In late April, we continued our journey home with a 1,mile, 8-day run from Ireland to the Azores. We departed Dublin in strong winds, but those settled within a day and we had reasonably calm conditions most of the way. Since Dirona has plenty of range, we elected to just sail directly south from Dublin. We fueled the morning of departure, taking on 1, gallons l to fill our main tanks and our three ATL fuel bladders.
The reason why we carried this large volume of fuel on this first short leg is that fuel is twice as expensive in Horta as we were able to get in Dublin. Below are highlights from April 28th through May 5th, Click any image for a larger view, or click the position to view the location on a map.
And a live map of our current route and most recent log entries always is available at mvdirona. The boat is moving a ton in the water motion, and we have to keep tending the lines as the tide rises. We expect to hit a patch of rougher weather a couple of days from the Azores as a large weather system approaches, but conditions otherwise should be good.
We started using PredictWind more seriously earlier this year. We initially started using it to help compare the various routes from the Azores to Bermuda. PredictWind produces data for a variety of weather models in both graphical form and in a table form that can be copied into a spreadsheet. We can then use that data to analyze and compare conditions across the routes.
The three columns at right are our colorized interpretations of the data using a spreadsheet. We color wave height green if the waves are less than 4 feet or the wave period is more than 1. The final column is wave period divided by height and is colored the same as for wave height, but only using the wave period part of the formula. These tables allow us to easily consume a lot of date and get a good overall view of the conditions we can expect.
