Day 358, Year 5 Passage to Somewhere, Day 5
Date: Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Weather: Sunny Day with Few Clouds, Winds ESE, SE, SSE 10-15
Latitude: 23 05.411 S
Longitude: 038.40.040 E
Miles Traveled: 454
Miles to Go: 355 to Inhaca, Mozambique / 495 to Richards Bay, South Africa
We are making progress. We just don’t know where we are going! We now have two very different weather outlooks for this weekend when we should arrive in Richards Bay. The GRIBS, BUOY Weather, and Peri Peri Net all tell us that a cold front will send strong south winds to the Richards Bay area by Friday night and there’s no way we can get there by then. Graham on the South African Maritime Mobile Net tells us he sees no chance of southerly winds until late next Tuesday the 27th. We like that report, but we are leery since the BUOY reports have been so accurate to date. So we are muddling along for another 24 hours before we make a decision. By this time tomorrow we should know where we are headed. If it looks like the southerly winds are coming we will head to Inhaca on the Mozambique coast. We had thought we would go further north to Inhambane on the Mozambique coast, but after taking a careful look it just didn’t look like a tenable anchorage. If the southerlies have been diverted, then Richards Bay here we come!
We are no longer sailing upwind. Since yesterday morning we have had winds from the south and east, so no more beating. Right now the winds are behind us and starting tomorrow sometime the winds should start coming from the north and the east. We are getting a little bit of everything on this passage but so far the seas have been fairly calm, so that is good. They didn’t seem so calm when we were beating into the wind, but it could have been much worse. So on we go.
