Route Planning
Sail cruising planning revolves around the weather. Plans for what time of the year to make major passages are made to get good sailing conditions and, more importantly, to avoid bad weather. Plans on the exact day to leave for a passage are made by watching weather forecasts. It is not uncommon to wait for several days, and in some cases several weeks, to get a good weather window for a passage.
This is very much different than sailboat racing. Races are scheduled events that go almost irregardless of the weather. As such most of the stories of boats getting into weather troubles come from races, or from other schedule considerations that require departures or arrivals by specific dates, such as the need to get back to work.
The whole point of cruising is to avoid these types of schedule concerns.
We plan to leave the Northwest in late September, which is starting to get a little late for heading south from here. We wanted the boys to get a few weeks of school in to touch bases with their friends and teachers, which we hope to keep in touch with the entire school year. We will find a good four day weather window that looks gale and storm free and head south to San Francisco to visit family for a short period of time.
By mid October we will be heading from San Francisco to Southern California. Once in Southern California we are no longer racing against deteriorating fall and winter weather. Although we still need to maintain diligent watch on, and respect for, the weather, the weather windows are normally more frequent and longer once we are South.
Next we head to Mexico in November after the end of the northern hemisphere tropical hurricane season. From here our plans get a little fuzzy. We plan to spend Christmas in the Puerto Vallarta area where Juli's sister Joni and her family will join us for the holidays.
At this point the only firm plan we have is to head off for the South Pacific in April. This allows us to get out of the Northern Hemisphere tropics before hurricane season and into the Southern Hemisphere tropics after their typhoon season. The goal is to spend winter in the tropics, avoiding the stifling heat of summers and the cyclonic storms.
From January to April we may travel little and anchor a lot in Mexico, or, if we as a family enjoy the long sails, we may head south to Central America, and maybe Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, before heading off to the South Pacific.
Once arriving in the South Pacific the plan is to do the coconut "milk run" and sail downwind in the trade winds through the South Pacific islands until November or so, when it will be time to leave the Southern Hemisphere tropics before summer.
We will first arrive in the Marquesa Islands in French Polynesia after 3 weeks or so at sea. We will then continue through the Tuamotus and arrive in Tahiti, the capital of the country. We will make our detailed plans as we go, but some of the island groups we may then visit include the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji.
Once November arrives we have two options. The first is to turn right and head north towards Hawaii, starting our voyage home. The other option is to turn left and or head south to New Zealand and summer over there. Which way we go depends on how much we enjoy the lifestyle, money, Juli's need to get back to work, and a myriad of other details that we can't even conceive of yet. We could leave the boat in one of these locations, come back home to work and school, and return in our spring and sail the boat home.
The route through Mexico and the South Pacific is the same general route taken by dozens of cruisers every year. We are all dependant on the same weather systems and have the same high level plans. It is common to make friends in one anchorage and then meet them again in an anchorage downwind in another island group.