Fifth day out- We’ve found the wind, I think..

It was a moderately windy day from the north at about 10-12 kts however it dropped to 6-8 kts overnight but we kept on sailing, because that’s what we do!

By noon we had to drop the kite and went to the Genoa as the wind got up to 15 kts!

So now that we have the wind, and the big question is what to do with it. We’ve been using the Predict Wind Offshore App to download and view grib files as well as getting updated weather routing info. However, it is amazing how different the various forecasts (and thus routes) Predict Wind puts out.

Predict Wind says that if the various models are relatively consistent then it is a good bet that the forecast information will be correct. We are currently getting different forecasts between the pwc and pwg files. On top of this we have to make the decision whether to keep heading SW away from Hawaii and thus stay in steadier winds vs taking the rhumb line route and keeping the distances as short as possible.

Well as of today I’ve decided to split the difference. Mainly because we dropped a little south over night with the kite up but we had  good pressure today with the Genoa to keep moving with an apparent wind angle at about 70 degrees (which this boat just loves).

We will continue to look at the weather routing and update our decisions accordingly, however it does feel good to be chomping off the miles directly to our waypoint for the time being after playing cat and mouse with the wind for the last couple of days.

Position update at 1200 local time March 28, 2016:
18 03.204 N
115 55.820W
132 nautical mile noon to noon run
2352 nautical miles to destination
7.6 Kt. SOG
291 COG