Saturday, August 11, 2012

Unusually Usual

You know what they usually say when you go to some new location for a sailing regatta - "The weather isn't usually like this here."

It happens everywhere. They promise reliable breezes of a certain speed from a certain direction, but the time you actually go there, there is no wind at all, or it's blowing a gale, or it's pouring with rain, or the winds are flip-flopping back and forth like.... (name your least favorite politician)'s policies.

Buzzards Bay is no exception. The commonly accepted wisdom is that the heating of the land to the northeast of the bay during the day reinforces the prevailing wind blowing from the southwest along the length of the bay to give rise to 15 to 20-knot winds in the afternoon. But every time I have sailed the 3 day Buzzards Bay Regatta we have never had conditions like that every day. Last year we had one extremely frustrating light wind day, one "typical" day, and one day cancelled because of high winds, rain and thunderstorms.

This year, though was very unusual. We had winds from the south-west every day, over 10 knots every day, and on the first and third days building as the afternoon progressed.

Marvelous weather for Laser racing.

Unusually usual.


Friday




Saturday




Sunday


2 comments:

SoxSail said...

Where do you get these graphs? I'd love to grab them from this past weekend.

Thanks,
SoxSail

Tillerman said...

Those are screenshots from SailFlow.

Actually they are for Ned's Point which is some distance upwind from the area where we were racing. So our winds may have been a little different from that but I thought it was close enough to make the point.

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