The wind varies between 15 and 25 knots, and it is challenging to keep the boat moving without going crazy when the squalls hit. Fortunately they are not Florida-thunderstorm-60kt type squalls--but bad enough. The sat pic shows this persisting until about 10N (another 160 miles)--we won't be out of it until sometime tomorrow.
The satellite picture (a 3-4 minute download on the Iridium sat phone of a tiny B/W sat pic) shows we are under a band of clouds that looks like a trailing end of a front or trough. It doesn't show on any weather map we have, and the GRIB files say the wind today should be 15-17kt. Ha!
We're also watching a blob of weather down near the equator (02N 142W)--though we're still about 700 miles/5-6 days from the equator, we need to track the movements of the major bad areas to make sure we avoid where it's going to be.
Our friends on Infini, who left about 10 days ahead of us, just crossed the equator last night. They are motoring again in light winds, and seem to mostly be clear of the ITCZ.
Here's the sat pic we are able to download at sea, using the Iridium (its ~82K)
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/hnl/satellite/cp_1200_ir.gif
A much better one can be found here:
The upper right picture on this page is a pretty nice sat pic if you have reasonable internet.
-----
Sherry & Dave
Headed South for French Polynesia
At 5/4/2011 9:42 PM (utc) our position was 12°41.27'N 153°48.30'W
http://svsoggypaws.com/currentposition.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment