Day 200 Meteorology

We are anchored in the shallow harbor and not on the marina wall. We decided to anchor in the harbor because the windlass has now completely quit working and we have to lower and raise the chain by hand – not an easy chore. We did replace the heavy steel anchor with a lighter weight aluminum one but the chain itself is very heavy and pulling it up from the bottom is quite an effort.
We can easily get to shore in the dingy and from there can catch a free shuttle to any of the hotels. Near the Sheraton is an upscale coffee shop that has free WiFi and “Starbucks quality” coffees at almost Starbucks prices.
We spent a good part of the day in the Internet looking at weather charts with Dave from Talerra. The weather in this part of the Pacific originates at the equator and at the South Polar latitudes. These two systems collide at about 30º North Latitude. Cold air systems originate from the cold South and hot, moist air from the tropics. The cold air heads North and the warm air goes South but the spinning of the Earth biases them eastward across the Pacific. This causes periodic fronts that contain unstable air i.e. storms that could be violent. The yachting journals are filled with accounts of sailboats heading south to New Zealand and being damaged or lost in these storms. We want to avoid that!
Conventional wisdom has it that when the leading (or Eastern) edge of a high-pressure system reaches the West cost of Australia, it is time to head south. Since the magic 30º south latitude is about 4 to five days away from Fiji, by the time we reach 30º, the leading edge of the high should have passed and we will avoid any violent collision of weather systems. This would mean clear sailing to the 30º mark followed by favorable winds for the remainder of the trip to NZ.
One of the fascinating tools used to forecast the weather is a publication from NOAA called the GRIB files. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. GRIB is a grid based computer algorithm that predicts future weather patterns around the globe for 10 days in advance. No human intervention is used in this prediction. In other words, no weatherman looks at the data and tries to guess. The whole system is automatic and probably runs on a Cray supercomputer. Access to the files is on a subscription basis and so far as I know anyone in the world can subscribe.
The amazing thing is that all the yachting sources say that the GRIBs are “eerily” accurate. My questions are who the heck developed the algorithm and who paid for it? The Department of Defense perhaps?
The bottom line is that knowing how to sail a boat may be one thing and knowing how not to sink the boat may be another thing entirely.