Gulf Passage Planning

The boat's mostly ready to go, so I've been spending a lot of time planning the route and watching the weather. The next window should open on Tuesday and last at least a week. Of course the systems are coming my way, so that'll shorten the window some. I can only see a week out on Passageweather.com, but right now it looks great.

The only problem with this window is no moon, but I'm not sure I want to wait for the next one. However, no moon does have an effect on the route -- making me want to go further south to give the rigs a wide berth. Right now, we're looking at just over 600nm -- anyone want to come along?

If the forecast holds, we should make pretty good time. I've only made a few trips so far, but with good wind, we've done over 100nm a couple times, and even when we beat to weather and had to tack back and forth to make headway on the trip to Carabelle, we still averaged around 80nm, so I'm optimistic we can average 100.

That means about six days, and since we're planning to leave Tuesday evening and wouldn't want to make landfall at night anyway, I'm hoping for just under seven days, which would make it Wednesday 25 April. Of course, if we only average 80nm a day, arrival could be a few days later, perhaps the weekend. We could also put into Freeport first, but it all depends on the weather and how well we do.

We'll go over and get fuel, water, and more provisions on Tuesday morning, mainly fresh fruit and stuff you can eat right out of the bag. Then we'll take one last look at the weather, and if everything looks good, we'll head out.