WINGSSAIL

Riding the Windvane to Vanautu

We've arrived in another new country, Vanuatu, or New Hebrides as Cook called it. We've been reading everything we have on the country and looking at charts (scroll down)...its exciting to be in a new place. Port Vila is the capitol and it is reputed to be very cosmopolitan with good European restaurants and shops, and now that we are here we are looking forward to it. Plus we have friends here we want to see.

The passage was easy, if exasperating. We had enough wind to sail for a little more than half of the four and a quarter days it took to get here. We motored the other half of the time. Well, it was not really a problem, just slightly frustrating. We wanted to sail, we tried to sail, and all we got was a lot of sweat and not much forward progress. The spinnaker was up and down about five times. Oh, we had some good sailing, just not enough.

On the plus side, we got a lot of rest and read some books. We also wrote a neat computer program that figures out, given the wind strength, direction, and the direction of your destination, whether it makes sense to try to sail or not, how fast you will go if you do sail, and how much progress you will make towards your objective. It takes all the adding and subtracting of compass headings and calculations of velocity made good, etc, into account. For example, if the wind is 10 knots from 55 degrees, and your next port bears 260 degrees, the computer program tells us that for WINGS, the best we can do is to sail 275 degrees, which will give us 5 knots of boat speed and 4.6 knots toward the objective. Going more directly towards it will slow the boat down too much (reaching gives better boat speed than running) but sailing higher takes us too far away from the mark, although it gives us delightful speed, it is in the wrong direction. This was a fun exercise and it actually helped us on the trip, but it still needs some development and debugging. Oh well, on the next passage maybe.

Now we are here, time to explore and enjoy. We'll write more later about Port Vila and the ni Vanuatu, as the people are called.