Big Day Out for Expedition

 

Our start from Napier was quite uneventful, the fleet under spinnakers for the broad reach to Mahia peninsula. Clearing  the lee  of Cape Kidnappers found the wind and seas rising to the forecast 25 to 35 knots of wind as we rounded Mahia peninsula prudence encouraging us to stay off the shallow and disconcertingly light blue waters (about 10 metres deep) off the point, we settled into the run through the night up to East Cape. Our progress was pleasingly quick but needed firm hands on the tiller, our "classic" Farr 38 not being as well optimized for the fast running as the newer boats.

 

 

We were happy to round East Cape in the early hours (about 4 am I think)  The last major cape on the trip and happily reached along our course to Cape Colville still at about 10 knots of boatspeed but with much flattter seas. I mentally started to divide our distance still to sail by 10.........  well that was just silly but I'm getting to the point..

We had observed that the weather grib files downloaded in Napier to our Expedition software onboard showed a very distinct zone of light wind in the lee of Mt Hikurangi inland of East Cape approx 20nm wide and stretched offshore due north for 60 Nautical Miles. Our course to Cape Colville was 274 magnetic and crossed right through it. In  fact our Expedition "optimised course"  (which is a function in the program that takes the potential speed of any given yacht (in this case ours) in conjunction with digital weather models (the "grib" files) and computes via brilliant and highly intelligent algorithyms the best way for a yacht to get from A to B) advised a course to go due North, right around this zone.

We didn’t want to believe it, at the time we were reaching fast, and hoped that the weather model was pessimistic and that we could get through while the optimised course wanted us to go 70 degrees off course. And here is the point, such a large windshadow  stretching so far offshore was hard to believe, but then we sailed into it.

We cursed ourselves and got back on the program. I can honestly say that without the assistance of the Expedition software helping us make a tactical decision when we were tired and that I would not have intuitively come up with then we would have been stuck in that hole for a long long time.

The scheds as we approached Cape Colville at first surprised us. When you don’t know where your competitors are and you are becalmed or sailing "off course" as we were you imagine that they are still sailing away at 10knots. They weren’t, in fact it seemed that our offshore course had done very well for us. We had passed many boats that obviously spent more time parked up than us, all we had to do was "hang on "  for a good result.

We rounded Colville and shortly after, the wind changed again and we had a great tussle with Midnight Express all the way across the Hauraki Gulf in a wind now getting fickle in the afternoon. We lucked out with the tide sweeping us into the harbour and the finish line off Westhaven that we just drifted across to the pleasing sound of a gun for the first boat to finish in Div 3

To Expedition and Nick White

Thank you so much for being such a great sponsor of our project. We would not have won the last leg of the RNI 2011 without you !  We have always been very proud to be associated with the best Navigation and Yacht racing software in the World.