Too good to be true?

Day 15 : Ascension Island to Azores

Friday, April 1st 2022

We passed a major milestone on Day 15 – according to our chart plotter, we’d arrived at the halfway mark, having covered 1,700 miles, and with 1,700 still to go on our charted course.

I use those words advisedly, because that would make the total journey around 3,400 nautical miles, when the reality is that it could be much further than that if we end up having to make lots of tacks later in the passage.

Having said that, though, it has been looking more and more likely that all that tacking might not be required. With hindsight, our gamble to take a more easterly route through the ITCZ appears to be paying off, and we’ve been able to hold the course I’d wanted to on the first half of our long beat.

Even better, the forecasted weather between here and the Azores has also been suggesting that we might have very favourable weather for the latter half of the passage.

As recently as 2 days ago, PredictWInd was suggesting that the remainder of the journey would look like this:

• 4 days more upwind sailing on our current course until our “Cape Verde Decision Mark”, at which point it was suggesting we keep going
• A further 4 more days of beating (but no tacking required), until 6th April
• Around 6th April, the wind would swing more easterly, allowing us to move onto more of a beam reach, while heading straight for the Azores
• 2 days on a pleasant beam reach, before arriving at the Azores High
• 1-2 days motoring in the Azores High
• 4 days of medium to strong south westerlies, which would give us 25-30 knots from behind and a fast run in to the Azores

Based on that forecast, it was looking like we might arrive in the Azores around 13th April, some 28 days after we departed Ascension. Substantially faster than we might have hoped.

It looked too good to be true. And we think it was.

Those strong south westerlies in the final phase are being generated by a significant depression due to pass to the north of the Azores in the next 10 days. For them to work in our favour, our timing would need to be just right.

But 10 days is a LONG time in weather forecasting. And in passage making. So as our boat speed varies, so does the timing of when we’d arrive at the spot where we’d exit the Azores High and enter those favourable south westerlies. Since low pressure systems revolve, that means that arriving a day later or earlier than planned can mean substantially different wind directions. Plus of course, as each day passes, so that weather system’s track and intensity is being updated as it gets closer to the present time in the forecast.

When we awoke this morning and looked at the forecast, it looks like instead of that system giving us favourable southwesterlies, it might in fact give us very strong headwinds, so much so, that we’d be foolish to proceed into them.

Damn it!

That leaves us with a couple of options.

Option 1: try and slow down and let the headwinds pass, and head further to the NW in the meantime to get out of their way, in the hope that what comes after them may be more favourable, or

Option 2: Put a tack in when we reach our Cape Verde decision point and head towards Mindelo on the island of Sao Vicente in the northern Cape Verde Islands.

Option 1 is tricky, because that low pressure system is just one of a continuous string of them at this time of year. By May or June, they start to get further apart, and lessen in intensity, but in truth, one always has to try and pick your timing to arrive at the Azores in between them.

And so the only thing we know for certain at this stage is that after this depression, there will be another one. It’s timing and location, and thus impact on our passage, are as yet impossible to gauge, as the forecast doesn’t look that far ahead. So if we do proceed to the NW, it’s really on the basis that we just have to deal with whatever comes our way next.

Option 2 is a more attractive option in some ways for a couple of good reasons. On the one hand stopping at Mindelo would give us the whole range of benefits that I’ve mentioned in previous blog updates, including the ability to wait for an optimal weather window between those depressions.

But heading in that direction doesn’t necessarily commit us to stopping. It automatically adds a further 2 days to the passage, but once we get close to Mindelo, those 2 days may have been sufficient for us to see what’s coming in the forecast after the current depression, and we may well have a window right there, allowing us to proceed without stopping at all.

Plus, by heading those further 250 miles to the east, it makes the immediate 500 miles after the Cape Verdes that much easier, as we’d still be in the NE trades, but now have a more favourable wind angle.

Of course, it will be very difficult, if we’re passing within a few miles of a marina with calm waters, and the ability to refuel and reprovision, to just sail on by.

On the other hand, the optimistic version of the forecast that we’ve been looking at for the last few days had brought the Azores tantalisingly almost within our grasp, and with our passage making mojo well and truly established, it would also be a difficult decision to break our momentum and stop if a good weather window does exist. After all, who knows how much longer we would have to wait for the next good one?

The good news is we don’t have to commit to a decision just yet. It will take us another 48 hours to reach the point where we have to choose one path or the other, by which time of course, we’ll have a further 2 days of visibility in the weather forecast.

But in the meantime, this all just serves to reinforce something we all know to be the case. When things seem just too good to be true, they almost always are.

Day 15 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 14 days, 21 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 110 nm
Average Speed in last 24 hours: 4.6 knots

Official Length of intended Route when we set out: 3,480 nm
Current Projected Distance to Go according to chart plotter: 1,634 nm
Distance Sailed so Far: 1,768 nm
Total Projected Distance of Route: (1,768 + 1,634) 3,402 nm
Change in total projected distance in last 24 hours: +5 miles.

Miles to go to our big decision: 225