London to Auckland

This leg will be a good warm up for us for the big ocean crossings to come later. It throws up a number of new challenges such as range of the skis, use of the support boat, collision avoidance at sea, navigation and weather forecasting. I’ll now discuss each issue.

The range of the skis with long range tanks will be around 500km in good conditions and as low as 300km in bad conditions. This leg is 856km long with a quick stop at Karpathos at the 180km mark which leaves us with an uninterupted leg of 676km. This will mean that we will need to refuel from the support boat(SB). At this point it is planned to carry this fuel in bladders aboard the SB. We are planning to have a system in place whereby we can lift each ski onto the SB for refueling and maintenance purposes. There has been a lot of discussion on just how this will be done and the consensus at the moment is that it will be done with a crane and sling or hook. Any comments on this from readers would be welcome. In any event, whatever sytem we put in place will have it’s limitations in rough seas.

Overnighting on the SB will be interesting too. We will need to throw out a sea anchor and drift overnight. In the morning we will then need to motor back to the precise GPS point that we stopped riding and head on from there. The Mediterranean Sea is a particularly busy area for shipping and there will be a danger of being run over in the night so we will have radar reflectors, a SB radar with an alarm and a person on watch at all times. We will also have an AIS (Automatic Identification System) on board which is a transponder type sytem that tells other ships details about your ship such as identity, boat type, position, speed, course etc.

Navigation should be easy with GPS and the easy way to do this would be to follow the SB but this won’t always be practical so we will need to rely on GPS sytems on the skis. From experience I can tell you that this is not as easy as it seems. When riding it’s important to be looking ahead of the skis and reading each wave in advance. Looking down at a GPS readout distracts you from this so you have to employ tactics like aiming for a particular cloud on the horizon or hitting each swell at the same angle and just correct the course slightly from the GPS every now and then.

Good weather forecasting will be important for the ocean crossings as there’s no where to run if you get caught in a storm. We will have access to good forecasting through the net and by weather fax. Thankfully my knowledge of meterology is pretty good from my aviation career.

Below is a photo taken from space of the eastern Mediterranean. Our crossing takes us from the islands in the top left in a south easterly direction to Port Said which is on the coast at the bottom of the picture on the right side of the black area which is greater Cairo and the Nile Delta. You can also see the Suez Canal heading further south east. The Canal and Cairo will be the subject of my next post on the route.