THIS url has the map of the Pacific in May 1997 of the drifting buoys from one of the buoy sites that I previously directed your attention to. <http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/graphics/dacdata/te_may97.gif> Notice the arrows moving from left to right near the equator: Zero Latitude. I used that current at that time and place to power a 68' sailboat from Tahiti to Panama. Normally the current is running the other way. The 3 weeks that we were enroute down the equator the current alone carried us 900 nautical miles. Saved us about a weeks running time and the fuel involved. If the current had been running the other way, it would have added about 4 days to the run, plus the week that was saved, in other words, about 10-11 days, extra. At 1 1/2 gals per hour, it would have required an extra 400 gals of fuel. If it had turned on us, we might not have made it has we had only 1250 gals of fuel to cover 3600 miles. If you work the arithmetic it comes out to be about 800 hours of running time. Our speed through the water was about 5 knots, under best conditions. That's 4000 miles. If you subtract an adverse current of 2 knots, you can see that we would not have made it. We used the sails for 600 miles, so that leaves 3000 miles to run on the 800 hours of fuel. If you divide that up, you end up requiring a speed of just under 4 knots over the ground in order to make it. This demonstrates how important knowing current strength is in calculating safe cruising range. These drifting buoy web sites can be very useful. You can select the report for the present month, if you want to know what is going on right now. It shows a very different pattern. The URL for Dec 2004 is: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/graphics/dacdata/te_dec04.gif At the time I did not have access to this information from the buoy centers. I did have reports from reliable sources that the conditions that we encountered, were in fact as shown. Regards, Mike