The 3,000-mile leg I keep re-studying
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 longest leg of the whole trip is the one I keep coming back to: Galápagos to the Marquesas, right around 3,000 nautical miles depending on where you split the departure. It's the longest single passage most circumnavigators ever make, and for us it would be the longest stretch the kids go without land — which is probably why I keep opening pilot charts at 9pm instead of doing something useful.
The route logic is simple to state and easy to get wrong. Leaving the Galápagos you're sitting nearly on the equator, in a zone where the southeast trades haven't fully filled in. The classic mistake is pointing the bow straight at Hiva Oa on day one and spending the first four days wallowing in 8 knots of breeze and the leftover slop of the equatorial counter-current. The better play is to sail south-southwest first, down to about 4 to 6 degrees south, before bending west. You give up maybe 150 miles of extra distance to buy consistent 15–20 knot ESE trades for the remaining 2,700. Everyone who has done this passage says some version of the same thing: get south, then go west.
Timing is dictated by the far end. South Pacific cyclone season runs November through April, so the Puddle Jump fleet leaves the Galápagos from late March through May and arrives in the Marquesas with the season closed behind them. That happens to square with a school calendar, which matters more to our crew than to most.
My departure criteria, as currently drafted in the worksheet: 72 hours of 12-plus knots from the ESE quadrant within the first 300 miles of track, no light-air hole under 8 knots parked between the islands and 5°S, and combined seas under 2.5 meters. I also want the trades established out to the 7-day horizon rather than showing up as a two-day pulse. The caveat I keep having to re-teach myself is that a GRIB at day 7 is a mood, not a forecast — past day 4 I treat the files as pattern confirmation, nothing more.
The numbers: typical crossings run 18 to 24 days for boats in the 40–50-foot range. On the 50-foot cat we're researching, the polars say an 8-knot average is plausible in established trades, which pencils out to just under 16 days. I'm planning to 20. And every provisioning list I write for this leg budgets water, diesel, and patience to 25, because the gap between a 16-day plan and a 25-day reality is the gap between a good story and a bad one when there are four kids aboard.
What I haven't resolved: whether to hold near 5°S on the shorter track or drop to 8–10°S, where the trades blow harder but the beam seas get squarier. Faster and lumpier versus slower and kinder is a different question when half your crew is under ten. That one's a note for another Friday.
