Settin' Up The Weather

Mike: Today, I went over the various systems on the boat to ensure that they won't be going to Davey Jones locker sometime on the trip. There's still a few items that need to be checked off my list and they should be done by tomorrow when our surveyor does his thing. Hopefully, like a papal figure, he'll give his blessings. Fingers crossed.

Later in the afternoon, the sweet sounds of Pain Killers were calling softly to me from the bar, so with laptop in hand, I settled onto a stool and started setting up for our automatic daily weather updates. Every day, we'll be retrieving 5 day forecast GRIB files (from SailDocs.com) and off shore text forecasts (from NOAA) that'll be delivered each day at 1200Z into our inbox. We'll use our sat phone to connect to the internet each day from the boat and download the latest weather info. If we need to, we can also request on demand WeFax from NOAA or tune the HF received and capture to the laptop off the airways based on their schedule. The GRIB files are graphical weather maps that can be directly overlaid on our laptop's chartplotter program which we've already loaded up with NOAAs new and free ENC vector charts. By simply stepping through the 5 day forecasts, we can watch fronts approach, or low/high pressure areas develop. That was the good news regarding technology and its capabilities. The bad news is technologies and its ability to fail based on any of a myraid of individual finicky hardware and software issues. So when all this ceases to work, it may well be back to listening to the radio.

Ok... now it's time to switch to my evening drink... Bushwackers. Good thing that the only navigating I need to do tonight is down the dock to my bunk on the boat!