1000 hours. We’ve just completed our first day’s run – 265 miles run in past 24 hours – in 11 to 14 knots of ESE wind. BEOWULF has been carrying her two roller furling code zeroes, and her crew are trying to get their sea-legs after five months on land. The sailing has been great, and entertainment not bad either! Along with the DVDs (which we just wrote about in a Tech Talk article) we’ve got a lovely moon to guide us along at night, balmy temperatures, several groups of porpoise, and the prospect of a bit more pressure wind-wise tomorrow. We should be doing more of this.

The weather situation is not as promising as a couple of weeks ago. We downloaded another batch of weather files for both AVN and Oceanic Experimental models. They both pretty much still agree with the NOAA forecast, which shows a good breeze for the next couple of days, and then the wind going fluky to potentially on the nose (yuck!). That’s what we get for waiting until this late in the year to go.

Both routings we’ve done with MaxSea have us working towards the coast. The routing does not know about the countercurrent which runs in a easterly direction – and it has us smack in the middle of that flow. If there are NW winds, these will accelerate the current flow. To get out of the current you have to sail along the beach – something we are not going to do given the current state of security along the Venezuelan and Colombian coasts. Still, when we study the suggested routing, considering both projected winds and adverse current, it probably makes sense. We don’t have to make a final decision for another 36 hours, so we’ll wait and see how the weather develops.

The weather of the West Coast of Central America and even up into Mexico is looking a little unsettled for this time of year. Four separate low pressure systems. Only one, to the west of Panama, has actually closed its circulation and started to spin. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this pattern over the next weeks.