Sunday, December 8

Storms

Boat, Maintenance, Storms

Leaks found

Florida afternoon thunder storms have been rolling through pretty regularly this year. It has helped me discover a few leaks and provided a nice spray down for the boat. It has also reminded me that you always need to be prepared when at anchor. The winds that have come through with these afternoon storms hit over 35kn and hit quickly. Best be prepared with a well-set anchor or ready to pick up and move quickly if things go bad. This has been something I prepared for early in my refit, my 85lb Mantus Anchor is good, in theory, for up to hurricane force winds for my boat size and weight...I just hope I never really have to test how hot holds in a hurricane. Easily, one port leaked, needs to be re-bedded. Two chain plates, already known, leaked. I had already suspected the leaks so was...
Hurricane, Isaias, Review, Storms, Weather Service

Review: Predict Wind

I’ve been using the free version of Predict Wind for a while but had not used it to track yet to track significant weather events. I was considering to eventually subscribe to it when I started permanently cruising. I used it recently to monitor Hurricane Isaias, the accuracy was very disappointing. Predict wind offers two public models, GFS and ECMWF and offers two proprietary models based on GFS and ECMWF. Using it to follow Hurricane Isaias the GFS and ECMWF models were as expected, they each had their own forecasts, but were relatively accurate in their own. The two Predict Wind models had the storm crossing the state of Florida and entering the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, I was also monitoring the spaghetti models and none of which had the storm crossing the state. Even as th...
Hurricane Isaias
Hurricane, Isaias, Storms

Hurricane Isaias

Lucky Hurricane Isaias turned out be been a non-event for my location in Florida. There wasn’t even any rain, just wind. The winds only reached 30 knots in my area and nicely rocked the boat which made for nice sleeping, While I had already experienced higher winds previously, it was a great learning experience on how the boat behaved in sustained stronger than normal winds. Luckily, I had just received new dock lines and used them them to prep for the storm. I did learn is that I needed some additional longer lines to use in storm situations. I still have another 240ft from the spool I ordered so I can make adjustments to the lines available. Rather than turn the rest of the line into some longer warps I will turn them in to extra 50ft lines to use as extra lines to use in case of future ...