Ready for sea

This morning we requested outward clearance on Monday morning. There’s a weather window forming from Monday afternoon until Wednesday morning so we plan to depart for Inagua in the Bahamas on Tuesday at first light. This trip is tricky to plan as we start with full exposure to Caribbean Sea conditions but as we move north-east we will get more and more protection from Haiti. That protection will lead to very light conditions. Computer models show a little more wind along the Cuban coast, but that is right along Guantanamo Bay which is not only a restricted area, it’s also a place where we want to stay well clear from :-o

We hope to see light conditions for the first 3-4 hours where we have to go straight east (against wind, seas and current) to get around the east point of Jamaica, before we can assume a north-east course for the rest of the day. The next 24 hours will be light conditions but wind direction is a gamble as all four computer models we use disagree with each other. We’ll see.

When we go through the Windward Passage, we enter the Atlantic Ocean with very different weather patterns. The last time we sailed near Inagua, Bahamas was in 2003 when we were tacking upwind from Mayaguana Bahamas to Sapodilla Bay in the Turks & Caicos islands. We will have spent 16 years in the Caribbean.

This passage we’re gonna use our Macbook Pro with the newest release of OpenCPN which is free chart plotter software. I have managed to create a wireless link between the Mac and our NMEA instrument network and a short test showed working two-way communication so it can control the autopilot. This frees up the iPad’s to do any ad-hoc jobs. The charts we have for OpenCPN are old but still good enough for the job and we have new charts on our iPads as well as a new set of paper Explorer Charts. When this works good, we plan to replace our Furuno radar/chart plotter with a Mac Mini and display monitor, using a B&G 4G radar dome which is fully supported by OpenCPN.