Africa Slips To Stern

Africa was intellectually and culturally cool, and our little appetizer amuse bouche taste of it was plenty for now. The next course of Africa will be served up on the round the world trip on the leg to South Africa.

But now it's time to return to the Caribbean. After 5 months in the Med, Northern Ireland, Istanbul, and Morocco. At 12:30, we leave for the 2+ week voyage across the Atlantic to St. Lucia.

You can follow our trek track on the app called YB Tracker. Just download the app, click on ARC Rally For Cruisers, then choose the ARC plus option and look for Amari.

Tactical Briefing

For this passage the wind is the issue, but in a different strategic way: wind shadow, and doldrums. This first screenshot shows the windshadow behind the islands, which extends for miles down to the Southwest. If we turn across it, we will have zero wind and either have to bob about forever or motor across.

Our solution is to start South-Southwest through this afternoon and the night, and put the rising sun behind us by heading west at dawn.

The greatest risk in this trip will happen (in theory) during the first 48 to 72 hours. Notice too that the winds are fairly brisk, but the waves will not be coming with the winds in the South westerly direction. They will be coming at us 90 degrees, from a South easterly direction — dead abeam.

This means we can expect sloppy seas, and lots of rolling in completely dramamine-worthy conditions!

In this next pic, on the right hand side is a little blue circle — that’s us. On the lower left hand side is South America with the Caribbean chain above it — that’s our target.

Between here and there is a large wind dead zone coming for the central part of the Atlantic. We have to get well south of this, or we run into that bobbing/motoring problem again.

So the strategy is to hedge south and watch the weather files each day (we download “grib files” morning and evening). We will scrutinize the development of this dead zone to judge how far south to sail on the fly.

Otherwise the winds look light, astern, and constant. We will fly wing-on-wing for most of this trip, dosing up with anti-nausia meds early to stop any sea sickness before it starts.

See you in St. Lucia!!