How to avoid breaking one's hovel.......
I don't like to play Monday morning quarterback and certainly don't want to criticize the skipper and crew of "Broken Hovel" without knowing the full story. However, there are some important weather forecasting and navigation issues at stake here and maybe it would be useful to take a closer look at this particular situation. Not knowing "Broken Hovel's" departure port, but assuming that their trip started somewhere along the Oregon coast only 1-2 days before they ran into these problems, it is clear that they must have missed the normally highly reliable forecasts of these severe lows (that come spinning down from somewhere around the arctic circle and may even tend to penetrate a little further and faster into the Variables in an El Nino year winter season with relatively weak Pacific Highs). The attached image compares the COAMP(combined ocean/atmoshphere mesoscale prediction) model-predicted pressures and wind velocities 48 hours before midnight last evening (top half) versus the current, validated prediction (bottom half). As one can see, there was not any doubt early Thursday morning that a BIG BAD STORM was going to roll in. In fact, I find the similarity between the two images very impressive indeed. With this kind of a publicly accessible forecast, they should not have left. Although I don't have access to the NOAA-NWS SSB weatherfax predictions from several days ago, there is little doubt in my mind that the 48- and 96-hr surface analysis maps would have shown a similar grim picture. So, even if they left home several days earlier and could have missed the type of forecast data shown in the attached image they still should have been able to consult their weatherfaxes. For those who may not be familiar with these types of long-range weather models, I have attached a link to the FNMOC (Navy Meteorological Operations Center) website where one can run the large-scale (1 degree resolution) NOGAPS and GFS (a combination of the former MRF and AVN) models for any area in the world up to 144 hours ahead and the middle scale (27 km resolution) COAMP model for the East Pacific (plus a few other important areas) up to 48 hours ahead. When "Rivendel II" needed to find one of the rare time windows in the fierce Tradewinds along the Barrier Reef in June 2000 (a strong La Nina year!)I finally was able to locate a 4-5 day window that all models agreed upon and we made a successful escape from that lee shore for the 2-week passage to Vanuatu. The first attempt had been less successful, however, as the window closed too fast and we had to return to the last Queensland port accessible to us (i.e. Cairns) after bucking the 30-35 knot Trades and Barrier Reef seas for 4 nighte and 450 NM (as my good friend and sailing buddy George Kornreich on this board can confirm from first-hand experience). One more little detail: The GIF originals of each of the two color charts sections in the image are only 12 kilobytes. This means that you can have a friend or family member at home prepare, cut and e-mail this type of image to you at sea if you happen to have e-mail on board. It is especially easy to do so if you are not limited to text-only (e.g. with Inmarsat C) but can send and receive little images (e.g. with Iridium or Mini-M Inmarsat phones). Have fun! Flying Dutchman PS: For persistent doubters of my "outside the cyclone season offshore passages between 23.5 N and S tend to be a walk in the park compared to coastal sailing at higher latitudes" credo: compare the coastal leg with an intertropical offshore passage to Hawaii in this situation!!
