Rona Diaries Continued

Hanalei Bay sunset on 6/7/22 with Soulstice bathing in the golden light

The Rona Diaries continued…..

6/7/2022

The update on our recovery in Hanalei is that we are both doing well. Today is day #8 since the start of symptoms (5/31) and Stephen is 2 1/2 days behind. We have both continued to improve daily and I would say I feel 90%. We both started exercising but without exposing anyone, so open water swimming and paddleboarding have been the chosen activities. We have not been to shore except for my trash dump early AM the other day. 

We have been filling up our time doing some work-related things interestingly… Stephen doing some CEUs for Carson Tahoe Hospital and my physician group was bought out, so I am doing some of their mandatory onboarding training while I have internet so I am in compliance upon my return. There is definitely some good kindle time and movie time. I have been flirting with iMovie also to get some old drone footage accompanied by music. I did not post here due to the need to get music that is not copyrighted. 

AND… we have been looking at weather daily!! Our illness did not delay our passage making as weather has not shaped up even as of yet. We spoke to our friend, Ron, on Mar de Luz, who left out of Hanalei Bay last year on a Freya 38 and he did not even leave until mid-July, and his start date was due to the same problem. No North Pacific High forming!!! This is a weather phenomenon that historically forms in the summer and when this starts to form, the low-pressure systems from the West will start to track more North. Not until today did we see a high forming on June 16th and that is too far out for any confidence. Prior to seeing that this morning, there has been no high forming and just low after low still rolling in with the bottom of the lows at 40 degrees. Most sailors agree that weather forecasts even beyond 3 days are unreliable and definitely can change. The reason for this is because of being a La Nina season, and the sea surface temperature of the water is cooler. This can be good for certain passage makings, like heading to the S. Pacific because the trades stay reinforced and decrease the likelihood of hurricanes because sea surface temp is cooler. For us, it means the high is slow to form and still may not form well, like last year, it wobbled all over and really was not very consistent. 

https://www.severe-weather.eu/long-range-2/summer-2022-forecast-seasonal-update-united-states-europe-

https://oceanweatherservices.com/featured_blog_posts/the_use_of_the_500_mb_chart_at_sea

We will be heading up to 57 degrees latitude to get to Kodiak Island or Sitka. This is the dilemma we face as we will need to cross where the lows have been rolling through. We have been communicating with friends who headed that way last year and the folks we know who are headed up there this year to help us continue to formulate a tentative navigation strategy. One of the friends mentioned how cruisers he knew who made the passage last year from HI to Kodiak Island considered their passage pretty smooth but that crossing the Gulf of Alaska to get to South East Alaska was very challenging! 

Hmmm, lots still to contemplate as time marches on. And then the next thing to think about is our time frame. Mid-June is typically the time to leave but if we end up waiting longer for safer/better conditions and we WILL but then we get into the issue of still having a lot of geographical areas to sail.  What I am getting at is that we have a plan A, plan B, and Plan C - See below… Plan A, go to Kodiak as initially intended, Plan B, go to Sitka which is farther East and would have more time and not be as rushed after leaving the Prince William Sound area, and plan C - farther south and east and end up in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and spend a glorious summer in the San Juan Islands again. 

There are other plans but we do not really want to go farther south than the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Once we take off from Hawaii, we have lots of time for decision making, because we are at 22 degrees latitude and the decision latitude is 40 degrees. That is approximately 1,000 nautical miles/or 8.5 days of sailing north before we need to decide and head more East. We will have a friend help us out with the weather, Bill Hickey, who has an amazing HF radio and gave us weather guidance for our passage from MX to HI last season. 

For now, we chill in Hanalei Bay, continue to recover, and continue to look at the end of next week as a glimmer of the window to leave potentially. I did tease that living on a boat with our partner is changing your time in your relationship to dog years. So, Stephen and I have been together 85 years - ba hahaha - ok even 50! Is quite a bit! AND that Bean Bag that I gave so much credit to in my earlier post is now PARKED in the middle of the salon floor and Stephen has reduced my living space to probably 15ft. It has caused some friendly quarreling at times and I have been asked to cluster my activities to limit the need to get around the Bean Bag Island - WTH??? 

To Be Continued… 

Notice how the width of the bean bag encompasses the ENTIRE walk thru in the salon! 

So the darker/slightly thicker blue line that you see separating the low and high-pressure systems is the famed 5640 line- this is the line that we hope starts to move farther north ( historically should)  and get these lows pushed farther north. The 5640 line ( 5,640 meters/18,503ft) . We use this information with surface weather charts when evaluating weather. 

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So you can see the white dot at the bottom is us and then the band of No wind ( blue section) and then above it those 3 low-pressure systems above us ( counter-clockwise in N. Hemisphere). We would like to see these start to track farther north above the Aleutians. Once the N. Pacific High forms it kind of forces these guys to stay west and track north above the Aleutian Islands. 

Look at the date: June 17th... If you look to the right of the last white line, you see 2 blue ill-formed circles but a CLOCKWISE pattern - THIS IS THE N. PACIFIC HIGH forming!!!
The Plans!!!  The later in the season we leave, Plan B will be become plan A... Means heading to Sitka to start but TBD...