Day 21 - Weather works; Rod

We've been sailing and motoring our way up Fitzhugh Sound for the last three days, anchoring in small coves along the way. The weather has been somewhat grim the whole time: rain, drizzle, blustery winds, choppy seas; rewind, replay.

At night we turn the radio on and listen to the weather forecast. for that night, the following day and for several days after that. Listening to the reports requires patience and a proficiency that takes some time to build. Most of the report is not useful. The thing that makes the listening and the comprehension difficult is that they give a report that covers so much ground. And the report is organized by topic and not by region.

First there is a synopsis that describes frontal movements, then a report that goes region by region along the coast of northern Canada and gives for each, a forecast for the night and the following day. Then you have to wait through a long list of sea state forecasts, buoy reports, lighthouse reports, and finally an extended three day forecast for the same regions covered earlier.

The region we are in at the moment is called "Central Coast: McInnes Island to Pine Island." To get a report for tonight, tomorrow, and the next three days, You have to sit and listen for a long time and snatch what you need from different places in the report. If you get distracted by someone talking to you at the wrong time, or have difficulty listening and writing at the same time, You'll have to listen for quite a while to hear it again in the next loop.

One thing that helps is to time the stages of the report. Tonight, for example, it took six minutes between the next day forecast and the extended forecast for a given region, and the entire loop took 16 minutes. Knowing this gives me the option to do something else while waiting for what we want to know.

It has also been suggested that we can record the parts of interest to make it easier to re-listen.

There are ways to receive this information as a text file by satellite, but when I looked into the technology, I found it to be expensive for the equipment, expensive for the service, and likely to be ineffective at getting reception in a small cove.

So we listen. And listen, and listen. And it gives us a sense of what to expect out there. Sort of.