Seastream
New Member
A little story about animated weather onboard
As a software author and yachtsman with over 25000 miles experience sailing in the med, I was totally fed up with the complete lack of easy to get and easy to use weather information on demand for the liveaboard
A few of my friends in the same game as me who I have converted to sailing decided that we would try to develop something as a hobby. What came to mind was how do the racing fleets get their wind routing information. After all, the wind is probably the most important factor to know for a transit. No surprise, it’s from satellite information.
18 months on, we have managed to condense the huge array of data available into a very small file, which takes only 2 ½ minutes to download with a mobile phone, or only 40 seconds if using a GRPS data card. What we have been able to see is a moving picture of the wind, highs and lows, temperature etc of the area we’ve chosen. We can stop or pause the information at any time as though it was a simple cassette recorder. So on a night crossing for example we can see what’s going to happen before we set out. So off we went to test it.
We chose Villasimius, Sardinia to Mahon, Menorca for a test (roughly a 36 hour crossing for us) We had to sit in Villasimius for 10 days in bad weather watching our downloads for a break in the weather. We saw a window in the weather, which predicted we would have about 4 hours to spare at the other end before it broke again.
It worked to a tee! We were absolutely overjoyed and have since been testing it all summer with astonishing accuracy. I can now see how Ellen Macarthur broke the records by using satellite information to take advantage of the weather conditions.
So far as I say, we’ve had great results and wondered just how many people take a pc and mobile phone with them these days.
At the moment we’re refining ease of use, but shortly we’d like to get some feedback from other yachties on its accuracy, functionality etc. Anyone interested please drop me a line.
As a software author and yachtsman with over 25000 miles experience sailing in the med, I was totally fed up with the complete lack of easy to get and easy to use weather information on demand for the liveaboard
A few of my friends in the same game as me who I have converted to sailing decided that we would try to develop something as a hobby. What came to mind was how do the racing fleets get their wind routing information. After all, the wind is probably the most important factor to know for a transit. No surprise, it’s from satellite information.
18 months on, we have managed to condense the huge array of data available into a very small file, which takes only 2 ½ minutes to download with a mobile phone, or only 40 seconds if using a GRPS data card. What we have been able to see is a moving picture of the wind, highs and lows, temperature etc of the area we’ve chosen. We can stop or pause the information at any time as though it was a simple cassette recorder. So on a night crossing for example we can see what’s going to happen before we set out. So off we went to test it.
We chose Villasimius, Sardinia to Mahon, Menorca for a test (roughly a 36 hour crossing for us) We had to sit in Villasimius for 10 days in bad weather watching our downloads for a break in the weather. We saw a window in the weather, which predicted we would have about 4 hours to spare at the other end before it broke again.
It worked to a tee! We were absolutely overjoyed and have since been testing it all summer with astonishing accuracy. I can now see how Ellen Macarthur broke the records by using satellite information to take advantage of the weather conditions.
So far as I say, we’ve had great results and wondered just how many people take a pc and mobile phone with them these days.
At the moment we’re refining ease of use, but shortly we’d like to get some feedback from other yachties on its accuracy, functionality etc. Anyone interested please drop me a line.
