Feb 8 — 400 nmi rings and tropical storm stats

These notes are periodic updates to a progress report on a transpacific ocean row using state of the art weather overlays in Google Earth. Description of the Project.  See also Index of data sets in use.

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We added 400 nmi rings to help estimate progress. The display is shown below. You can turn it on or off or just turn on any one of them. He is now approaching the 2400 nmi off distance, 6 x 400.

These rings serve a couple purposes. One, they monitor how far to go, and two they remind us if we are travelling parallel to one of these lines, we are not getting any closer to Cairns.

If Jacob makes good a speed of 1.5 kts, which he has been over recent days, then it takes 400/1.5 = 266.7 hr = 11 days to make good 400 nmi.

Right now it looks like 6.5 x 11 days = 72.2 days to go.

One thing a navigator can benefit from that is often overlooked is a simple list of the days of the year that are numbered, ie Jan 1 = day 1. The Nautical Almanac Office of the USNO knows this is valuable because they put such a table in every almanac, as shown below.

This is not the NAO version, which I will add later. This is one was just made as a placeholder to finish these thoughts.

Today is Feb 8, which is day 39, and 39 + 72 = 111, which is April 21.  Chances are very good that he will not get there that early, and that is good news considering the tropical storm season will not be over then.

Here is a picture from our Starpath Weather Trainer Live software.

We see the peak in storms is Feb with 4.1 with April down to just 1.7. If all goes well, arrival time is likely to be in May, where we are down a factor of over 10 from the peak.