Comfortable Passagemaking
A weather forecast—like an old-school dead-reckoning plot—will decrease in certainty with the passage of time. Over the past five years of arranging off shore charters aboard our Swan 48, Isbjørn, and our Swan 59, Icebear, we’ve tempted the gods by consistently breaking the cardinal rule of cruising—sailing to a schedule. However, thanks to a fundamental understanding of big-picture weather patterns and a willingness to be flexible once underway, we’ve learned that even the toughest passages can be made comfortably. In this article, we’ll look at how we plan our passage calendar and the tools we use to forecast the weather. We’ll also analyze three difficult passages—Iceland to Ireland; a Bermuda-Azores Atlantic crossing; and a southbound migration from the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Caribbean—to see how these things all work in practice.
Besides the sailing itself, the neatest part of my job running off shore passages through our company, 59 North (59-north.com), is planning the next season’s calendar. I sit in the upstairs office of our farmhouse in Sweden, surrounded by books and charts, and open up Google Earth on my laptop. I literally have the whole world in front of me to plan the next 10,000 or so miles of our sailing calendar.
Many factors go into stringing these routes together. How much time do we need to leave between passages? Are we racing or cruising? What’s the customs situation in the countries we’re thinking of visiting? What’s the weather going to be like? Is it even safe to attempt a particular route at a particular time of year given the expected winds and chance of storms?
This kind of planning, when we’re picking out overall routes and seasons from the 30,000ft level, so to speak, represents the first stage of our
