Goodbye land. Hello ocean.

Boat’s ready, crew’s ready. Time to go! I’m just about to untie the dock lines and say adios to continental soil for a very long time. The passage ahead fills me to the brim with excitement. It’s going to be an experience different from anything I’ve done before, and I’m looking forward to the challenge. It will be a test of determination, endurance, motivation, engineering, navigation, leadership and most of all, seamanship.

The first leg is 2,800 miles to the Marquesas Islands, which I expect will take between 23 and 28 days, depending on the weather. The first challenge is to get off the coast of Mexico into the NE trade winds. The weather can be quite calm for hundreds of miles out to sea, so the trick is to wait for a pulse of wind coming down from the north to carry us out into the stronger wind. Many boats are still waiting here, watching the weather forecasts for a significant signal to go, but a few are now starting to push out from Mexico to try and find wind. I think it’s better to be making some headway, if only slowly, than sitting in a hot, airless marina twiddling thumbs.

We sail south west for about two weeks (!) to the northern tip of the doldrums – an area just north of the equator where the NE trades and SE trades meet. Up until this point it should be pretty plain sailing, with the wind behind us or off to one side, warm and relatively calm. Often, sailors complain of too little wind. Once we get to the doldrums (otherwise known as the ITCZ – Inter Tropical Convergence Zone) the weather gets much more unsettled – think monster tropical thunderstorm cells, squally weather, and rain … interspersed with dead calms. The idea is to cross through this as fast as possible, which is why the line on the map above ducks southwards for 500 miles or so. We might have to motor through here, so I’ve loaded up with many cans of extra diesel.

You can see the current wind conditions on earth.nullschool.net, an excellent representation of the GFS global weather data. The green dot on the image below is the Marquesas islands.

Once we’re through the doldrums, we turn to starboard and with the south east trades behind us, make the final 800-odd miles to either Hiva Oa or Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas. We should be able to average 4 knots or so, which means we average 100 nautical miles a day. That’s the plan, anyway.

I’ll be sending updates from the satellite phone to the blog, but no pictures. It’s only sea and sky anyway, so nothing much to see! Though I’m expecting some pretty epic skyscapes as we go through the doldrums…

Mother earth, give us fair winds and calm seas.
Rafiki, do what you do best and carry us safely through whatever conditions come our way.
Off we go!