Beowulf is ready to head to sea. Our heavy staysail is bent on (just in case) and the big reacher is furled off the bowsprit. The weather faxes between here and the East Coast look very good. Light to moderate reaching breezes right now, with the prospect of a southwesterly compression gale (i.e. a nice broad reach) as we approach the coast.

Of course it is spring, and the weather tends to change rapidly. The movement of highs and lows we’ve been watching for the past week does not have a lot of consistent pattern to it – as it should later in the year.

We will be leaving Tuesday afternoon – so let’s hope the pattern stays as expected.

Our course will be direct towards Norfolk, VA – but if conditions dictate we’ll stop in Bermuda for a few days until we get a clear shot at the coast weather-wise.

We will be testing some new gear for this passage. Item One is a Globalstar satellite phone. We’ve been using it for voice and data for the past couple of weeks. It is a big improvement over the Iridium phone we used last year. You can hear the other folks better, and we’ve only had a couple of dropped calls. Cost from the Caribbean runs around one dollar per minute – about half of other systems from down here.

The Globalstar phone can be used to connect to the internet and/or for e-mail. We’ve checked out a couple of weather sites and the download speed seems about the same as our dial-up modem at home (which is slow for a land-based system). Still, at 9600 baud it is impressive performance. What is really cool is that we are able to download GRIB files – with three days of weather data at six hourly intervals, in two minutes. On Sat C it would cost $50.00 to $75.00 for what is a $2.00 call on Globalstar.

Which brings us to the other piece of gear we’ll be testing on this passage. For many years now the top racers in the world have used MaxSea routing software in conjunction with GRIB weather files, to help decide on the fastest course between two points. You load a performance polar for your boat into the software, and then it does a series of calculations based on the projected wind speed and direction, and how fast you sail at various angles and wind strengths, to determine the fastest course.

Twenty of 22 of the last Vendee Globe competitors, and all of the cats in “The Race” used this software – and it has been the choice of the majority of the contestants in long distance races for more than a decade. We aim to see how it works for cruisers! We’ve been working with the MaxSea team for some time to create an ultimate cruising navigation system, and this will be our first chance to test the end result in the real world – very exciting.

We’ve created three polars for Beowulf: one which is a straight sailing polar; a second which includes some motorsailing in light airs and when the wind is on the nose; and a third which uses the engine aggressively (which we’ll do as we near the coast and cross the Gulf Stream). It is easy to switch between the various polars to see how the computer thinks things should go.

Stay tuned and we’ll update you daily on how things turn out…