Searching for Wind
03 February 2011 | Northeast of the Abacos
Jeff
After great sailing conditions yesterday and last night the wind has deserted us, leaving us motoring to continue to move east. There is some promise of wind tomorrow but it may not be much, we shall see. The wind left us early this morning, but we continued to try to sail until around noon. But when the wind didn't come up as it did yesterday we decided to start the engine and have been powering since noon. Not long after we began powering we spotted a car carrier ship to the north of us. So we brought up the iPad to access any AIS (Automatic Identification System) information that might be available on the ship. The AIS information told us that the ship was called European Highway and gave us its course, speed and closest point of approach. With that information we knew that we did not have a potential collision possibility as long as we both maintained our course and speed. I called the ship over the VHF radio to make that he saw us and that he planned to maintain his current course and speed. The confirmed that and passed well off our bow. Last night the AIS gave us information on other shipping in our area. Thus far we are very happy with our purchase and if it continues to work this well it will make our passages more safe. I'm now going to run our routing program against a Grib weather information file that I hope to download via the SSB radio. Hopefully the Grib file will give us a clue to where the wind is. Wish us luck.