RORC Transatlantic Navigators’ Nightmare: The Big Blue Hole
The big blue blobs move around like the oils in a lava lamp, and your goal is to slide by on the fastest side of the blobs. At least that’s how it looks to us as we watch the tracker for the RORC Transatlantic Race, currently underway from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands across to Grenada. Traditionally, racers head south to the easterly trade winds and zip across while searching for the best breeze angles crossing the Atlantic. This year the trade winds look weak, and the windless blue blobs have made it very difficult for navigators to find their way to breeze. We grabbed some screenshots from the past few days to give you a feel for it.
The navigators and software aboard all these boats are the world’s best. We have no idea what we’d do. But we always find it interesting to imagine how we’d try to solve that puzzle for what, to our inexperienced eyes, looks like a very complicated search for the right track across the Atlantic.
As you can see from the cover of our January issue, midwinters on San Francisco Bay can be very similar.