Caroline's Voyage
Chapter 5
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Chapter 5.
Starting from New York or up nearer here, say in Newport, RI, I reckon in favorable weather I should make Bermuda in five to six days max, getting my feet wet. I’ll want to stay in Bermuda a few days, and another eight or nine days they tell me, due south to San Juan, Puerto Rico or St. Thomas.
From there, it’s a long hike to Panama. I talked to Betsy’s father’s navigator about courses and things while we were on watch coming back from Bermuda last summer.
“Have you picked out a route?” he asked me, when I told him what I was going to do.
“Sort of,” I said. “I thought I’d head down the coast to Florida and then to Panama.”
He smiled. “So which side of Cuba will you go around, east or west?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Look,” he said. “you’ve got to think about ocean currents and the prevailing wind direction. The gulf stream circles the Atlantic Ocean. Between Miami and the outer banks of North Carolina it runs north at a pretty good clip. So you’d be going against it all the way to Florida.”
“But I have to go south,” I said.
“Yes, but you don’t have to go down the coast in the gulf Stream. Have a look at the chart. You can see the GulfStream hugs the south Florida coast and then takes a bead on Cape Hatteras, NC, before turning north easterly towards Britain. That Stream of warm water is what keeps northern Europe from being one big iceberg.”
“But I thought going in a straight line would make up for any adverse currents.”
“Well, that’s good thinking, but in this case you’d be wrong, Caroline. Plot it out, and you’ll see the best way to reach the Panama Canal from, say, New York, is to hit Bermuda first, Then some place in the Caribbean, where you can pick up the currents that run westerly off the coast of South America toward the Canal. You’ll also so get a favorable wind most of the year. Where are you going to head from the Pacific side of the Canal?”
“I thought maybe I’d go up the coast to San Diego or Los Angeles before heading across the South Pacific.”
“Same problem. The currents coming down the West Coast of California and Mexico’s Baja Peninsula are strong and will be dead against you. Same for the usual wind direction out there.”
“But I have friends in college in California.”
“As I said, same deal. The best way to go from the Panama Canal to LA, which by the way is one hell of a long way, probably farther than from Panama to Nova Scotia, is to go first to Hawaii and then come back to the West Coast. Sounds wrong, I know,” he said, “but have a look at the globe and you’ll see what I mean.”
“Is there some place I can check routes like this when you’re not around?”
“Absolutely, I’ll send you my list when we get home.”
So that was an education, and when I got back home there was an e-mail from a woman in Seattle. “Why don’t you truck ship your boat across the country to Seattle,” she said, “and start your voyage from Puget Sound?”
That nice lady is on to something. I put on my new navigators hat and got out the globe my father gave me for my fifth birthday. Have a look. The Panama Canal is only as far west as Pittsburg, PA or the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I always figured it was far west of that. All I will have done when I get there is go south about 2,000 nautical miles.
Most ocean voyagers who start from the East Coast usually go through the Panama Canal and continue south and west towards the Galapagos Islands on their way to French Polynesia - rather than going to LA, Seattle or Portland.
If I start from the West Coast like this woman suggests, I can sail down the coast of California and offshore Mexico’s Baja Peninsula in fair wind and currents pushing me all the way to the equator at the 120 degree longitude line, which is the longitude about where Santa Barbara, CA sits, hook into the southern trade winds, and let them and the equatorial currents take me west to French Polynesia and the island chains beyond. I’d miss Hawaii, but it would take two months of sea time off my trip to the south seas.
The problem would come if I really want to sail all the way around. I'll head back around the globe and cross through the Atlantic a year or two later. I'd need to cross my original track to make a circumnavigation official and I'd need to pass through the Canal anyway and head out to Hawaii. One big plus is that this route would avoid the North Atlantic altogether, which is one of the toughest passages anywhere in the world, so I’ve read and so Betsy’s father tells me.
I'm going to show here a bunch of maps with plots of my trip on them as soon a sI learn hos to do that. Until then check out your own globe - it's really fun seeing where you can go.
I’ll reach the islands of the South Pacific, ending up near the end of that segment on or near the island of Tonga. From there New Zealand is a prime destination, and from what I hear that’s a great place to be from December through April. I might get to the Bay of Island in New Zealand in 26 weeks from the time I leave New York (even going to Hawaii and back), and it will be much much less if I leave from the West Coast.
It’s a long, long way from downunder in New Zealand, over the top of Australia, across the Indian Ocean, down and around the Cape of Good Hope, through the South Atlantic Ocean, and back here to either coast of the U.S. Take out your globe and measure it. See what I mean? The sailing distance from New Zealand to New York heading west is as far as going around the whole globe at the 35th parallel (which is about the latitude of CapeHatteras - or Buenos Aires in the Southern Hemisphere). You can see the closer you are to the equator the longer is the trip around.
I could save over 4000 nautical miles if I don’t go down to New Zealand, and instead head west through Samoa, Vanuatu to the Whitsunday Islands and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. What I decide to do might depend on the time of year. In typhoon season you don’t want to be wandering around that far north. New Zealand is south and out of the typhoon zone, and also makes a nice place to break a trip, haul the boat out and do the kind of work I do in the boatyard here. I might even fly home from there to get recharged. I could do the flying home part from Cairns, Australia too, but I think New Zealand would be great for a little R&R for me and the boat, before the long slog north of Australia and across the Indian Ocean. It all depends on the time of year.
Speaking of that slog up and around Australia, I can’t use his name, but a well known Australian e-mailed to give me some more good advice. At least it sounds good.
He said, “Caroline, if you’re in New Zealand in January, and your heading home west from there, why not avoid all that distance sailing way north through Indonesia and then back down again to the tip of Africa. Instead, go directly across from Milford Sound on the South Island of New Zealand to Tasmania and then along the southern coast of Australia (a wonderful part of our continent), visit me in Melbourne, and see Adelaide and put into Perth on our west coast, and from there you can head straight across to Cape Town, South Africa. It would save you over 2500 nautical miles and take you to places where most voyagers haven’t gone. You certainly don’t want to go up through the Red Sea, beating against gale force winds all the way north, It’s always been a risky area no matter which way you’re heading, but now you might end up in the middle of a big battle in Irag. Then there are the pirates that operate along the coasts of Samalia and some of Indonesia’s islands.”
Look on the globe; you'll see what this man is talking about.
You can see on the globe that the south coast they call the Australian Bight is exposed to the full fetch of the Southern Ocean which has strong winds and big seas that circle the globe west to east. When those huge seas roll in off the Indian Ocean, they hit the more shallow water of the Australian Bight, shorten up, and make for a rough sea.
So what’s it like off the coast of Adelaide, Australia in their summer? What’s the direction of the prevailing wind? It might be on the nose for me – straight into it. I know the Sydney to Hobart, Tasmania Race, held in December each year, is often sailed in rough conditions. Is it true there’s a “devil” in Tasmania.
The Indian Ocean I’m told is unpredictable, and has a lot of storms. This is born out by the Pilot Charts that I’ve studied which show usual conditions around the world for each month of the year. But there’s no getting around that this ocean is a bridge I have to cross one way or the other. I’m leaning toward rounding the tip of South Africa rather than going up through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea into the Mediterranean. I’d love to see the Mediterranean, but getting there is too dangerous with all that’s going on in the Middle East. Too bad in another way – it’s shorter than going all the way south and around by Cape Town.
I might as well get used to facing reality, and the facts are that rounding the Cape of Good Hope seems the best way to go, like it or not. This cape is not the same as the infamous Cape Horn where Chile and Argentina meet the Antarctic Ocean. The AfricanCape is much farther north toward the temperate latitudes, about opposite Buenos Aires, 1500 nautical miles north of Cape Horn’s latitude. But even so it’s not all peaches and cream. There are vicious currents off the South African coast, making navigation difficult.
I met one of Betsy’s friends from college last summer. Her name is Kim, and she’s from Johannesburg, South Africa, notCape Town. She’s as tall as I am, and we got along terrifically. One great advantage of going in there is that I’ll meet some of her friends. We’ve even convinced Betsy she’ll have to fly down and join us. Kim says the South African men are generally pretty tall. Okay, so that’s not a good reason to go there, but you have to admit it’s an add-on.
The South Atlantic passage after CapeTowne will be the penultimate leg if I leave from New York, but will leave me three more legs if Seattle or California is my beginning and ending place. This will be a very long time at sea without stops in the South Atlantic, unless I make a stop or two in South America. Trouble with that idea is that the currents going north are closer to the African coast. I also could stop in St. Helena, which is the island right in the center of the Southern Atlantic where Napoleon was exiled to when he was deposed. Ascension Island is out there too in the middle of the South Atlantic, and could be place to stop. Otherwise it’s on to Trinidad and from there either island hopping up the Caribbean to Miami and riding the Gulf Stream back to New York or straight to Panama and through the Canal again on my way to Hawaii.
I take the most travelled route I’ll clock about 40,000 nautical miles. Averaging 6 to 7 knots or 160 nm a day, that computes to about 250 days and nights at sea. If I set aside a month for boat maintenance (which is what my boss here at the Yard advises), that leaves me a little over a year to spend diverting to other ports and places along the way, sightseeing on land and visiting with friends. I haven’t compared that to what other ocean voyagers have done, but I built in a fudge factor in the 160 miles a day average made good. I might be able to do better than that in a Trimaran, and that would give me more time ashore.
It’ll be good when I get all this logistics out of the way, so I can concentrate on people and places.
Where are some of the places I’d like to see and visit, assuming I start from Seattle and go through New Zealand and then north of Australia and down and around the tip of Africa?
How about San Francisco, Monterey, Catalina Island, Newport Beach, San Diego, Cabo San Lucas, Tahiti and the Society islands, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Auckland, the Bay of Islands, Milford Sound, Sydney, Brisbane, the Great Barrier Reef, and all of Australia, Bali, the Maldives, the Seychelles, Cape Towne and Johannesburg, SA, the Caribbean Islands, and Hawaii, for starters. If I stopped for an average of 6 days in all those places it would total about twelve months on shore.
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