Hilton Head Island: doldrums and average speed

Recently two comments have been made to journal entries that I believe deserve to be answered here.

First, David asked:  My apologies for the off topic question on this post. I believe I read that your prefer sailing boats with no motor. How did you handle the doldrums when you were circumnavigating. If you’ve written about this before, where can I find it? Thanks.

And on another entry the ubiquitous Anonymous asked:  I seem to remember that you wrote either in some article, or here in your blog, what the average speed was for each circumnavigation.  Is that something you have posted?

Here is the response to the question about the doldrums.

I don’t know that I have ever specifically written about this, but the answer is that I sailed through them. The key is having a boat that sails well, and sailing performance has always been a high priority with me. 

Without going back and counting, I think I have crossed the Equator and therefore the doldrums, properly called the Intertropical Convergence Zone, but I prefer doldrums, 13 times on five different boats from the 18’ CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE to two 37’ers, EGREGIOUS and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA., Two of these boats were engineless as essentially is GANNET with her electric outboard having a range of around 6 miles, but even on RESURGAM and THE HAWKE OF TUONELA which had inboard diesels I never powered any significant distance at sea. 

The doldrums are not an area of zero wind, but of inconsistent and variable wind. In the early days of sail they stopped ships because the ships did not sail well to windward and often had foul bottoms.

If there is no wind, I wait until it returns.

You can find details of my transiting the doldrums in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA on my fifth circumnavigation in THE FIFTH CIRCLE

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/books.html

and in GANNET 

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/logs.html

Upon more careful review I have in fact crossed the Equator and doldrums 14 times.  Twice on each of my six circumnavigations and twice on my first two unsuccessful attempts to reach Cape Horn.  Once on the way south from San Diego.  Once on the way north after a repeat of rigging damage in the Southern Ocean.

Of average speeds, I vaguely remember calculating it for my first circumnavigation, but that was almost fifty years ago.  It is not in STORM PASSAGE and probably was published in a long forgotten magazine article.

I only have numbers for my last two circumnavigations.  The fifth from Opua, New Zealand to Opua, in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA, and my sixth from San Diego, California, to San Diego in GANNET.

The numbers and daily runs for THE HAWKE OF TUONELA can be found at the end of her passage log.

https://www.inthepresentsea.com/the_actual_site/

The circumnavigation took 193 days and 10 hours.

The total distance of her daily runs was 23,992 nautical miles.

Rounding the days to 193.5 and the miles to 24,000, the average daily noon to noon run was 124.03 miles for an average speed of 5.13 knots.

THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s best day’s run was 171 miles.  Her best week was 1111 miles.  And she had 6 more than 1000 mile weeks.

GANNET’s circumnavigation took 282 sailing days.

The total distance was 29989 miles.

Rounding the distance to 30,000 miles, her daily average was 106.4 miles for an average speed of 4.43 knots.

GANNET’s best day’s run was 180 miles.  She had only one thousand mile week.  That was 1002 miles.  She had 4 weeks of more than 900 miles.

As always these numbers are less than what the boats actually did because I measure day’s runs as straight line distance between noon positions and often sail more than that over the bottom and because many of the counted days were not full twenty-four hours, such as at the beginning and end of each passage and when anchoring every night day sailing inside Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

The key to having a good daily average is not as much in going fast as in avoiding going slow and GANNET had a terribly slow final leg from Panama to San Diego which included five of the six slowest weeks of her entire circumnavigation.

I hope this answers your questions and you find the numbers of interest.  I enjoyed compiling them.