Heading for New England

Sue and I are heading north to New England, looks like tomorrow morning looking at the weather forecast. This has been a week of fairly unsettled weather along the mid-atlantic states, with a series of sinusoidal frontal systems moving west to east through the region, resulting in winds shifting from north to south back to north to south with some westerlies thrown in from time to time. I was hoping/looking for 48hrs of steady southwesterlies, very common for these August days, to take us from the Chesapeake to Martha’s Vinyard, but it never happened. (Looks like it might next week). Instead the winds have been shifting almost daily between north and south.
I had hoped to pick our departure day last Monday, looking for the best 48hr window. Each time I checked, however, the forecast model had changed. Now here it is Fri morning, and it still doesn’t look ideal for a nice downwind run, but at least there are no storms forecasted (looks very reliable) so I think we’ll head out tomorrow morning and just accept the 12-18hrs of light headwinds we will encounter until we can catch the SW winds forecasted further north on Sunday. Hopefully, the models wont change dramatically between now and Sunday – however, the track record is not promising.
So, with an increased understanding of the difficulty the weathermen have in making any accurate prediction over 24hrs, and the comfort of knowing none of the forecasts/models since Monday have predicted any winds over 20kts enroute and no major storms/gales, we’ll set out early tomorrow morning. The boat is all packed… we’re taking the cold foods down today… and we’ll spend the night on the boat, perhaps at anchor down the creek, and get a good night’s sleep before heading out at first light. Its about 5-6hrs to the ocean from our marina ( to southeast – taking advantage of the forecast northerlies tomorrow), then we’ll slowly try to work our way to the north into 5-10kts of northerlies until the southerlies kick in sometime tomorrow evening.
We’ll have HF email onboard so will be able to update our blog and the list with position reports and short emails describing the ocean sailing. Since we’re not on a schedule and there’s no bad weather forecasted, we’ll try to minimize motoring and sail where the wind blows us. Hopefully arriving somewhere near Martha’s Vinyard on Sun or Mon. We’ll be monitoring HF Maritime Net, 14300mhz most of the trip. Check our position each day using the link at the top of the blog.