Ocean Tactics Weather Routing
Me:
April 13 status
4°51.949’N 108°18.477’W
TWS 17
TWD 032
Sea state choppy, 4-6 feet, pretty steep (but we’re on the tail end of a squall)
cloudy, no squalls overnight, but just dodged a few - they’re going SE now instead of NW….
We had a lot of lightning last night, but never closer than 20 miles
boat speed 6.5 - 7.5 now - thanks to the squall!!
COG 242
TWA 150
AWA 129
Sea was very calm this morning and we motored for about 8 hours. Raised sails as squall came up and are riding the wind for now!
OT:
Ok ran the numbers anyway, routing as per yesterday …
Routing - Next AP- 3N 110W then 4S 112W
Lightning at sea is terrifying. And last night, we were surrounded by it. One lightning strike could fry all our electronics and leave us with no navigation, all the way up to blowing up the boat and killing us. We do everything we can to avoid storms and squalls that have lightning. It’s scary at night, because you can’t see anything and can’t visually see storms approaching you.
We rely on a combination of vision and hearing (the good old-fashioned “count the seconds after the flash until you hear thunder” trick. Each 5 seconds = 1 mile away.
Meghan and I spent hours at the helm together tracking lightning and trying to steer around it. PredictWind also gives us locations and times of lightning strikes, presumably detected by satellites.
See the lightning map photo below. The white dot is Some Tuesday. The bolt icons are lightning strikes less than 1 hour old. That photo is terrifying.
Poor Meghan really struggles with the lightning. The fear is totally rational and sensible and I feel bad for her. The best we can do is manage our risk by doing our best to steer clear! On this particular night, it never was closer than 20 miles, but tomorrow night we will get a strike within 1 mile of the boat. Wow.