We started tracking a weather window about 4-5 days before our planned ready date of March 1. We had previously learned that you could request a “moving spot” forecast from saildocs. In your request you give a point GPS location, a heading, a speed, and your desired time increment and you get a text file that gives you the forecast along that path. We wanted to compare different departure days, but there was nowhere in the request to give it a day/time to start the forecast. It always started it at the time the request was received. We emailed saildocs, and their response was no, that feature isn’t available, but that’s a good idea. So, basically what we did was move the start location back 24 hours in order to get a forecast for what it would look like if we left a day later. A little clunky, but it worked. Then Tim wrote an excel program that took into account the polars for Exodus, and we were able to compare 3 different departure days by comparing how many miles we would cover in the first 5 days. Once I put the final touches on the program, it was a breeze to use every morning as we got new forecasts and tried to determine the best day to leave.
There was what seemed to be a good window to leave right around 1 March, but since we had only just started tracking it, we weren’t sure if it was really good in a relative sense or not. Plus, we weren’t really thinking we’d leave on 1 March even though that was our ready date. We were thinking March 2 or 3 was more realistic. It was not to be, though, because the weather window closed and there was basically no wind for about a week and change. Lady Carolina wasn’t able to leave yet anyway, since they were waiting for new glasses that they ordered for Kyle at Costco. We kept tracking the weather and it started looking like the next window would open up around March 9-11, which was great because that’s about when Kyle’s glasses were supposed to be ready. We never really confronted the decision that we might have to make of whether to wait for Lady Carolina or leave as soon as the weather looked good. The weather gods took that ominous decision out of our hands and made it so both things coincided, and we could all leave together at the first weather window.
So, as it got close, we started discussing our plans with other cruisers. Winds looked decent for a 10 March departure. We wouldn’t break any speed records, but we were ready to go, and we would at least move along, so we were going to go for it. As it turns out, Mike from PV Sailing/North sails on Channel 6-8, who is also the weather guy for the VHF net hadn’t yet declared a weather window for the puddle jump and he was saying it wouldn’t open for another 2 weeks. Screw that. We were ready, and our own observations led us to believe we would be just fine. However, it seems there were very few other people willing to go out on their own limb like that, and pretty much everyone we talked to said something like, “well, there’s no wind so we are going to wait.” I get that people might not be ready yet, but if you are really and truly ready, there was plenty of wind. At least that’s how I saw it. I can’t tell you how sick I got of hearing how there was no wind. One of our friends even told me how they were on another boat and some blowhard was going on and on about how the boats who were getting ready to leave are nuts to leave when there’s no wind. No wind? I just didn’t get it. You can really only look out with any sort of certainty for 5 days, and the forecast we were looking at told us we could make 500-600 miles in those first 5 days. Good enough for us.
Anyway, wind or not, our little clan of Exodus, Lady Carolina, True Blue V, and Chara were ready to go, and we left.
Spoiler alert: Our winds were fine. We made 583 miles in the first 5 days, and the entire trip in just over 22 days. Better than many who left when the weather was “good” and much, much better than some.
Gresham Family Exodus 