October 7th
I sit in the cockpit, laptop on my lap. It is a perfect day, tight reaching at 8 kts in 15 knots of breeze, blue skies. If I look up I can just see the hazy silhouette of Raoul Island about 20 NM abeam, quite a high island.
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| Close up of Raoul Island Northern side - source http://www.flickr.com/photos/lancea/sets/ |
We have just downloaded the weather supplied by Sally via satphone, I have copied it onto my laptop so I can get an updated optimized course from Expedition. These practical exercises are good for me, I feel I am getting really comfortable with the program now. There is a lot of new stuff for me to learn here. Having Expedition adds a new dimension of appreciation of the weather, and navigation, complimenting and enhancing my traditional skills. It turbocharges learning of the overall (nav/weather/performance) situation to be able to see things like weather situations and outcomes through expedition in a way that would take years if ever to learn by traditional or intuitive experience alone.
I am really excited to be using it.
October 8th
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| Position of SV Dreamcathcher from http://www.sailblogs.com/member/sydreamcatcher/?show=map |
Motoring now, the predicted calm About 400NM to go, hoping to complete trip in overall time of about 9 days, which will make a good trip, again enhanced by Expedition optimized weather routing into a quite direct track that saved time. Traditionally we would have made more westing in the trades before faceing predominant SW closer to NZ, this has not been the case this trip.
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