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Routing Based On Pilot Charts – Geraldton to Cape Town preview

It seemed to me that as a part of course pre-planning for long ocean races, it might be useful if I published on Solfans for each new SOL ocean race the suggested OpenCPN routing based on Pilot Chart wind data for people to make use of if they so desired.  It also seemed that it might be a useful resource for the non-routers out there.

Here is that route for the upcoming Geraldton Cape Town race.

Geraldton-Capetown-pilot-charts-route-March

I have run a route on my own router using the SOL grib data and superimposed that for comparative purposes.  The suggested Pilot Chart routing for March is the pale pink line and the routing using SOL and NOAA extended grib data as at the 22:30 WX on Feb 28 is the deeper pink line with the wind direction barbs attached.  You can see that the primary difference is that the current weather data suggests a much more northerly route than the Pilot Charts suggest, principally because of a significant high currently lying west of Perth.

The OpenCPN Pilot Chart route suggests a trip of 18 days 8 hours, and the route using SOL weather suggests 14 days 13 hours.  In other words, we can expect a faster than average trip.Overlay-Geraldton-Cape-Town

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