We are presently tucked into Kiwiriki Bay in the Port Fitzroy area of New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island. It’s a raging gale outside the protected confines of the harbour—gusts in the high 40-knot range. Inside where we are anchored, the rain pours down endlessly, and the wind swirls around.

The anchor is set in mud just off of a knob of hillside with valleys to either side of us. This is proving to be a good spot so far. The wind is shifty, but lighter than further out in the bay.

In the bad old days, we’d take bearings off nearby prominent land features or navigation aids. We’d plot those bearings on a harbor chart or plotting sheet. We’d post an anchor watch and check those bearings once per watch. But it’s not the bad old days anymore. Today, we have apps.

We have three running right now: The crappy anchor alarm on our B&G Zeus 3S chart plotter; Anchor Pro, a long-time favorite, is running on the iPad; PredictWind’s new AnchorAlert is running on my iPhone.

All three apps plot our shifting position as we slew around in the breeze. All of them will sound an alarm if we swing or drag outside the designated safe zone. Having them running allows us to snooze at night knowing we’ll get rousted up if we drag.

We did some testing for PredictWind last year and provided feedback on their app. It’s gotten very good now and has become our preferred anchor watch app. Its best feature is that it updates our position to the PredictWind cloud (via Starlink), which means we can keep an eye on the boat while ashore (assuming we have a cell signal).

Anchor Pro can notify you remotely of an alert as well, but it does it over email, which means you have to constantly check your email ashore.

The chart plotter has a simple alarm. It sounds if the boat drifts outside a designated range (in feet or meters). It doesn’t have a way to identify where the anchor was dropped and thus you can’t get a clear picture on how the boat is behaving at anchor. Why a modern chart plotter doesn’t have a better anchor alarm is a mystery.

Looks like one more day of this nasty weather, and then we can go sailing again.

The Best Option for Most Cruising Sailors

• Roam-Unlimited Service Plan

• Tonga or Fiji Service Address (we use a marina in Fiji as our address).

• Opt-in Ocean Mode / Data when offshore (beyond 12nm)

  

• ~$100USD/month for unlimited data

• ~$2USD/GB when offshore using Ocean Mode / Overage Data

Sailors in North America should consider the Roam-Unlimited plan with a Mexico or Panama service address. The costs are similar to a Fiji or Tonga service address

Comparison of South Pacific Options

Roam-Unlimited Plan for common service address countries (per month):

• Fiji: $225FJD ($100 USD)

• Tonga: 240TOP ($100 USD)

• NZ: $220NZD ($129 USD)

• Australia: $195AUD ($127 USD)

• Marshall Islands: $100SUSD

• Mexico: $2,000MXP ($106 USD)

• Panama: $100USD

Choosing a Service Address Country

Starlink lets you choose the country in which you base your subscription—the “service address.” Give some consideration to which country you select:

1. Price

2. Where Starlink will ship your warranty replacement or accessories

3. Where you’ll be spending time (helpful if Starlink enforces the “60 Day Rule”)

Some cruisers have friends or family in a country who can receive and re-ship a replacement to them. Their address may be a good choice even though the subscription costs more.

Changing Your Account and Service Address to a New Country

If your current service address country doesn’t offer Roam-Unlimited as a subscription option (or you otherwise want to move your service address to a place closer to where you are sailing), you need to setup a new account and transfer your dish to your new account.

Not every service address in every country offers Roam-Unlimited as a subscription option. It’s easy to shop around on the Starlink site to determine a country address that will work for you and that offers Roam-Unlimited.

Follow these steps:

Cancel your current subscription. Note your dish serial number and kit number. You need it to activate it on your new account

Transfer your dish

Activate your dish and select “New Account”

Follow the prompts to establish the account and payment method and select “Roam-Unlimited as your subscription option

If you want to keep using your same email address and you are a gmail user, you can use gmail’s alias feature. It makes it possible to avoid setting up a completely new email address for your new account.

Example: name@gmail.com becomes name+starlink2@gmail.com

Limitations on Transferring Your Dish

Some users have run into a limits on transferring their dish. You may not be able to transfer your dish if your recently purchased it or recently activated it. Nothing stops you from creating a support ticket explaining your situation and asking for an exception.

Our Current Configuration

• Subscription Plan: Roam - Unlimited: 225FJD (~$100.USD) per month

• Service Address: Fiji (Vuda Marina)

• Ocean Mode / Overage Data when away from land (more than about 12 miles):

• Hardware: Gen2 Dish Kit, Stock OEM Starlink router

• Dish Orientation: Automatic (not flat)

• Dish Motors: Working (not disabled)

• Mount: Generic rail mount from Amazon, mounted on stern rail behind the port helm.

• Spares: Gen2 dish kit and router, Spare cable (router to dish)

Current Subscription Plan: Roam - Unlimited

Our current plan is about $100/month for unlimited data when near land (within about 12 miles). We turn on “Ocean Mode / Overage Data” if we want internet access while away from land. It’s about $2/GB.

Data Consumption

We use 300GB to 400GB of data each month when we are near land and running on “unlimited” data. This with no effort to control or manage the data usage of our various devices. We have two laptops, two iPhones, one iPad, one Smart TV, a PredictWind Datahub, and our Victron Cerbo all connected.

Offshore on a passage, we use about 4GB to 5GB per day provided we have our devices in “low data” mode.

Using Starlink Offshore with Roam-Unlimited

Here is what Starlink has to say about “ocean-use” with the Roam-Unlimited plan:

Our Roam-Unlimited plan has a “Global Priority” data toggle, similar to the old “Mobile Priority” toggle. We hope this means we can continue using the plan as usual.

What Happens Offshore?

If you don’t toggle on Global Priority data and you sail 12 miles away from land, you’ll see this:

It means you need to toggle on Ocean Mode / Overage data. On short passages between islands we often don’t bother. A few hours of disconnected-ness isn’t a bad thing.

Roam-Unlimited and the “60 Day” Rule

According to their terms, Starlink may limit the use of Roam-Unlimited outside of your home country to just 60 days. This has not been enforced in French Polynesia over the past year.

Starlink’s terms of service seem to indicate that this rule is invoked in areas that are sold out or have heavy bandwidth contention from land-based subscribers. That may explain why the term isn’t enforced here in French Polynesia. There are no land-based subscribers here.

If Starlink starts to enforce the 60 day rule for the Roam-Unlimited subscription plan in our location, it will effectively put an end to the usability of this plan for cruising sailboats—at least in this area.

Anticipating Changes to Starlink Plans

Recently, some subscribers on the “Mobile Priority” subscription plans have been forced to switch to new plans.

If Starlink eliminates the Roam-Unlimited plan or otherwise limits the use of it, we’ll likely be left with one of the “Priority Subscription” plans—Local or Global—which are available now.

Local & Global Priority Plans

The Local and Global Priority plans for business users have two parts: a monthly terminal fee and a per-GB data block fee. The price varies by service location, with Fiji being one of the least expensive.

The “Local Priority” plan may work since we’ll mostly be in and around Fiji this season. However, ocean use is prohibited, so it may not be an option. Or, Starlink may not enforce this provision. Or, they may not enforce that provision in some areas.

We’d pay $324FJD/mo for a 500GB block, which is about $141USD/mo. It’s not as good as our current plan, but still a great deal for high-speed internet on a cruising sailboat.

If “Local Priority” fails, we’d be left with the “Global Priority” plan, incurring a substantial cost increase.

A 500GB block would cost $405FJD/mo plus $1,350FJD/mo, totaling $1,755FJD/mo or about $765USD/mo.

In that case, we’d abandon Fiji and opt for a US-based Global Priority 500GB plan at $650/month.

Bottom Line on Subscription Options

We hope to continue using our Roam-Unlimited plan with a Fiji service address, and enabling Global Priority data when offshore.

Otherwise, the Global Priority plan at $650/month is the worst-case scenario. It’s expensive, and a big jump from $100/month. If you want high-speed, low-latency internet in the ocean, it’s your only option.

Confusion Over the Future of the Roam-Unlimited Plan

In September and October of 2024, some subscribers on some plans in some countries got emails from Starlink announcing the “Removal of Priority Data for Roam Service Plans.”

A few weeks later, some of those recipients got another email from Starlink stating they would “…extend the ability to use Mobile Priority opt-in on Roam Unlimited until early 2025…”

And some of us got emails that said nothing about this and simply mentioned, “…you’ll have access to In-Motion Use, International Travel, Coastal Coverage…” and raised our monthly subscription slightly.

All of this confusing communication led many to believe:

• Roam plans would be discontinued.

• Roam plans would remain, but the option to toggle priority data when offshore would be removed.

None of that came to pass. At least not yet. It might. But it hasn’t. We’ve been happily sailing around French Polynesia using our Fiji-based Roam-Unlimited plan for over a year, toggling on Global Priority Data whenever we are more than 12 miles from land.

Gen2 Dish: Flat Orientation & Disabled Motors

Early on, there were far fewer Starlink satellites in the sky. There are over 7,000 operational satellites today. Back in 2022 when cruisers were starting to use Starlink, there were half that many. Some users found that forcing the dish flat and disabling the orientation motors (by drilling a hole in the bottom of the dish) resulted in faster acquisition times and better performance.

That is less of an issue today. However, there are times when we are at anchor and swinging around rapidly that we use the app to set the dish flat to improve the performance.

The latest Gen3 dish is flat and has no motors.

Gen2 Dish Reliability

We’ve recently had our third Gen2 dish suffer a failed GPS chip. This is not an uncommon problem with these dishes. The symptoms include:

• Difficulty maintaining a connection while in motion

• Slow to reacquire a connection

• “Determining Location” message on the app screen never clears

• Debug Data shows “ GPS is not valid”

Starlink will replace the dish. It will be shipped to your service address. You can change and update the service address, but you can’t change countries. Our service address is currently in Fiji. When the last dish failed, our warranty replacement was sent to our service address in Fiji. We arranged for DHL to pick it up there and ship it to us in Tahiti. It took about 10 days. The shipping costs were what a new kit would have cost, but they aren’t available in Tahiti, so it was worth it.

For our latest replacement, Starlink is shipping us a V3 dish. They no longer offer Gen2 dishes in our part of the world. We’ll need to work out a new mount for that.

For now, we can limp along with our current Gen2 dish. We’ll swap out our spare Gen2 before we cross to the Cook Islands, Tonga, and Fiji. Hopefully, we will get at least 8 months out of the spare dish (which is how long the Gen2 dishes have been lasting us on average).

Activating a Spare Starlink Dish

We needed to swap out our failed Gen2 dish with a spare. We’ve got a long passage coming up, and the failed dish won’t hold a connection while we are sailing.

It was easy to do. www.starlink.com/activate. The activation site will ask if you want to open a new account or activate your spare dish on your existing account. We chose the latter. It lets you select the subscription plan specific to that dish. We stayed with a Fiji-based Roam-Unlimited plan.

Once the spare dish was up and running for two days, we paused the subscription on the failed dish. That way, we don’t have to pay for two subscriptions. Once we pick up our warranty replacement in Fiji (a Gen3 dish), we’ll decide what to do next.

I needed an internet connection to complete this process. Do it when you have 4G/5G cellular access or before your current dish completely fails (my method here).

Make sure your spare dish is free from a previous account and has been “transferred.”

For now, we are back in action!

What About The Starlink Mini Dish?

We don’t have any experience with the “mini.” Many cruising sailors have minis now, all of whom are making it work. Those that previously had Gen2 dishes report slightly more incidents of lost connections with their mini dish. One reported it would overheat under an awning (but creating an airspace solved that). For all of them, it was worth the tradeoff to get lower power consumption. 65 watts for the Gen3. 22 watts for the mini. That’s 53 amp hours over 16 hours daily!

What is the Deal with Starlink and French Polynesia?

Starlink is not available in French Polynesia. You can’t buy the equipment here, and you can’t subscribe to the service here. You can’t use a French Polynesia service address.

Recent reports suggest you can’t get a Starlink dish kit shipped here anymore (we were able to get a warranty replacement shipped to Tahiti back in September 2024).

Starlink has to negotiate tariff and operating agreements with each regulator in each country in which it sells its equipment and service. It is a herculean legal and business development challenge. That accounts for the different prices and experiences subscribers have among various countries.

OPT/Onati Monopoly and OneWeb/EutelSat

French Polynesia has granted their external telecommunications monopoly to the incumbent operator, Office des Postes et Télécommunications (OPT), and its operational subsidiary, Onati. OPT/Onati’s stated strategy is to partner with OneWeb (owned by EutelSat) for satellite-based internet. Availability of a solution from them was scheduled for the first quarter of 2025. That did not happen. No specifics about services and pricing have been announced. 

Whether OPT/Onati eventually launches a service and whether it is competitive with Starlink remains to be seen.

Permission to Import Starlink Dish Kits

There is a case currently before the administrative tribunal in Papeete. This case specifically challenges an administrative decision banning the importation of Starlink antennas into French Polynesia. It is reportedly the first such refusal to be formally adjudicated by the tribunal. The outcome of this case may determine whether sailors and residents can import Starlink dish kits into French Polynesia.

Our Experience

Starlink is a game changer (an overused expression but true in this case). It has allowed me to build and run a global consulting business while sailing across the Pacific and through French Polynesia. We stay in daily contact with our friends and family through phone and video. It enables luxuries like watching movies, popular shows, and the NFL Super Bowl streamed to our computers or television.

For sailing and passaging making, you can’t beat instantaneous access to weather information. It is helpful to access the current satellite loop to determine what you will soon face or how long you’ll be dealing with the current conditions. Before Starlink, the best we got was a single satellite image download that might be half a day old.

It’s not without its drawbacks. It changes the nature of the cruising experience. We are still nearly as “connected” as we were back home. It has largely killed off the HF Radio nets on HAM and SSB as well as the local VHF morning cruiser’s net. Those have been replaced by WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, and apps like NoForeignLand.

People complain about Starlink changing its plans and terms. This is the nature of iterative development. Try new things. Keep what works. Abandon or change what doesn’t. That approach is what gets you high-speed, low-latency internet in the middle of the ocean at an affordable price (in your cruising lifetime).

People hate change and unpredictability. If you want predictability and stability, you’ll get your cable company (or your mobile carrier). And they don’t have high-speed internet in the middle of the ocean (and likely never will).

Not everyone loves Starlink. We get it. But we wouldn’t go back.

Thank you to Ian Clarke and Chris Rabbidge for their editorial contributions to this post.

Why is our solar production low? Why is the weather unpredictable? Why is the sea-state rough and confused? Why so much rain? Over the past two months, I noticed things had changed from what we experienced the previous year.

It’s the dangerous middle1. The term given to the 1,400nm stretch of ocean between French Polynesia’s Society Islands and Fiji. “Middle” because it’s roughly the middle portion of the “Coconut Milk Run” route through the South Pacific from the Marquesas to New Zealand.

It’s dangerous not because of piracy. It’s dangerous because of complacency. We were into a comfortable groove in French Polynesia. The weather was good with sunny days and predictable patterns. The navigation was straightforward and well charted. The distances from one stop to the next were manageable. We could get to and from Tahiti and the Tuamotus in one overnight passage. We could pick our travel windows with confidence.

Leaving the Society Islands in April and sailing west marked a significant change. The weather was less predictable. The stops were further apart. There were fewer boats around. We were out of sync with the main cruiser migration and often sailing alone without a buddy boat nearby.

The South Pacific Convergence Zone

The SPCZ2 is an area where the equatorial easterly winds and the southeast trade winds converge. This convergence creates a zone of unstable weather, characterized by erratic trade winds, frequent low-pressure systems, and convergence zone activity. It accounted for the challenging weather, the difficulty in forecasting it, and the resulting drop in solar production. It meant relying on our diesel generator to keep up with our electrical consumption.

Confused Seas

The sea-state is the single most important factor in a passage3. When the seas are calm, anything is possible. When the seas are rough, everything sucks. In this stretch, the seas are “confused”—meaning multiple wave trains of different heights, periods, and directions. The main ocean swell is generated by storms in the Southern Ocean and rolls in from the south. The wind blows mostly from the east to the west and creates wind waves on top of the swell but in an east-to-west direction. The result is at best an annoying “lumpy gravy” sea state or at worst a very rough washing machine that tosses the boat around.

Convergence

Unlike the frontal weather we are accustomed to back home, where weather fronts move predictably from west to east across the weather map, the weather here is dominated by convergence—two air masses crashing into each other and going straight up. Add some atmospheric instability, and you get rain, squalls, thunderstorms, and generally overcast, crappy weather.

South Pacific weather is harder to forecast than weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Weather models need live observations to initialize. There are heaps of live weather observations in the Northern Hemisphere. The models have a lot to work with. The Southern Hemisphere has very few live weather observations. The models have less to work with.

Long Distances

There are a few stops out in the dangerous middle. The Cook Islands, Niue, and Tonga lie on the direct route to Fiji. Some boats sail north to call on American Samoa for easy access to American boat parts and groceries. These stops are far apart. Most are multi-day passages in unpredictable conditions.

The upside is that Aitutaki in the Cook Islands, Niue, and Tonga were more than just way stations. They turned out to be wonderful destinations. I’d be happy going back to all of them. Wonderful people, interesting cultures, beautiful anchorages, and excellent diving.

Navigation and Landfall

We increasingly relied on satellite images from Google Earth on this stretch. Nautical charts in this area of the Pacific are often inaccurate. Some are still based on cartography from Captain Cook. There are boats that run up on reefs here either because the reef simply wasn’t on their charts or because they weren’t zoomed in sufficiently on their electronic charts to notice the reef. We use three different chart sources—Navionics (by Garmin), C-Map (by Navico), and New Zealand government charts rendered in OpenCPN. We also use Google Earth satellite images, which are often more accurate than any of the charts.

Fiji

Getting to Fiji was a goal for us this season. Arriving in Fiji means getting here but also continuing another 130nm miles into the country, through the islands and reefs, in order to reach Savusavu, where you can clear customs, immigration, health, and biosecurity. Another half day or more of sailing.

Now that we are here, we’ve had time to rest up and enjoy some luxury time in the new Nawi Island Marina in Savusavu. Reflecting back on the past few months going across the dangerous middle, we didn’t fully appreciate the demands of this part of the South Pacific.

As my friend Chris says, “…this is big-boy sailing…”

Title Image Credit: Edmund1234 - Original sourced from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pacific_Culture_Areas.svg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148457632

Most of what is written on the topic of weather for sailors attempts to turn sailors into amateur meteorologists. It doesn’t work.

Sure, there are some sailors who geek out on weather and get into the weeds on parcel theory, deep moist convection, and the Madden-Julian oscillation. They are the ones quick to quote the day’s 500-millibar chart. They are the weather hobbyists.

The rest of us are managing risk. We are deciding when to depart, what route to sail, what sails to set, and what conditions to expect. We are never going to understand enough about weather to out-forecast professional weather forecasters and modern forecast models. And even if we could, we don’t forecast often enough to remember how to consistently put all that knowledge and information into practical use.

How we make weather decisions

Our goal is to keep the process as simple as possible (but no simpler). We start with the tools:

• Windy.com (Premium subscription)

• PredictWind (Professional Subscription)

And employ them in a simple process:

1. Big picture quick look

2. Sea State

3. Wind Speed and Direction

4. Rain and Thunderstorms

5. Departure Planning

6. Routing

If it is a long passage or one where we aren’t confident in our weather conclusions, we’ll enlist the help of a professional weather router to critique our plan and challenge our thinking.

It’s Sunday, and we are thinking of departing Mo’orea for Huahine on Thursday. I’ve been watching the big picture every morning for the past week. We’ll use this upcoming passage in the example below.

Passage Planning:

1. Big picture: Windy Pressure Map.

We zoom way out (wide enough to see New Zealand on the screen). Click through each day to see how the highs are moving across the Southern Ocean and the result they have on wind direction. This gives us a nice 10-day look at how things are going to play out. It’s very visual and it sticks in my head for days.

2. Sea State: Windy Wave Map

When seas are flat and calm, almost anything is possible. If the seas are rough, almost everything sucks. It’s the sea state that breaks sailors and boats, not the wind. We want less than two-meter seas. One meter is even better. We’d prefer the seas to be going in the direction we are going (following seas). They usually aren’t, but a guy can dream.

Consider the “period”—the distance (in seconds) between the waves. The longer, the better. The period needs to be at least twice the wave height (in meters) to be comfortable. 2.5x is even better. Two-meter seas need at least a four-second period. Five seconds is even better.

Both PredictWind and Windy have sea-state maps. PredictWind has more models to choose from. Windy allows you to break down the waves into component parts. The seas are always confused (waves coming from different directions). Looking at the individual wave components never changed our decision if the overall height was two meters or less.

3. Wind: Windy “Wind Gusts”

We look at how hard the wind will blow and from which direction it will blow. This starts us thinking about sail selection and configuration.

We use the “Wind Gusts” map, not the “Wind” map. This is especially true of the ECMWF weather model, which chronically underestimates the wind speed.

From the wind direction, we’ll figure out the True Wind Angle across the route. That will determine our sail selection. “Jack” our Code 65 reaching sail (“Jack Reacher,” get it?) doesn’t perform well in True Wind Angles greater than 135 degrees. “Samantha,” our symmetrical spinnaker, likes True Wind Angles greater than 150 degrees.

If the seas are relatively flat, we don’t care too much about how hard the wind blows. But they go together. When the wind blows hard enough for long enough, the seas get big.

4. Rain and Thunderstorms: Windy “Rain & Thunder” and “Rain Accumulation” map

Click through the days and look at what the models think the rainfall will be. Unless it shows large, nasty thunderstorms, we’ll depart anyway and live with the rain—especially if the seas are slight and the wind is going in the right direction.

5. Departure Planning: PredictWind

The Kiwi software gurus at PredictWind have created an amazing tool for sailors. We feed it our boat’s performance potential, our desired comfort level, our start and end points, and it figures out the best day to leave and the best route to sail. It tells us the conditions to expect, which helps us prepare the boat and configure our sails.

We start with the “Departure Planning” option. It runs a series of simulations using the average of four different weather models and then lets us know which of the four departure times is best.

The data is also presented in tabular form, and it’s what we look at first. It’s clear from the simulations that Thursday evening, April 3rd, is the best day and time to go. Once again, it’s all about the sea state.

6. Sail Routing: PredictWind

Now that we have the best day and time to depart, we can run a detailed analysis. This gives us the best route to sail, the optimum sail configuration, and the conditions we can expect.

All 7 weather models suggest sailing straight to the destination. Some suggest rounding the south end of the island. Others suggest rounding the north end. They are all reasonably consistent, which gives us high confidence in the plan. If the different models are each suggesting different routes, we have less confidence in the plan. We’ll dig into what might causing the models to disagree. We will make a final call on which way to round the island as our departure time gets closer.

PredictWind’s Sail Routing also produces this information in graphical form. Here is the True Wind Angle across the entire trip. It’s around 130 degrees. That will work well for “Jack” our Code 65. We’ll reef the main to keep the speed down and because it’s a overnight passage with only one person on deck.

It’s A “Go”:

Sitting here five days out, Thursday looks like a good day to go. We’ll re-run this every morning to see if the weather models change their forecast and if those changes affect the conditions we’re expecting. If things start to look different, we may wait until a better “weather window” presents itself.

You can see why this is the best safety tool we have. The best way to deal with a storm is not to go out in one. The best way to reduce risk is to get off the ocean as soon as you can.

Inputs Into the Model:

We have to give some inputs to the PredictWind model so it has something to work with beyond weather. We give it our desired comfort level and our boat’s “polars.” The “polars” tell the model how fast the boat will sail given a certain wind speed, wind angle, and sea state.

One reason we pay for the “professional” version of this software is that it constantly calculates our “polar” performance assumptions based on how we actually sail our boat. PredictWind calls it “AI Polars.” We have a “DataHub” that constantly records the performance data of our boat when we are sailing. It uploads that data via Starlink to PredictWind. They crunch that data and produce the performance assumptions we then use the next time we plan a trip. Pretty amazing.

Human Weather Routing Service:

We often engage the services of a professional weather router. We’ll do this for longer passages or in situations where we feel like we want more insight into our risks.

I typically work out a plan and then send it to our weather router for critique. He’ll often see things I don’t and make suggestions on timing and route.

We have been working with MetBob for the past year. He routed us across the Pacific last year. He also helped route us on a few passages around French Polynesia.

He writes an excellent blog focused on South Pacific weather.

I appreciate Bob’s willingness to engage in a discussion of our plan and not just give us sailing directions. It helps me learn and improve my own interpretation and decision-making.

Satellite Loop: Right Here, Right Now

It’s hard to beat the current satellite loop image when you want to know what is happening right now and what is coming in the next hour or so. Windy has a great view. Turn on the infrared and lightening options.

South Pacific Weather

Many years ago Jim and Sue Corenman sailed their Schumacher 50, Heart of Gold, through the South Pacific. Jim wrote a series of articles for Latitude 38 Magazine titled, “Letters from the South Pacific.” They were the stuff of dreams for me. And here we are as a result.

Few people explain South Pacific weather as well as he.

Post Script to the Passage:

We made it to Huahine. How did it work out?

Short answer: Passage as planned; weather as forecast. That’s what we aim for.

The model forecasts didn’t change appreciably from Sunday through our departure on Thursday evening. The forecast conditions turned out to be spot on. The passage timing was within one hour of the plan. We had a mild squall just as we approached the pass into Fare, Huahine. Nothing major.

It was a glorious overnight sail. Fast and smooth. Just the way we like it.

Excerpt from our log

16 43.231s 151 02.329w

Fri Apr 04 2025 08:00:00 GMT-1000 (Tahiti Time)

All is well. We are once again anchored in the south flats near the town of Fare, Huahine. We arrived after a fantastic overnight passage from Mo’orea. We sailed a broad reach in slight seas with a reefed main and Jack, our Code 65. 1/3 daggers. Passage as planned, weather as forecast.

The GPS chip in our Starlink dish failed during the passage. The third dish we’ve had with this failure. Fortunately we have a spare dish but it is disconcerting this keeps happening.

Catana built 90 471s and finished 12 of them as 472s. One of those 12 is anchored next to us!

Roam is a 2001 Catana 472 designed by Christophe Barreau and built by Catana in Canet-en-Roussillon, France. The 472 is a higher-spec version of the legendary 471. Approximately 90 471s were built of which 12 were finished as 472s. Roam was built as 471 hull #35 and finished as 472 hull #09.

Her length on deck is a little over 46 feet with a waterline of 45 feet. The longeron brings her overall length to a little over 51 feet. She is just over 25 feet wide which means she will fit into many marine travel lifts. With her daggerboards fully up she draws less than three feet of water. Her custom carbon-fiber mast towers more than 70 feet above the water.

Why a Catana 472?

For us the right boat needed to be:

• Comfortable to live on for long periods

• Fun to sail

• Manageable for the two of us

• Reasonably fast while carrying a typical cruising load

• Built and equipped to comfortably and safely cross oceans

• At a price point that made sense for us

• Not a “project boat” requiring an extensive refit

With the 471/2 Barreau achieved a near-perfect balance between performance, comfort, livability, and load-carrying ability.

Catamarans are known for being comfortable live-aboard boats. Guests and crew are well separated in the hulls. The cockpit creates a giant “patio” conducive to easy outdoor living. Cats don’t lean or heel when sailing and they don’t roll around at anchor making housekeeping and cooking much safer and easier.

However, most cats are built for the charter market and they simply don’t sail well. They are optimized for volume, space, and convenience because that is what charter guests want and what charter companies want to offer. These boats make fine “island hoppers” and are usually motored from one mooring to the next. The sailing performance and construction for crossing oceans simply aren’t needed in charter boats the way they are in ocean-going cats.

History

We are Roam’s fifth owners. She was launched in 2001 in France, sailed the Mediterranean, crossed the Atlantic, and cruised the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and the US east coast. Eventually, she transited the Panama Canal and sailed north to Pacific Mexico. New owners brought her to the Pacific Northwest before she returned to Mexico where she has been actively cruising for the past four years in the Sea of Cortez and the Mexican mainland.

Friends of friends connected us with her previous owners who were shifting gears in life and were beginning to think about selling their boat. The rest is history!

Cruising World Magazine Boat Review, Catana 472, March 2001

661KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Euro-Elegance Meets Cruising Cat Performance

Download

Construction

Catana’s design and construction techniques were ahead of their time when Roam was built. She was laid up with two outer hull molds and one deck mold that was vacuum bagged using vinyl ester resin and cored with PVC closed cell foam with unidirectional cloth for outer laminate & Twaron aramid cloth for inner laminate over the entire hull. This results in a very strong, lightweight structure that won’t rot if water gets in. This makes the boat essentially unsinkable. Most catamarans (and most boats generally) are built with less expensive balsa-cored hulls and polyester resin which is subject to rot and blistering from water intrusion.

The daggerboard trunks were over-engineered to be seven times stronger than the daggerboards. All of the structural bulkheads were cored with a Nida-Core honeycomb core with carbon fiber on both sides. Roam’s main bulkheads were reinforced with carbon fiber based on engineering advice from Catana making her one of the strongest 471/2s out sailing today.

The boat is rigged with a carbon mast and boom and originally used synthetic, Kevlar rigging for the cap shrouds (later changed to stainless wire). Roam, like many 472s also has a carbon fiber longeron which serves as a robust bowsprit for flying reaching and downwind sails.

Catana created a digital switching system to reduce wire weight in the boat. Something that is common now but quite cutting-edge back in the early 2000s. Roam’s electrical system accommodates both 120-volt, 60-hertz, and 220-volt, 50-hertz sources and devices. She can plug in anywhere in the world.

Catana no longer builds performance cruising catamarans like the 472. The last one, a Catana 53 was built in 2023. Instead, they focus their production and marketing on the Bali line of catamarans aimed at the charter market. It makes sense. The charter market is roughly 95% of the entire catamaran market. It also means this generation of performance Catanas remain in high demand.

Catana 472 Caligo Specs & Inventory

377KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Original factory sales sheet.

Download

Refits and Upgrades

All boats require maintenance and upgrades. The extent to which these refits are done is largely a function of how the boat was used as well as its future plans.

Roam is no exception. The boat was extensively upgraded and refit over the years including carbon reinforced main bulkheads, new Yanmar 4JH57 engines, SD60 sail drives, new North sails, Victron LiFePo4 electrical system, a new Northern Lights 5KW generator, a new CruiseRO SM30 water maker to name a few.

The big cost drivers when considering used catamarans are the rigging, sails, engines, electrical system (solar, batteries, and charging), and hull finish. With the exception of the need to replace her standing rigging, all of Roam’s major systems have been updated or replaced within the last three years.

Why the name Roam?

Roam (roʊm)

intransitive verb

1: to go from place to place without purpose or direction

2: to travel purposefully unhindered through a wide area

3: to use a cellular phone outside one’s local calling area

Merriam Webster

More Information

Ship's Drawings

1.36MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Roam's layout, configuration, and schematics.

Download

Catana Owener’s Support Group

Catana Owner’s Facebook Group

Catana Catamarans For Sale Facebook Group

Roam’s days as a charter cat

Sail Magazine’s article on Catana 472, El Gato

Subscribe now

Unsaved changes