I had to give up one of my most interesting thought island: Kiritimati.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
During the last day on our way to Kiritimati, we had not much wind and drifted with the current in the worst position possible. The forecast showed much better wind conditions for the last days. But, a forecast is a look into the future without any guarantee.
\nWe saw no reasonable chance to go to the entrance of the pass. We would ha had a fight for more than 24 h, most likely even more than 48 h. This against 15 – 20+ KN of wind blowing directly from where we needed to go and in waves being up to 3 m high. Additionally there is a current of 2 – 4 KN almost in the same direction the wind blows into.<\/p>\n
We tried with only the engines on the shortest route and we made only 0.5 – 1.5 KN VMG (Velocity Made Good, the velocity MaRe made good over ground towards our destination WPT.<\/p>\n
We also tried to use sail and engines. This brought us a bit more. About 1 – 2 KN VMG. Still we had to make 30 NM to the entrance of the pass, which would have taken us roughly 15 – 20 h. But if you can’t go through the pass due to such wind conditions it does not make sense to go to the entrance in the first instance. A boat cannot just be parked like a car in front of something.<\/p>\n
Heaving to was, in this case, not an option. The current would have pushed us at 2 KN of current (minimum current value) 48 NM roughly towards NW per 24 h. On top of the current drift, there is MaRe’s drift speed when heaving to. This is about 1.5 KN. In 24 h this would have been plus 36 NM. In total we would have been moved away from our destination at minimum (48 + 36) NM\/24h = 84 NM\/24h in minimum. (As the angle between the current and wind was not too big, a non vertical addition is possible.)<\/p>\n
Additionally, I could not be sure if the pass is free of bommies and if we find a sufficiently big sandy spot to trop the anchor. Even if we would have made it to the entrance, wind and sky conditions were not suitable to go into such a water where visible navigation by looking at the sea bottom is mandatory.<\/p>\n
The weather forecast for the next 4 days showed no substantial improvements; I use only ECMWF and SPIRE weather models as they are the best. Looking further into the future is equivalent to reading the crystal ball.<\/p>\n
At a certain point, Shigeo made a comment about going directly to Samoa. Also I have a never give up attitude, I didn’t see any chance anymore. It was then, that I remembered Shigeo’s words and asked him if he is serious about it. He was and the decision was made to sail directly from outside of Kirimati to American Samoa, which was our next destination after Kiritimati.<\/p>\n
Sometimes it’s better to give up something when it can’t be achieved at reasonable effort. Here it was an effort and chance driven decision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had to give up one of my most interesting thought island: Kiritimati. Why? During the last day on our way to Kiritimati, we had not much wind and drifted with the current in the worst position possible. The forecast showed much better wind conditions for the last days. But, a forecast is a look […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}