When you’re cruising your often much more interested in getting somewhere than the act of sailing itself. When your out for a day sail, you want to sail and enjoy the feeling of the boat being pushed along.
So as a cruiser should you create a route from the likes of PredictWind and chase the wind all over the sea, or create a lay-line route and sail as close to it as you can and if you can’t motor-sail it?
Its a dilemma, because sailing not only means “fun” it also means not burning diesel.
But what we have learnt on Waiata is that if you go much off the lay-line looking for wind, you’ll end up motoring further most of the time and our golden rule now is… Sail a lay-line unless we are following the wind we have, but never too far from the lay-line or we’ll find ourselves becalmed and motoring further than we wanted too.