Understanding weather is more than just knowing whether (sic) you are going to have a sunny day out on the water. The weather is so inextricably linked to boating that it behooves boaters to fully understand weather so that they can stay safe and not head out or get caught in inclement weather.
Anyone can tell you what the weather is like by simply looking out of the window but the trick is to be able to look forward or 'forecast' with some degree of accuracy what is likely to happen in the future be that in the next day, week or month.
Most folks are familiar with the with the weather forecast that they get each evening after the news on TV but these reports are very brief and cover a large area and as such are of limited value to boaters.
If you know where to look then there is an almost bewildering array of weather information that is available to boaters and much of it is free. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ) is the government agency that provides weather information to other agencies and individuals. Their web site can be hard to navigate partially because they are trying to disseminate so much information but there is ton of information available, everything that the boater could want and then some. NOAA provides dedicated small craft weather forecasts which have such information as significant wave heights, visibility and expected wind. It is also possible to download synoptic charts for free and these can be a boon but only if you know what you are looking at. I have found that the best approach is to spend some time at home or the office looking at the NOAA website, find the links that are the most appropriate to me and save these to my smart phone so that I can update my information on a regular basis while I am out on the boat. Of course this only works if I am in cell range so for offshore weather via satellite is a good way to go. The most well known of these is the XM weather service, as shown on the chart plotter above which is a subscription service with costs ranging from $10 to $50 per month depending on the amount and detail of the information required. In addition to paying for the service you need a compatible receiver and for many boaters it is possible to integrate this into the chart plotter or multi function display that they already have . Exactly how to do this will depend on the manufacturer of your particular hardware but in most instances you will need to add at least an extra antenna. The beauty of receiving weather data via satellite is that the weather data can be integrated into the other information that is on the display, for instance you can overlay weather data over the chart that you have displayed in the cockpit or at the nav station.
There is also a lot of old sailors wisdom that still holds good and things that were learnt as a child are just as relevant today. 'Red sky at night sailors delight, red sky in morning sailors warning' and 'when rain comes before the wind, halyards, sheets and braces mind, but when wind comes before rain, soon you may make sail again'. It is very easy to dismiss these rhymes as folklore but there is lot of truth to them and in the days of the clipper ships there was virtually nothing in the way of weather forecasting and captains of these ships had to rely on their own knowledge and experience. Apart from making observations of the wind and sky an accurate barometer aboard is a vey useful forecasting tool but sadly they are often little more than a bulkhead ornament but they can give the boater useful information. Most barometers if you have ever looked at one have writing on the face such as fair, cloudy, stormy and so on, this is more for decoration than anything else. To be of any use to the yachtsman readings from the barometer should be taken at regular intervals say every hour, the readings recorded in the log book and then a mental picture can be drawn up of what the weather is likely to do. A barometer is simply an instrument for reading barometric pressure and this is shown either in inches or millibars depending on the actual barometer scale. High pressure normally indicates settled weather and low pressure windy unsettled weather and the barometer is very sensitive to changes and these show up as the needle either moving up or down with and increase or decrease in pressure. A sudden drop in pressure over a few hours will almost always foretell that unsettled weather is coming.
The weather is so built into our physcy that when we call on people we almost alway ask what the weather is like.
There is do doubt about it that the weather is a very interesting subject and one which has a huge impact on the lives of boaters if there is one boat that I can recommend for further study it is The Yachtsman Weather Guide by Ingrid Holford which has been in print for some years now but is interesting reading and shows you how to make sense of all this squiggly lines on a weather chart.
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