400 miles covered in a 24 hour period earlier today as Musandam passed the south coast of Tasmania, now in the Tasman Sea heading east directly towards the South Island of New Zealand. Currently trying to keep ahead of the high pressure system moving in from the west that will start to slow their progress north by Monday. However, in a call to Oman Sail HQ this morning Charlie reported that they were on course and expect to be nearing the Cook Strait on Tuesday (3rd January). Onboard today it was still ‘sunny and downwind’ with sea temperatures at just over 10 degrees and a comfortable 14 degrees down below.
Update from onboard today
“Just been spending some time at the chart table, and once again with our electronic charting software. We have the 80 day pace boat plotted and now for sure we are 3 days ahead of schedule, in 3 days time the 80 day pace boat will pass the point where we are now. This is good news, this is important to us onboard as we are here to set a great new record time for the course Muscat to Muscat, which others in the future will try to beat – we want to set them a stern challenge. We have had had lovely conditions for sailing, but they haven’t necessarily been the fastest conditions possible. Certainly the Doldrums could have been kinder, perhaps by one whole day and it’s possible to imagine perhaps another 24 hours to be gained else where, where we have been sailing quite deep downwind these last few days. Not to take anything away from our progress, our three day lead is reward for the constant round of sail changes, sail trim adjustment, and course alterations that ensure we are sailing at optimal speed for the conditions we have. In the last 24 hours we have been through the gennaker, genoa to the solent headsails, then back through the Genoa and Gennaker as the wind has increased and decreased and altered it’s direction and we have wormed our way firstly just north of east, and now north east.
In a few hours the wind will be ‘left’ enough (that is somewhere near south west it was north for a while 14 hours ago and has been shifting slowly towards the south west) for us to gybe and sail on starboard heading roughly in the right direction for the Cook Strait. We may end up sailing more east in fact and approaching New Zealand’s south island somewhere 320 nautical miles south west of Cape Farewell (the northern point of New Zealand’s south island), which should give us more wind than a direct route.
We are likely to hit some slower conditions on Monday as we approach New Zealand and the pace boat will have it’s chance to catch up, we hope to make some more ground away from it as we head across the Pacific and South Atlantic, we need to as the pace boats progress north towards Muscat after we round South Africa will be relentless and we will once again have to deal with the fickle winds that circulate the middle of the earth (the Doldrums) so whatever our lead will be after the Southern Ocean part of this trip we can expect it to diminish on the last quarter of the trip.
We have until 0000 hours tomorrow to submit our onboard bets as to what time we will be crossing the half way point of this trip. It’s kinda hard to put an exact figure on where the real half way point is as we don’t know exactly how many miles we will have sailed until we finish so we can’t divide that by two. So we have used the pace boats distance to finish, when that is half her overall that is what we will call half way. So when the pace boat has 10833 nautical miles to finish – that is our half way point.
For now though we are just concentrating of getting in and out of New Zealand, and into the Pacific!”