OCEAN, Harriet’s and my Dolphin 460 cruising cat, is tugging at her mooring. We are a quick dinghy ride from the Bora Bora Yacht Club, where cruisers are hoisting sundowners, drummers are drumming, and cultural dancers are dancing. Paddlers in their pirogues, outrigger canoes as sleek as needles, are racing across the lagoon in the sunset. Bora Bora’s iconic peaks, wrapped in green-dyed clouds, loom majestic.
I see none of it. I am staring into my laptop as PredictWind’s weather-routing Offshore App plays a ten-day passage to Fiji across the screen. The European Model displays a favourable, fast passage. I drag the timeline back to the beginning and run the simulation again, this time with the GFS Model. Things indeed are lining up. “Euro and GFS say tomorrow is a good time to go,” I call over to Harriet.
Harriet has been receiving government text forecasts through her SailMail connection, and she’s reading a weather prognosis from Commanders’ Weather, a New Hampshire, U.S., weather-routing service we have been using for 14 years. “Commanders’ and the text forecasts look good,” she answers.
To get home to New Zealand by late October or early November, dodging tropical cyclones and New Zealand’s southwesterly gales, we have 3,000 miles to go. It is the first week of September, when the cruising season in the tropics begins to wind down, and from points across the South Pacific Kiwis are divining the weather: they’re hunched over their laptops, they’re tapping and texting on their smartphones, they’re chattering on WhatsApp and Facebook.
The unprecedented access to real-time weather data from government forecasts and bulletins, weather-routing software, commercial weather forecasters, and between yachts at anchor and at sea has made many cruisers feel like meteorologists, or at least apprentices. On we get all of it, and we realise how intoxicating it is, but we try to take it with a pinch of salt. We try not to let technology, as sexy as it is, lead us to outsmart ourselves, to take chances, to assume that the screen is always right. In the morning, we will head for Fiji.
