Passage in Pictures

The previous passage blog ("Tropics Bound", June 2017) looked at life on board the vessel underway; this one looks at the world outside the boat. Hopefully it will open a window on what we see as we cross oceans.

Every day on a passage I send position reports to Yachts in Transit via our SSB radio communication system. What follows is a picture version of that information: a daily chronicle of the voyage in images of  weather conditions, sail configuration and chartplotter data.

Reading from top to bottom, chartplotter data indicates:
Speed over ground, in knots (1 k = 1.15 mph)
Time of day, in local time
Depth, in feet (--- means too deep for the sonar to read; depths over 1 1/4 miles are common)
Distance To Destination, in nautical miles (1 nm = 1.15 "land" mile)
 (since sailboats often cannot travel directly toward their destinations, the difference between one day's DTD and the next does not indicate the actual miles sailed)
Time To Destination, computed from DTD relative to speed
(this figure changes constantly and we pay little attention to it)
Latitude & longitude
(normally the screen displays the area relatively close to us and these numbers are the current lat & long of the boat; since I had to move the cursor to center the large picture, the box shows the cursor location, not the vessel location)

DAY ONE

Wind ESE 9k, Sea ESE .5m

Full main, full jib

A picture of the entire route,
from New Caledonia to a waypoint outside the Bay of Islands,
 New Zealand

DAY TWO

Wind SE 15k, Seas ESE 1.5m

Full main, full jib, inner foresail

On the big picture, a wee bit of progress

DAY THREE

Wind E 12k, Seas ENE 2m

Full main, full jib

Cursor (and sails) show we've tacked

DAY FOUR

Wind E20k, Seas 3m mixed 

Reefed main, jib partially furled

Weather forecasts showed a squash zone--area of very strong winds--in our path,
so we slowed down to avoid  running into it

DAY FIVE

Wind ESE 22k, Seas 3.5m

Furled jib only (no main)

Squash zone and local conditions getting stronger,
but even with hardly any sail up we couldn't slow the boat down enough 

DAY SIX

Wind ENE 24k, Seas 4m

Full main and full jib in contrary motion
("hove to", intentionally stopping the boat)

Cursor shows us floating backwards, since we're not sailing forward
(the downside to not forcing the boat or crew to bash into rough seas)

DAY SEVEN

Wind NE 23k, Seas NE 3.5m

Main on 3rd reef, inner foresail

For some reason the chartplotter's backlight didn't work well that day;
photo shows a speed of 7.1k with 271.2 miles to go

DAY EIGHT

Wind ENE 10k, Seas NE 1.5m

Full main, full jib, inner foresail

Getting close!

DAY EIGHT+

Forgot to take a water photo,
but wind is NW 14k and seas are .3m;
we've tacked downwind, full main only

We reached the waypoint!
Turned into the Bay of Islands on the morning of the 9th day

To be consistent, here's a photo of the big picture;
we're beyond the waypoint, almost to our landfall at Opua

All told the voyage was about 850 miles and took 8 days + 3 hours.  As always, we were exhausted afterwards, but there were no major problems and it felt good to get another long passage under our belts (or under our lifejackets)!

Speaking of which, here's a Day 3 photo of Art in his lifejacket. He's tying up the inner foresail since we weren't going to use it for a while. He's not wearing his bathing suit because it was warm (it was not) but because he knew chances were good he would get doused (he did).