waiting on weather

An American sail boat arrived shortly after the Belgians and Bismark II left. When I came back from the library yesterday it had departed and I was the only sail boat left in the harbour. But before night fell it was back! I guess it stuck it nose out and realized the winds were from the south.

This morning I dragged myself out of bed and looked around. Two more sail boats have arrived. A wooden 50 ft + wooden gaff rig from France “Nortre Dame des Flots” that I had seen previously seen tied up at the yacht club in Reykjavik. Another sail boat from England (home port Plymouth) has arrived. After a summer of sailing around Iceland they are getting ready for the voyage home.

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I keep an eye on the larger picture by downloading weather files and forecasts from www.grib.us. It’s a free service and you can get a 7 day forecast displaying wind speeds and directions in 3 hour intervals anywhere in the world.

Up here in the far north it works like this:

Low pressure systems, like giant cartwheels a thousand miles or more across, roam from west to east in an erratic fashion. The cartwheels always spin in an anticlockwise motion. The trick is to get on these global merry-go-rounds at the right time and ride them as far as you can to your destination.

I’m waiting for the centre of a giant low pressure system to move south and east of us so I can jump on it for a ride south. Everyday I check the forecasts religiously. Current forecasts suggest a Sunday departure. But it could be sooner if the low pressure system decides to pick up its pace.

Once off, my goal is to go directly south so as to avoid headwinds from the next approaching low pressure system. One I get below, say, 55 degrees N, I should be able to rely on westerlies (or to put it another way, the bottom of the low pressure systems) to take me to Ireland and Wales.

On land one wants to know from weather forecasts how warm, cold, sunny, cloudy, rainy, it’s going to be. When sailing long distance these concerns are of little consequence. The only thing that really matters is wind speed and direction.

At the bottom of the blog I’ve posted a chart that shows how the wind system should look like midnight tonight. The red boat is my current location. The black dots connected by lines is the projected course of the center of the low pressure system. Each dot resents 24 hours of movement.

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I’ve always had an interest in languages. Icelandic is an old Norse tongue as spoken by the Vikings over a thousand years ago. But all the Germanic languages (including English) sound similar to the ear. ‘Got tag’ they say for ‘good day’. ‘Thanks’ is simply ‘tak’. They say ‘sex’ for ‘six’. I wonder what they say for ‘sex’. Six?

Speaking of language and literature, I’m reading, for the second time, a book I bought just before I left Wales. It’s called Gwylliaid Glyndwr (The Glyndwr Bandits) published by Y Lolfa. It’s one of the funniest and most enjoyable books I’ve read for a long time. The story revolves around the theft of the Pennal Letter from the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and includes collaborators from Manchester, thugs from London, the French Secret Service, Welsh bureaucratic buffoons, as well as an odd assortment of slightly mad Welsh nationalists.

If there is anyone back home who reads this blog and can read Welsh (two people come to mind) who might be interested just say and I’ll pass it on to you once I’m back on Welsh soil.

Hwyl nawr,

Simon