure the winds fluctuated a little lower at times, but honestly my nerves were so frayed that those brief respites were not enough for me. I will give a small bit of credit to the meteorologists who worked on this forecast, they were accurate on the precipitation!! Rain it did in gusto for the same 24 hour period. The breaking news on Maple is that the foul weather gear officially made its debut in the Southern Hemisphere. Even D put on his foul weather gear after a freezing watch wearing just shorts and a light jacket. During some of the worst of the weather, we came within half a mile of a huge fishing vessel. To watch it motor upwind in 30kn of wind, I will never again assume that the large ships don't feel the sea state. Made me almost nauseous watching it.

However, since this morning the sun started shining and the winds subsided dramatically allowing us to dry out our clothes and gear. We are still not able to point north very well so have made a lot of westing with trying to run with the wind. A stop in Hawaii is looking highly unlikely without bashing ourselves east.

On a separate note, we are just now crossing our 1000nm completed mark. So we celebrate again with more candy!! We will have our equator crossing tomorrow. I have to admit I am less enthused about making a huge effort for this equator crossing than our first, but we will be sure to pay some homage to Poseidon and perhaps he will go easy on us for the rest of the trip.