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St Francis |
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Understanding South Pacific Weather
Last updated: Dec 2011
We are pretty experienced cruisers and feel comfortable normally interpreting our own weather. However, our familiarity was with the Caribbean�Northern Hemisphere�weather. We were a little stumped when we first launched off from mainland South/Central America for French Polynesia. (We still have trouble remembering that everything�s backwards when weather systems pass).
Several really good sources of instructional material on South Pacific weather exist.
1. Bob McDavitt�s �Mariner�s Met Pack for the Southwest Pacific� ISBN 1-877197-08-04 published by Captain Teach Press, Auckland, NZ. Though Bob is located in NZ and his weather focus is mainly the western portion of the South Pacific, his instruction manual covers a lot of useful information for the South Pacific in general. Purchase online: Waypoint Books or Bluewater Books or BoatBooks from NZ. If you can�t find it, email Bob at bob@metbob.com
2. Jim Corenmans �Letters from the South Pacific� originally published in the late 1990�s in Latitude 38 Magazine. Copies of this series of articles are floating around among boaters, and might be found on Latitude 38�s website. Jim had a great article on understanding South Pacific weather that is still really helpful to newbies entering French Polynesia.
Download from here: JimCorenman-SouthPacificLetters.pdf
3. David Sapiane�s Weather for the Yachtsman. I think I downloaded this document from the Pangolin site:
http://www.pangolin.co.nz/node/59
or the Pacific Puddle Jump Yahoo site. It is an 11-page Word document dated June 2008, with a bunch of good information on terminology and understanding weather for the South Pacific.
4. Some practical tips on planning a passage can be found here:
http://www.pacificyachtdeliveries.com/weather-advice.html
5. The Hacking Family has a great circumnavigation website, and their South Pacific weather page is here: http://hackingfamily.com/Cruise_Info/Pacific/SPacific_Weather.htm
6. Check the Pacific Puddle Jump �Files� section on Weather, there are usually some good, updated documents there. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pacificpuddlejump/
7. Bruce Balan from s/v Migration wrote a great article in the Feb 2011 Latitude 38 entitled "Fair Weather Sailor - Pacific Weather Simplified" You can find the article here: http://svsoggypaws.com/files/Migrations-PacWxSimplified.pdf