The season for a Canaries-to-Caribbean crossing is settled; the departure day isn't. How to pick it from the first 72 hours, why model agreement matters, where PredictWind's Departure Planning fits (we haven't tested it), and who should skip paid tools.
PredictWind launched an AI Weather Router on 21 October. There is no independent review yet and we have not tested it. Here is what it claims, what routing software assumes, when to override it, and who should skip it and keep reading GRIBs.
The average boat crossing the Atlantic with the ARC is 14.9 metres, and a third of the fleet is multihulls — which made my 50-foot cat look a lot less like a stretch.
A southwest gale against a four-knot current is the one thing on our Cape route I can't plan around, only stay out of. Here's how I'm cutting the coast into hops.
I've priced the Atlantic crossing in days, not dollars: 17 of them, leaving in early December, with weather criteria written down before the party invitations arrive.
I kept two versions of our Indian Ocean crossing alive for a year. This summer's Red Sea attacks settled it, and the Cape route asks more of the boat than I'd budgeted for.
I keep sailing the same 2,965 miles from a desk at home, and the weather files keep giving me the same four-line answer.
Galápagos to the Marquesas is where our whole plan either works or doesn't, so I wrote down the actual GRIB criteria I'd want before casting off.
The Bermuda-to-Azores window in late May is a high you want parked, a low you want predictable, and a 500mb chart I'd rather see flat than amplified.
The 3,000-mile leg from Galapagos to the Marquesas hinges on one GRIB pattern I keep watching.
Everything you need to plan a safe and enjoyable Atlantic passage.
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