It’s a lovely summer day, and you’re pining to go on a longer journey than your usual casual afternoon boating outing. You want to spend the weekend miles away from your home port. The local TV weather forecast calls for a 40% chance of bad weather. Do you go or not?
Someone once said that the most dangerous thing on a boat is a schedule. The first time I went boating and shouldn’t have was a Labor Day weekend trip from Groton, Connecticut, to the “fishtail” eastern end of Long Island, where it splits into the north and south forks. We had a fun weekend, but the kids—all 13 of them on our four-boat flotilla—had to be back in school the next day. Even though the NOAA weather forecast was questionable, we took our chances. This was before chart plotters, GPS, tablets and 24-hour weather channels.
It wasn’t a good idea. We had to go through the Race, a watery gap between the North Fork and Fishers Island where the current can reach 6 knots as all the water rushes in and out of Long Island Sound. The wind came out of the north, which was unfortunately the direction that we wanted to go. It soon became clear that we would not make it back before dark, if at all.
Discretion—or something—being the better part of valor, we headed for the shelter of Greenport Harbor on Orient Point, New York. Off the wind, our 23-foot sailboat’s 6-horsepower outboard could make headway, and we relaxed but unfortunately too soon. The outboard faltered, and we could only keep it going by hand-pumping the bulb to feed it gas. That became the kids’ job. As a friend passed us, the first mate cried out, “We’re all going to die!”
Thankfully, we survived, taking the ferry home to get the children to school. We went back for the boats the next weekend.
Even seasoned cruisers are not immune to uncertainty about the weather. On my Intracoastal Waterway blog, boaters ask nearly daily if they should attempt such-and-such bay with winds from this or that direction.
How do you make a good decision? First, you can be fairly confident in the short-range forecast. They are accurate for about three days, and meteorologists almost always get big storms and weather fronts right, if not always the timing.
Nowadays we have tablets and phones that have
navigation apps with embedded weather information, and we also have weather apps that give more detail.
However, remember that most televised forecasts do not address the specific needs of boaters. NOAA radio and web pages are the first refuge of a wary heart, giving weeklong forecasts and expected wind and sea conditions.
Nowadays we have tablets and phones that have navigation apps with embedded weather information, and we also have weather apps that give more detail. Researching them for my planned boating apps seminar, I learned a lot.
Among apps designed for nonboating audiences, my favorite is MyRadar. Oriented toward airplane pilots, it provides a wind map and a detailed forecast for anyplace you move the map. The forecast includes the next two hours, an hourly forecast for the next 24, and a weekly forecast for temperatures, precipitation, wind and cloud cover.
My favorite weather app is the paid version of PredictWind. This app has wind direction, speed and gusts using 10 different weather models for each hour for up to 14 days, cloud cover, temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, moon phase, wave direction and height. There is also a daily briefing page for your location, animated maps, graphs, global weather patterns, sun and lunar charts, real-time observations and more. It also offers sail and power passage routings that change depending on your appetite for waves and wind.
No matter how good, no weather app can make us immune to pressures that might lead us astray. I said earlier that the most dangerous thing to a boater is a schedule. However, using some of these apps might just help you make a better go or no-go decision.
