If one want to sail from Minerva Reef to NZ one needs to ride on the back of a high pressure area.

The center of the high has to be ESE of the northern part of the North Island of NZ (roughly at 37 degS 180 deg) at the beginning and then it needs to move E slowly enough. The high pressure areas must extend N to approx Tongatapu.

One starts from the Minerva Reef with the wind still coming from ESE, which gives an AWA of about 60 – 80 deg PRT. After a day to two, the wind must slowly turn to E. On day 3 – 4 The wind should slowly veer to N. For the last day to two ideally it stays like this. Should it veer towards W, a gybe will be needed to run the last miles towards NZ.

Currently the high develops at around 40degS, 148degW, this S of Melbourne.

Departing on Saturday could lead to southerly winds on Sunday evening. Thus, this needs to looked at with tomorrow’s weather forecast.

I am a bit lucky because Vili, a Croation sailing friend, living in Switzerland, shares daily with me his consideration based on data he can get in the internet.

I used until recently mainly PredictWind and their data from the ECMWF weather model (on and off shore) and SPIRE weather model for offshore. Now I’m using ECMWF and GFS and receive these data from saildocs via my Iridium mail in form of highly compressed GRIB files for the area of my interest. I’m viewing the data with the XyGrib-reader, which is s part of the Linux Mint application depository. This gives an good overview and I can easily zoom in for details. I also can add information on where I am, and where I expect to be after 1, 2, 3,…. days of sailing.

Please keep fingers crossed that we get a nice weather window for the last leg to NZ.