Weather info for AZAB

[doris]

Anyone got any serious input as to what method is likely to be the best for weather onfo down to the Azores. SSB receiver/lap top? Irridium? Mini m or what? On a 36 footer power is limited as is the budjet. Does one really care......with not enuf speed to wizz off to another system as per an Open 60. Does one just sail the rumb line and to hell with it? Any contact info etc would be very welcome.

 

[Guest]

The Atlantic Crossing Guide (Anne Hammick) gives excellent advice on weather sources.

My suggestion is as follows

1) NAVTEX
2) SSB radio receiver for listening into French maritime forecasts you may also be able to pick up other radio nets and broad castst listed in the Atlantic Crossing Guide

3) SSB radio receiver attached to PC with weatherfax software (NASA marine Target HF3M is a good budget buy, ICS also available) This will get you Deutshe WetterDienst radioteletype forecasts with ocean seastates and the synoptic charts

4) Radio 4 shipping forecast good for much of the distance down there

All of above on my boat budget <£700 if you get a 2nd hand PC cheaply. PC also runs nav software for sun sights and chart plotting

Going for sattelite links costs more and brings problems

Iridium Phone (Call up a weatherforecaster £450 + call charge)
Data download is slow so not so good perhaps for downloading grib files for Maxsea navigation software. I dare say others will offer better advice than me on this. Data download problems are summountable

Inmarsat C data E mail GMDSS SOS all catered for, but you need PC and £2500 to buy at least, no voice transmission


SSB good for talking to other boats and Herb the weatherman on Southbound HF, good for taking weatherfax, fascinating for those boring times when there's no wind (Ahh! HF propagation tables!!!) good for e mail via Kiel radio but expensive to install and still very good for mid ocean distress... but heavy on power use

Hope this helps

 

[HaraldS]

Just sailed that route two months ago. I used weather routing from MaxSea, the wind prognosis from wetterzenrale.de (AVN model 10m Wind), and the weatherfax broadcast from DWD on shortwave.

(1) Wetterzentrale.de works fine as long as you have decent Internet access, which means no worse than cell phone. They give you a 6 hour raster forcast out to 180 hours from the model run. This means about 6 days. I found that for the northern Atlantic, they are quite close to reality for up to three days ahead. Once you're under way, these pages are too complex for Iridium speed, and the browser keeps hanging and timing out.

(2) The so called Grib files are a much condensed for of the above and can be interpreted and displayed by certain programs. One of them MaxSea which is what I'm using. When you buy MaxSea, you get a free service that allows you to specify the area you want, what data, and what time raster. The request goes out in a very short (3 lines) e-mail, and a few minutes later you receive mail with the answer. Carefully selected, a few days forcast for the relevant area, can be as small as 10kb. I used SW e-mail for that, but Iridum or Inmarsat would certainly do as welll.

If you have the weather routing software, and it is loaded with the polars of your boat, it will tell you whcih path to take. It does very well figuring out the general plan, given the weather situation, but you will find that following the precalculated route for some hours, there is enough small differences to make you deviate a bit. But that doesn't really matter since after a while you just rerun the claculation, from your new position; you don't need new weather data for that. It is good to refresh the weather data once a day, but two days is usually still not too far off.

(3) Weatherfax on shortwave is free and easy to get, it gives you a good overall idea.

I think weather routing will also help a 36 footer, even if you cannot wizz off to another system. Looking several days ahead it will give you a much safer plan and also a faster one.

You didn't say exactly from where you wanted to start, and when, but going from England or Ireland towards the Azores, it is very unlikely you will be able to sail the rumb line all the time. Depending on the weather systems moving through it could be quite different, but as a general trend, expect SW - NW and that you might have to go south for a while before you can make significant westing. This usually changes when you are couple hundred miles within the Azores, where you might get becalmed.

I did many "virtual"starts mostly duirng April and May, and at time sthere was weather that I didn't want to be in, but it was interesting to see which way the routing would send me. So sometimes it would start me out going straight west for two days and then turn down, but more likely were the other variants as described above.