LinoCat

What are the options for tactics ? What are tools that can be used?Of course all start at the same time and place and have to reach the same place. So you can only vary the course, equipment and crew. Crew is fixed on most boats since the owners and some other people are sailing on them. This is different in the racing division. Equipment starts of course with the boat choice and since we all are in the cruising division we do not want to race in the first place but things like a spinnaker, a folding prop, new antifouling paint will influence your speed and so does the load of the boat. But often this is also already given. A folding or feathering prop will give you maybe 0,5 knots. But that is 12 miles per day which is 120 miles in 10 days. That means over almost 3 weeks arriving 1 or 2 days earlier! Routing and weather is one of the biggest things to consider. Some people directly target for St. Lucia while we for example went pretty much in direction of Cape Verde islands. But where...

it looks like we will have a nice sail in the beginning. Later it depends a lot what the coldfront in the mid atlantic will do. This is how the map looks today:

We have to think about Wind, temperature, waves and currents. So we need different information sources. The easiest is the internet where you can find maps like this to the left. There are current maps and predicted ones for up to 72hours and some even up to 90 hours. We also download GRIB data, which is then used to calculate wind strength and direction in 3 hour steps. The Software for this is free at www.grib.usw so you can play around with it. Seastate and winds should be OK and so we might leave if the work on the trampoline is finished today.