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LongPac Tactics Seminar on May 12th

A

ajgoldman

Ocean Cruiser
I am pleased to announce our first 2011 LongPac Seminar. Stan Honey will be giving a talk on tactics for the LongPac on Thursday, May 12th at 7:30pm at the Oakland Yacht Club. Stan was recently awarded the 2010 Rolex Yachtsman of the Year for his work as navigator on Groupama 3. Groupama 3 set the record for fastest time around the planet at 48 days, seven hours and 45 minutes. He was also the winning navigator aboard ABN Amro One in the 2006 Volvo Ocean race. Closer to home, Stan completed in our Single Handed TransPac aboard his CAL 40 “ILLUSION” with an elapsed time of 11:10:52:21 (OK, that is a full ten days faster than my time!). Stan still holds the corrected time course record for the SHTP. Stan is now working on many projects including the America’s Cup here in the San Francisco bay. He is also a great guy! Save the date for this special talk.
 
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Hi AJ,

I haven't been on the forum since I got back from HI till tonight. Congrats on being chairman for the Longpac *AND* the transpac!!!! You are a glutton for punishment. I was reading an earlier post and saw they were looking for a chair for the Longpac and I had typed an email to Max offering to at least help when I saw the post that they had found a sucker, excuse me I mean chair..... Smile..... Let me know if you can use some help. If not I will probably just sail the longpac since I know a lot of the prospective participants. I will probably also do the 2012 Transpac again, what the heck. It's like drugs, once you start it's hard to stop........

I don't know how often I will get on here so best to email me if you need help.

SeeYa,
John Hayward
Dream Chaser
 
May 12th 7:30p.m. OYC

If you are planning on doing the LongPac, don't miss this meeting.

The race signups for the LongPac will be posted soon.
 
Stan Honey Article

There's a very good interview with Stan Honey in the current (May, 2011) issue of "Sailing World" magazine. Includes a great photo of Stan and Sally in their house, too. Good background for any SSS folks who haven't been around long enough to know Stan and his achievements.
Pat Broderick
 
Stan's slides?

Very interesting and informative talk last night, a big thank you to the SSS organizers and Stan for making this possible.

Is there a chance of getting a copy of Stan's powerpoint slides? I took notes but I'm sure I missed some stuff, the detailed info was coming at us pretty fast.

Thanks!
 
That was outstanding. I've heard the TransPac part twice before and have read Stan's article (on the PacCup website) several times, and each time I feel like I "get" more of it. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.pacificcup.org/stan-honeys-weather-advice

Correct me if you heard it differently - the three race stages in this article form the second, third and fifth of the five stages he discussed last night.

The first stage, getting to the synoptic wind, is the most important for the LongPac. I realize now I was focusing on the wrong GRIB file models for this.

Anyway, thanks a lot for setting that up AJ. It was great to have a full house for it, so also a 'thank you' to everyone for coming, and most of all to Stan and Sally.
 
Any news on posting of Stan's slides??

I really liked his discussion of weather models and their use in generating GRIB files for near offshore conditions. What were the two weather models that he spoke of? I can't recall which one was preferred for generating GRIB files for the LongPac...can anyone help with a quick summary.
 
Richard, the two models Stan discussed were COAMPS and GFS.

The Navy's COAMPS model accounts for terrain effects and is good within 20 miles of shore. Stan recommended studying the COAMPS grib files to determine how best to reach the synoptic breeze.

The GFS is more common and is recommended for offshore. GFS is what you get with PassageWeather, Grib.us, etc.

I can request gribs from either model from SailDocs through my nav software, but as I studied up for LongPac I discovered the COAMPS gribs are only available a few hours ahead, and are not interpolated (the grib "barbs" are really spread out). For example, the COAMPS grib files I studied for Spinnaker Cup (SF to Monterey) gave me only three or four relevant reference points along the coast, and I could not get a forecast very far ahead.

So as it turned out, the raw COAMPS data wasn't that useful for LongPac planning. Other local weather sites were more helpful since they interpolated the data for you and projected farther ahead - but that's mostly my lack of experience with this stuff.
 
I'll have to fire up the waffle iron* again and do some grib requests to answer precisely.

My nav software formats the grib file requests (from SailDocs) according to the range of lat/lon and time periods I specify. My recollection is I could specify a time period for GFS grib files out to five days, but only one or two days for COAMPS gribs. In a way that makes sense since the COAMPS gribs are intended for use close to shore. I also recognize that forecasts beyond 2-3 days are not very reliable.

Where it's a problem is if you wanted to do your forecasting on Tuesday night for the LongPac race running Wed-Sunday, and you won't have access to e-mail during the race. If you want grib files for the whole race (inaccurate as they may be) you have to request the GFS-based files.

* Old SH TransPac reference. It had to do with getting gribs on your grids, maybe with a side of grits. Okay, you had to be there . . .
 
Coamps

Bob, I think you're right about getting around 2 days of gribs with Coamps. But you can actually get better resolution than GFS. Coamps is available on a .2x.2 deg grid, while the smallest available for GFS is .5x.5 deg. Between here and Monterey that's quite a lot on Coamps.

Paul/Culebra
 
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