Hello friends, family and casual lurkers! S/V Pasargada expects to be entering the ocean sometime as soon as August 19th and I expect that many of you have been awaiting this moment so that you could enjoy following us on the tracker.

If you first want to get a sense of how the track might look, you should check out the track of S/V Priya, this year’s earliest departure in the Coho Ho Ho Rally from Port Townsend to San Francisco. They left Seattle’s Shilshole Bay Marina early in the morning Monday, August 9th. You can see their track on the Coho Ho Ho tracker by selecting “S/V Priya” and then hitting submit. The displayed track includes months of going around Puget Sound before departure but the interesting part is when they enter the Strait of Juan de Fuca and then make the big left turn into the Pacific Ocean. The link here should pull up their most recent track and position, but you can zoom out to see where they came from in Puget Sound.

You will be able to do the same using that website when we leave (select S/V Pasargada, hit submit, then hit refresh on the page to load the most recent hourly position). Alternatively, you can follow the same position info on our Predict Wind Tracker. There you don’t have to refresh to get the latest position and you can layer in interesting information such as the current wind speeds and directions based on different weather models. At first the wind info may not load, but wait a bit and you should see a lot of rainbow colors and/or arrows on the screen. Right now our tracker just shows places we’ve gone inside Puget Sound the last few months, and mostly only once a day updates. When we are on passages, as we will be soon, we will be going to hourly satellite position updates. In this picture, I have clicked the layers icon and am showing how you can toggle different views of the wind map and then the different wind prediction models (PWG, PWE, ECMWF, GFS) – the squiggly lines rainbow view is probably the easiest to interpret – red is lots of wind and purple is like no wind. We sorta like yellow to orange wind with the arrows moving somewhat to the south along with us. So if you’re wondering if we have “fair winds and following seas” you can go to our PredictWind tracker and see what it thinks the current wind at our position is. It’s all based on models because there are not sensors all over the ocean. We may update (in the white boxes) with details of the actual conditions seen.

So when to start tracking us? Well, we expect to leave our marina Sunday evening (August 15th) and then go anchor in a nearby bay for the night when the first of our crew joins us. The next day we will sail back in to Seattle and go to the Bell Harbor Marina downtown to pick up our second crew who is getting to down via Amtrak and could easily walk to Bell Harbor. Being there will give us a chance to get some fresh local produce at Pike Place Market before we leave – a fond farewell to Seattle in a way. Then we expect to go part way up Puget sound Monday evening and continue to Port Townsend’s Boat Haven marina on Tuesday (August 17th). Our third crew member will meet us on Tuesday in Port Townsend and, assuming the weather window is good, we will leave Port Townsend at 5:30 AM Wednesday, August 18th to optimize the tides for going through the Admiralty Inlet and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

tldr; start tracking us early next week – tracker links are in this post or in the “Where is Pasargada?” link. For mobile site, click on the “Menu” pull down at the top of each page. For desktop site, it is in the blue section at the top of each page and there is also a quick link to our PredictWind tracker on the right hand column of each page.

We may also post short text updates on the PredictWind tracker as well as on our blog (we can send email over our satellite service to this site to make a blog post). So stay tuned!