Bob Mcdavitt - Weather Guru
16 June 2016 | Near Hawaii
Colin
Bangorang is now within 150 miles of "The Big Island" of Hawaii and about 350 miles from our destination in Honolulu. Since tearing our mainsail from luff to leach 3days ago, we have been sailing well under jib alone at about 6-7 kts with 20-25 kts of ENE wind. Unfortunately, there is also a very confused 3m sea running, which is really tossing our little ship about. This makes a lot of noise below and sleeping is difficult. Nevertheless, we're grateful for the favorable breeze allowing us to continue sailing, despite the useless mainsail.
Regarding the weather, I'd like to give Bob Mcdavitt a big shout out. Bob is a long time New Zealand meterologist who in his retirement offers voyage planning and weather routing advice to sailors. We first consulted Bob a couple years ago for a passage from Fiji to New Zealand, about a 1000 miles which is often considered quite difficult because of the constantly changing weather patterns. Although the passage was not without challenges: a 30 kt squash zone, cold front and 5m seas, each weather feature was called out in advance and delivered exactly as promised by Bob either in the original voyage plan or as email updates along the way. This went a long way towards our peace of mind and the safety of our passage. We have since used Bob's advice for 2 more passages between NZ and the tropics and most recently, Bob has helped with two very significant 2600 mile passages from NZ to Tahiti and then Tahiti to Hawaii. On long passages like these you can't always get the weather you want, but with Bob's advice we had no real surprises and made safe and timely passages. However, asa point of caution, I'd remind skippers that ultimately we are responsible for the safety of ship and crew and the decision to sail lies firmly with us. Still it doesn't hurt to have a littleexpert advice along the way.