Weather or Not to Go

Jumping ahead here as we are now approaching East Cape on the North Island after departing Picton (Queen Charlotte Sound) on the South Island. The weather planning for this leg is a prime example of the compromises one must make to cruise New Zealand.

Red sky in the morning – Picton.

First, the route. Leaving Queen Charlotte by the Tory Channel, you enter Cook Straight and do a 70 mile leg southeast across the Straight passing Wellington and then on to Cape Pallisar.

There you turn northeasterly for the run to East Cape – a distance of of an additional 320 nautical miles. From there it is our intention to go to White Island – an active volcano some 80 miles further. All in all, this will take us approximately 60 hours at sea (no stops). We are currently approaching East Cape.

We have been watching the forecasts carefully to capture the best weather window, but, unfortunately, on this routing, the chances of getting a perfect window for the entire route is somewhere between slim and none (and Slim left town). Thus you have to pick between the least of the evils and that is pretty typical of the cruising we have been doing in New Zealand.

Here were our options. Cook Straight was predicted to be flat calm if we left early Sunday morning. Later in the day, winds were forecast to rise to gale strength (35 knots) in the straight between Queen Charlotte and Cape Pallisar. The Straight is NO place to be in gale force winds. Unfortunately, the chunk of water between Pallisar and East Cape are also renowned for their share of grief. Joe, our Captain, and his father were rolled 360 degrees in their 40 foot sailboat off Castle Point midway up this coast.

Starting early Monday morning, the weather for this part of the route was forecast to be light and variable – just what we wanted. Unfortunately from Sunday afternoon until then, the winds were to be out of the northeast at 25 to 30 knots – right on our nose. Now this isn’t fun on a good day, but to add to the misery, the prevailing current flows northeast along the coast and opposing winds and currents make for very short, steep and confused seas – the kind that launch even an 85000 pound 64 foot vessel right out of the water. Pallisar and East Cape also mix in a bit of their own misery with confused seas and currents as most Capes do. Add in 2.5 meter tides typical around here and you have the makings of a real mess.

Well Cook Straight was to calm down by late Tuesday but then the weather was even worse after Pallisar.

Waiting in Picton for a good window for the entire trip could take a month. So our choice really amounted to picking our misery. We chose to go Sunday before things got bad in the Cook Straight. The price came about 7 PM on Sunday night when the winds came up to 25 to 30 after rounding Pallisar. After several hours of crashing, I headed for deeper water but that didn’t really help much. We then bore off the wind about 30 degrees – well off our desired heading – and slowed the boat down to 7 knots. The crashing was reduced to several airborn launches an hour instead of one every few minutes. Heavy spray was still being thrown completely over the boat.

On the back deck, things are normally pretty sedate but even the contents of the dink were thrown around including full gas tanks.

Around 1 AM the winds started to abate and we were gradually able to come back to our course over several hours. By 4 AM the winds were down to 10 knots and we boosted our speed back up to 9.7 knots.

We are behind our original schedule but after a sound bit of sleep this morning (there wasn’t much last night), a hot shower and a bacon and egg breakfast, we are motoring along in flat seas. Didn’t much like it last night but this morning it looks like we called it right. The Stones had a song that went something like “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need”.

Guess we did.