Csail
N/A
Even the RNLI are wrong, asked for an actuall (they overlook the bay) and they said calm.....it was massive.....we turned back, waves were about 10ft and messy.
Inshore Weather Forecase - Pointless?
- Thread starter asteven221
- Start date
Mark-1
Well-Known Member
Apologies for waking a zombie thread but it really hit me this weekend how useless the inshore is.
I'd stopped taking any real notice of it years ago but I did usually check it out of misplaced respect for the old ways. This weekend I finally faced facts. It's just too vague, like the bible, you can take any message out of it you want.
With the synoptics and a site like Windguru/XC weather the passage of Sunday's low was pretty clear from Wednesday even to a weather dunce like me. It was also clear that for most of the daylight hours the wind would be under 20 knots with the odd gust. Because the largest imaginable gust in an exposed area might just touch 30 this gets described as a F7 by the inshore which some yotties hear as "top of a F7 touching F8" and suddenly simple minded people in the flat waters of the Solent are cancelling their weekend because they're expecting 3 metre waves first thing Sunday morning.
I guess the format was chosen to be easily verbally transmitted over radio and for that purpose it's still useful, but for 90% of weekend sailing it's a dead loss, to my mind.
I'd stopped taking any real notice of it years ago but I did usually check it out of misplaced respect for the old ways. This weekend I finally faced facts. It's just too vague, like the bible, you can take any message out of it you want.
With the synoptics and a site like Windguru/XC weather the passage of Sunday's low was pretty clear from Wednesday even to a weather dunce like me. It was also clear that for most of the daylight hours the wind would be under 20 knots with the odd gust. Because the largest imaginable gust in an exposed area might just touch 30 this gets described as a F7 by the inshore which some yotties hear as "top of a F7 touching F8" and suddenly simple minded people in the flat waters of the Solent are cancelling their weekend because they're expecting 3 metre waves first thing Sunday morning.
I guess the format was chosen to be easily verbally transmitted over radio and for that purpose it's still useful, but for 90% of weekend sailing it's a dead loss, to my mind.
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BoatShow Avenue
New Member
Well there are sites on the internet that provide very accurate information like xcweather forecast!
asteven221
Well-Known Member
Just browsing around to see what caught my eye and wow I saw my name as the OP on a post from yonks ago. The zombie has woken up!
Still nothing's changed it seems. The Inshore Forecast is still a waste of time. Just causes unnecessary anxiety with forecast that doesn't represent reality. But one can't just ignore them out of hand, in case they are correct! So the choice is to head out all anxious worried in case they might be right, stay in the marina and get p£££ed off that your day has been wasted as it's been lovely and calm all day, or just ignore it altogether and one day get caught out. All of which are pain to say the least.
You would think with the gazzilions they spend on computing power they could get is a wee bit correct most of the time. The frog on my £14.99 weather station from Aldi's is more accurate for heavens sake! If the frogs has an umberella it will rain. A scarf and it will freeze. Thumbs up - it'll be calm and sunny. Simples. Never fails!
franksingleton
Well-Known Member
As might be expected I must rise to this one. A quick answer would be to tell you to read my book but I will try to explain briefly here.
Any written marine forecast can only be a brief headline. It MUST include mention of hazardous weather, especially strong or gale force winds. Given the time available it is impossible to do much else.
A challenge that I always throw out is to ask you to sail along a stretch of coast or open sea for 12 hours. Then try to describe what you have experienced within the word constraints of the forecast. That may give an idea of the impossibility of try to satisfy all the sailors all the time.
View any GMDSS marine forecast as a warning service and a headline. Use whatever else you have available. GRIB output in some form or other plus your own experience. The GFS now issues GRIBs on a 0.25 degree grid, currently available using zyGrib V7.0 or Saildocs email service.
But, I emphasise, always use these purely objective forecasts with an eye or ear on the written texts. These have human judgement and interpretation.
North Sea sailors have output from the Danish Met service available to them – see http://www.dmi.dk/en/hav/#danmark . I would like the UK Met Office to something similar and have written a letter to the Royal Met Society magazine, Weather saying that the Met Office is behind the field in this respect. The Turks have set a good example for the Med, see http://212.175.180.126/DTS/sea.php.
If you feel strongly about this then please write to the Met Office. Ask why we cannot get a service comparable to the Turkish Med forecast. Or why the Polish Met service issues UK Met Office computer output for the Baltic, see http://www.meteo.pl/index_en.php. This says and is
Why cannot we get the same service?
Any written marine forecast can only be a brief headline. It MUST include mention of hazardous weather, especially strong or gale force winds. Given the time available it is impossible to do much else.
A challenge that I always throw out is to ask you to sail along a stretch of coast or open sea for 12 hours. Then try to describe what you have experienced within the word constraints of the forecast. That may give an idea of the impossibility of try to satisfy all the sailors all the time.
View any GMDSS marine forecast as a warning service and a headline. Use whatever else you have available. GRIB output in some form or other plus your own experience. The GFS now issues GRIBs on a 0.25 degree grid, currently available using zyGrib V7.0 or Saildocs email service.
But, I emphasise, always use these purely objective forecasts with an eye or ear on the written texts. These have human judgement and interpretation.
North Sea sailors have output from the Danish Met service available to them – see http://www.dmi.dk/en/hav/#danmark . I would like the UK Met Office to something similar and have written a letter to the Royal Met Society magazine, Weather saying that the Met Office is behind the field in this respect. The Turks have set a good example for the Med, see http://212.175.180.126/DTS/sea.php.
If you feel strongly about this then please write to the Met Office. Ask why we cannot get a service comparable to the Turkish Med forecast. Or why the Polish Met service issues UK Met Office computer output for the Baltic, see http://www.meteo.pl/index_en.php. This says and is
Why cannot we get the same service?
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