A Little Paranoia is a Good Thing

On this leg from Bermuda to Antigua we got reminded that a little paranoia is a Good Thing.

We set out from Bermuda for the 940 mile trip to Antigua with three good pieces of weather advice: 1) the excellent four day forecast from Bermuda Weather, 2) a trip plan from Commanders Weather and 3) Advice from the marvelous Canadian Weather Sage, Herb, of Southbound II.

We also left with the expectation (Gee, it’s in all the brochures, isn’t it?) that we would quickly get into the Easterly Trades and bowl on down reading our novels and never touching a sheet for days at a time.

All three professional forecasts said that we would pick up the Easterlies at about 29 or 30 North, and we did on Tuesday, two days out.

It was just like in the brochures.

Our forecasts generally covered four days and were right on. For four days. The plan had been to give Herb a call each day at 2000 to update, but propagation was terrible and we didn’t get through.

Four days out the barometer started to fall modestly (to 1011 millibar’s from 1019 the day before and the wind picked up from the SSE.

That evening we had a Southerly gale, Beaufort 8. The boat and crew handled it fine, but we should have anticipated it better. We would not have done much different, though it would have made sense to have run East a bit more when we had an easterly to moderate the impact. I should have, when unable to contact Herb, spent more time with the difficult-to-understand USCG SSB weather reports, called Commanders Weather on the Sat phone, and gotten the weather fax working in Bermuda. All three. We’re still learning.

Now we are a day out of Antigua, bowling along in a nice 15 knot Westerly, reading our novels and improving our tans. God and Herb know where the Easterly trades are.