Every passage has a final night at sea and for this leg of our trip tonight is it. Rather unusual for us is we are attempting to sail slowly, as we much prefer to enter a strange and new harbor during daylight. When planning a passage we always take into account what our likely arrival time will be in order to depart early or late enough to pretty much assure us of a daytime arrival. There were a few reasons for this one being a bit more difficult to calculate. The easy one is Columbia lies in a different time zone than we have been, i.e. we were on Atlantic Standard Time and Columbia is on Eastern Standard Time. Yesterday I found it a bit strange that sunrise did not happen until a little after 0700 (by my watch) Today it will be at 0617 now that all the clocks and systems have been adjusted. We could have departed a couple of hours later with no problems. The second issue that made the planning unusual for this passage is that I am trying a new weather routing program, which has some similarities to a Chinese restaurant menu, way too many choices. The weather program I have been using (and will continue)is operated by OCENS and they provide an incredible array of traditional weather products that are static views of what weather feature you choose, for what area and time period. Generally they way I have used that is to find suitible weather along a route I have determined. The program I am trying out uses four well known weather models and, based on input about your preferences and boat performance it provides four detailed routes to choose from. Since they are also forecasts, it is not as simple as saying I will pick route x and follow it. The idea is to find a time when all the models are in reasonably close agreement then build your own route from that. The neat thing is that every 12 hours I can get an email with an updated forecast based on where I am at then, so as weather changes you can get up to date information on how to change your route or what conditions to expect. The OCENS program will do the same type of thing except I have to do all the work of comparing original forecasts to newer ones etc. Anyway, for this passage I am trying it out and so far I like it a lot. It will take more use to become totally comfortable so we shall see. Incidentally, the bottom right hand side of the blog page has a link to the Predict Wind tracking program. It was working whe n we left, but I need internet access to see if it has been working throughout the trip. Finally, I was off watch catching some zzs when Charlene woke me to let me know we had a new tear in out mainsail. Fortunately it was low on the sail so I could reef the sail sufficiently to protect it from further damage. The really bad news is that is number 3 in less than 6 months suggesting a new mainsail is in order really soon. More later...