Our route this season takes us along some rather untouched and remote places, more so than in years before. This sometimes makes getting a good weather forecast a bit tricky. Previously we’d consult marina offices, go online where possible and listen to SSB radio nets in order to compile accurate weather information for our next passage.
But this year we’re experiencing an entirely new way of accessing weather.
Predict Wind is an online weather routing service that we’ve been aware of for some time and made occasional use of when in the land of easily accessible internet. They developed an app version, which you might assume is fairly standard for any web service.
However, the real game changer and the thing that has totally changed how we cruise, is that their app is optimised to work with an Iridium Go. The Iridium Go is a brilliant little bit of kit that creates a wifi hotspot on your boat using a satellite signal. It doesn’t mean that you can easily surf the internet at leisure in the middle of nowhere. But, instead, it means that we can turn our iphone and ipad into a sat phone for emergency use, it means we can send and receive emails on board and, crucial for us, it combines with the Predict Wind app to give us accurate, detailed weather forecast and routing information anywhere in the world at any time.
Let me say that again. I mean ANYWHERE in the world. That’s a huge shift in how we can gather weather information; getting high resolution detailed or offshore GRIB files for any location.
Predict Wind have even put together a special marine package bundle which allows you to easily purchase the Iridium, along with an external antenna and a routing software package.
Our SSB, long range radio, was great for getting forecasts but, as ours doesn’t have a pactor modem hookup, it meant that we had to tune into nets or broadcasts at specific and inconvenient times. Plus it meant listening to lengthy voice weather predictions which are hard to follow, sometimes not detailed enough for your cruising area, and always quite abstract when compared to a visual chart.
And, of course, you can get any type of weather graphic of anywhere if you use the tools available online but we simply don’t have the ability to get online everywhere we go. 34 countries and counting into our trip means that even if we’d purchased 34 different sim cards and paid for browsing data in each one then we’d still only have been within phone reception zones for a very small percentage of our time there – hardly a form of weather planning that we could rely on. Internet just frankly doesn’t exist in a lot of the places we’re sailing to at the moment, which is understandably hard to get your head around if you’re not out here cruising.
Enter Predict Wind and the difference it has made to how we sail has just been enormous.
For example, we used it mid-ocean en route from New Zealand to Vanuatu in order to dodge rain squalls and windless zones. That meant turning it on and downloading the relevant rain and wind pattern forecasts while the boat was underway. We were able to sail more than we’d expected, only motoring for a few hours of the 8-day passage and managed to dodge all the rain.
We’ve been able to see the changes in swell height before finding ourselves trapped in a rolly anchorage and been able to make fully informed choices about where and when we drop the hook.
We’ve seen strong winds coming in well ahead of time and been able to prepare the boat accordingly so that everything stays comfortable onboard.
We’ve been able to plan each passage from island to island, country to country, using all the different tools on offer. Predict Wind offers both weather routing and departure planning gizmos, making use of four forecast models: GFS, ECMWF, and two of their own models. This helps you to gain a much richer, fuller view of the predicted weather.
And, by and large, this has all been relatively glitch free. Sure, there have been a few times when to download the GRIB files takes a little longer than we’d ideally like or sometimes it takes more than one attempt. Occasionally the whole app seems to need a little rest and we restart the ipad altogether. But, I can’t in all honesty think of any app we use that doesn’t have the same infrequent hiccup. And, the vast majority of the time it works in a really straightforward and simple way, saving us time, energy and effort.
We’ll be sharing more and more about how we’re getting on with using Predict Wind as we gain more experience with this method of weather routing software and put more passages under our belts, as we only installed the Iridium Go in May. As we’re heading towards the equatorial and infamously flukey climate of South East Asia we’re hoping that this new system will also help us to take advantage of the sailing weather when there is wind and avoid having too many engine-heavy journeys.
And right now I couldn’t be more grateful than to have the opportunity to use this invaluable bit of kit onboard that has so thoroughly revolutionised our passage planning. We’re so happy with Predict Wind and cannot recommend this app and its tools highly enough. Watch this space for more examples of how we’re using it on our travels.
