Day 17: Ascension Island to Azores

Sun Apr 03 2022

Do we stick, or do we twist?

For the last few days, we’ve known that Sunday morning (ie right now, as I write this blog) was the key moment to decide whether to sail on direct for Azores, or duck for cover at Mindelo in the Cape Verde Islands.

As I write this, the safe haven of Mindelo Marina, on the island of Sao Vicente is due East of us, some 280 miles away.

With each passing moment, we are sailing further away from it, and slowly inexorably, towards the Azores.

There’s just one small problem. We’re also sailing towards some pretty tricky weather.

According to PredictWind, we should take around 12 days from here to the Azores. And while we can only see 10 days ahead in the forecast, what we can already see is that the series of depressions making their way eastwards across the Atlantic near the Azores latitude are creating all sorts of gnarly weather ahead for us, starting in about 5 or 6 days time.

The two main models we look at (ECMWF and GFS) are broadly aligned – we WILL encounter one of the systems. But they’re just sufficiently different in the system location and intensity as to suggest quite wildly different routes to minimise the worst of the conditions. At their most divergent, GFS has us sailing some 600 miles further east than ECMWF.

Neither forecast suggests that we’d be in any significant danger – we’re not talking about hurricanes, or anything like that. But they are both suggesting that if we don’t take avoiding action, we’d have up to 30 -35 knots on the nose for a day or two, and waves of 4-5 metres. These are pretty uncomfortable conditions, that we would not ordinarily choose to sail in to, if we had the option to avoid it.

Which we do.

Both forecasts are suggesting some avoiding action, which will reduce the worst of the wind we experience to high 20’s. We can’t escape the waves though, we’ll definitely have high 3’s and quite possibly high 4s.

The ECMWF forecast (which has been far more accurate than GFS in the Atlantic so far) suggests a route through that would minimise the nastiness to less than a day, after which it would be still a little rough, but quickly diminishing to just boisterous. The GFS suggests we’d be in the crappy stuff for 2-3 days (wind) and 5 or 6 days (waves).

What comes after the nastiness is still open to debate – by the time we’re getting to the end of it, the forecast runs out, at which point we still have a further 300 miles to go to the Azores. It’s likely from what we can see that we’d then have moderate to strong winds from behind, which would be perfect for a fast run to our destination. But there’s also a small chance that we could end up In yet more foul weather. We just don’t know at this stage.

Based on what I’ve written so far, it seems like it would be an easy decision to divert to Mindelo in the Cape Verdes.

The problem is that these sequences of depressions are relentless at this time of year. And with a likely duration of 12 days sailing from Mindelo to Azores, we’re essentially going to have just the same level of ambiguity as we sit in Mindelo waiting for a weather window – we’ll always be able to see 10 days ahead, but not 12. And if we’re trying to give ourselves a day or two’s notice before departing, then in effect we can really only see 8 or 9 days ahead of the 12-day passage.

It’s inevitable that during those 8 or 9 days, there will be storm systems passing through. So if we do divert, it’s clear that we’ll be facing exactly the same dilemma as we prepare to resume the journey.

Aren’t we better to save the time and money involved in stopping, and deal with the devil we know? We have trust in our boat and ourselves. We have a window which looks like it might not be TOO bad (more unpleasant than dangerous), and a route through it that the hitherto more accurate forecast is suggesting might actually be as good a window as we might realistically expect to get.

Another option is to defer our decision and keep sailing on towards the Azores for a further 24 hours. That will lessen the ambiguity of what lies ahead- not completely, but perhaps enough to give us a sense of whether the good conditions ahead of the nastiness are real or not . And also whether the nasty stuff looks like it might actually get worse (after all ,we are talking about the outer reaches of a 10 days forecast here, so the only thing we know for sure is that conditions WILL be somewhat different from what its suggesting. But the key question we can get insight into in the next 24 hours is “How is it trending”?.

If we do defer, by this time tomorrow we’ll be 120 miles further away from Mindelo, so the sail back there will take 3.5 days, instead of 2.5 days if we were to head there now.

Plus another day will have elapsed of course, so we’ll be arriving in Mindelo some 2 days later than if we were to head there now.

On the plus side, the further we sail on now, the more favourable the wind angle is if we DO decide to turn and head back to Mindelo.

Yup, sometimes the best decision is to make no decision at all.

Day 17 Statistics:

Time on passage so far: 16 days, 21 hours
Distance covered in last 24 hours: 111 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: 1,408 nm
Distance Sailed so Far: 1,984 nm
Total Projected Distance of Route: (1,984 + 1,408) 3,392 nm
Change in total projected distance in last 24 hours: -22 miles.

Number of times over the last 48 hours I’ve found myself thinking how grateful I am that we have such awesome forecasting and routing software at our disposal, rather than just sailing blindly into whatever lies ahead – 53

Number of times over the last 48 hours where I’ve also thought “All this agonising is silly – life was surely better when you just sailed on, and dealt with whatever conditions you were faced with: Precisely 0.

( I don’t buy into all this revisionist nonsense about the good ol’ days. Yes, we may sometimes have a little analysis paralysis. But that’s still infinitely superior to sailing in 80 knots of wind and 8 metre seas and just dealing with it because you found yourself there. Technology and more information wins every time, in my book.