We are ready to go, the crew are all here in Las Palmas, but the weather is wrong!

The wind should be a steady 20 knots NE tradewind – wind thats blowing from the North East to take us South West.   From the historical wind charts this should be predictable with about 99% reliability by mid December.

But if you look at today’s weather predictions, then you will see the wind is blowing from the south at up to 30 knots for the next few days – and there is a low weather system sitting just a few hundred miles west of the Canaries.   The weather forecasts show that it will be gone in about 5 days – so do we wait or find another way?  If we wait, we will definitely miss Xmas in the Caribbean.

The decision is to push on.   We will route out of the Canaries on a westerly course, passing by Tenerife and then the other smaller islands (picking up a final weather forecast by mobile email as we go past).  We may even have to go north west, but the plan is to get west somehow and get through the low weather system into the fair winds beyond.  There will be some bad weather as we go through the weather fronts – but nothing we cant handle.

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Note typed later – there certainly was bad weather on the fronts – wind to 40 knots, driving rain, and wild thunder and lightning for a couple of hours.  We sailed through it all but only on our smallest storm jib.   Spray was flying everywhere but everyone coped fine and after a couple of days we were into the tradewind system, albeit a windy one, that took us all the way to the Caribbean.