Weather or not

Back on land, if I happened to be leaving the house that day, I looked at The Weather App to decide if the kids needed snow boots. That was pretty much the extent of it.

Because sailors hate to simplify, we don’t have “a weather app”. We have dozens. Most boats narrow it down to a handful that they use to fool themselves into a sense of security. Twig uses Predict Wind (aka “pretend wind”), Windy, and raw weather buoy data to make our guesses.

We also use accuweather (radar) and blitzortung (lightening strikes) to see what has already happened. At least that data is always right.

Each app predicts the weather differently. For extra flavor, some of them have multiple prediction models with divergent opinions. The only time that you know with absolute certainty what the weather is going to be is when all of the apps and models agree. In that case, you know it will be precisely the opposite of what is predicted (insert witty joke about crappy weathermen here). We do what we can because onboard our lives on the boat are ruled by the elements, so if a storm hits us, it is a really big deal.

Wait. Shoot. I forgot. I can’t call it a storm. Never mind that the rest of the world calls anything with rain a storm, sailors do it different. We also pee in a head and cook in a galley and turn port and starboard instead of left and right. Ropes are called lines and windows are called portlights. Unless they are on a ceiling, and then they are hatches. Ceiling is probably the wrong word too. Weird bunch us sailors. Storms. A storm is only a storm if clocks over 48 knots (nautical miles) per hour. Oh yeah, nautical mile. We have our own definition of mile too. Ours is bigger. 6076.12 feet (don’t forget the .12). Bigger is better.

So if it’s not a storm, what is it? There are actually 12 different names for weather systems at sea, all based on the Beaufort scale. Good luck keeping that sorted. On Twig we narrow it down to three: “good day”, “squall”, and “storm”. We try to sail on good days. Pretty simple.

So, we look at all the data, and interpret what we think is going to happen, and decide where we want your boat to be to maximize fun and minimize rain/wind. It reminds me a bit of Dilbert being asked to analyze data. “Ok boss, what do we want the slides to say, and I’ll use the data to tell that story”.

If we had a printer, we would print out all the predictions and put them on the wall and throw a dart to make it simpler.

Here’s an example. We were ready to leave the Bahamas to jump over to Florida. We were sitting at a marina with a bunch of other boats waiting for the famed “weather window” to make a crossing. The outlook was terrible, and we told the marina office that we might be there a week. We didn’t want to be there a week, so we picked a day that looked “somewhat potentially squally” and decided to leave. In the pouring rain. Pouring rain that looked like it was going to change direction away from our course.

It did. Yay! We spent the rest of the day watching the clouds and tagging them with our radar to see where they were moving. Does that one look like an anvil (anvils are bad)? Is that a waterspout? Not another bit of rain hit us the rest of the day. At least, not until we got to Florida. At that point, the skies opened up and we got to make landfall in a downpour. “Somewhat potentially squally”.

The great thing is that even when the prediction is wrong and you’re caught in the path of a squall, missing it is simple. Here’s how: just predict exactly where the squall is going to go, and don’t be there. It’s not like you’re in a car and can only go where the roads are, so it’s easy. Oh, except that the storm isn’t constrained either. And it can move up and down too. And join up with friends to take turns pounding you. And it likes to play tricks on you, like going in a direction opposite of the wind. Oh, and it had a gun and can shoot down waterspouts at you. Simple.

We made it to Florida, and right now we’re in West Palm Beach. There was a huge gale system moving down the east coast, and we wanted to be at anchor when it hit. We booked a marina for a week to wait it out and take care of some chores. So, what did the system do? It didn’t hit. It stayed up north, well out of our path. Sigh, we just payed for a marina for a week for nothing. Pretty boats though.

I lied. It wasn’t for nothing. I hit “buy now” on my huge Amazon list that I accumulated during the Bahamas. I think we had at least a dozen packages delivered every day we were here. Silver linings.

Next we’re heading up the coast to spend “hurricane season” there. Yup. Sailors don’t even call the seasons summer and fall. It’s either “hurricane season” or “sailing season”.

Here’s the game that we’ll get to play. The official season starts June 1 and ends November 1. As everybody knows, there is a giant invisible wall above Florida that keeps all hurricanes from leaving the state, so our insurance gives us until July 1 to get above the Florida Georgia line.

Except for the Carolinas. Apparently they haven’t paid off their weather mafia yet, so they are considered dodgy. You’re cool staying in Georgia, or going to Virginia, but the Carolinas are “statistically significant” so everybody says to steer clear of them. North of them, it’s easy sailing. I’ve been watching the news for years, and have never heard of any bad weather on the East coast, so we should be all good. Except for ‘noreasters. They can be a pain. At least they don’t have a name.

Names. If the weather pros give a system a name, your insurance deductible goes to 10% if they mess you up. It doesn’t have to be a hurricane, it just hast to have a name. You know, that “alphabet game” that you hear every year with names starting at A and moving down the line. They name everything that looks like it might decide to maybe think about being a hurricane’s cousin someday. They even name systems that look like they might hook up with a hurricane’s cousin at a wedding.

Ok, got it. If it has a name, it’s bad news. So what do you do if you find yourself in the vicinity of a storm with a name? It’s here that we take a lesson from elementary school. The storm is the bully, and you are the victim. If you were threatened by a bully, what were your choices? Parents and teachers said to come tell them and they would take care of it. We all know how well that worked, so let’s take that option off the table. You really only had two choices: run/walk away, or cover your face and take the punches.

Insurance is nice enough to give you the same options. They let you either:

1. Promise to stay at least 100 miles from any “cone of uncertainty”. If you are closer, fire up the engines and run away. All you have to do is predict which way a storm is going to move (see earlier comments on predicting the path of a storm) and go not there
2. Secure your boat as best you can, go ashore, make some popcorn and wait it out.

That doesn’t seem so bad, we have choices right? Wrong. You had choices. You made the decision on options 1 or 2 back when you signed the policy in the comfort of your warm and dry home. If you chose to run, YOU MUST ALWAYS RUN! You can’t ever be within 100 miles of the cone, or you’re not covered. Ever.

So, we chose 2. We’re still allowed to try to run if we want, but if we get caught and we haven’t covered our faces (secured the boat properly), the bully wins the round and we’re not covered.

Even if you play the round perfectly and still get hit, you owe the insurance company 10% of the value of the claim. This isn’t like your car when you have a deductible of a few hundred bucks. Boats are expensive. 10% of any damage ends up in the thousands (remember the BOAT buck?). If you are really unlucky and your boat is a total loss, you owe 10% of the value of your entire boat.

That’s the big scary named storm scenario, but what about something benign like getting struck by lightening? You know, just lightening, no big deal. Shrug. Insurance doesn’t give us a bunch of rules for lightening, so we’re on our own. Here’s the rub: there’s a secret to why they don’t gives rules. There’s nothing you can do. You’re on a boat. You will end up getting struck by lightening someday. Get over it. They build it into your premium and assume it will happen. The people on board will (most likely) be fine, it’s more of a threat to the electronics.

That doesn’t make it any more fun to get struck, so the creative side of the sailing community kicks in. There are as many different opinions on how to minimize lightening damage as there are new words for old things. Instead of listing them all, I’ll try to sum up:

if faced with lightening: hook up jumper cables to your standing rigging and drop the other end into the water. unplug every electrical device, and put all the important stuff in a full metal box (called a faraday box). in a pinch, wrapping them in tin foil or throwing in the microwave might work. don’t touch anything metal.

Simple.

The kids got wind of this. Now every time they see lightening, they run around like little chickens with their heads cut off unplugging electronics. One of these days they’re going to accidentally microwave an iPad.

Except here’s the kicker: there is lightening every day, at least down here in Florida. Oh, and some really important electronics (like the chart plotter and VHF) can’t be unplugged. At least we have lots of tin foil.

So, what’s the gist? This free and easy sailing adventure that we’re on starts each day about the same way: We open up the half a dozen different weather apps and see what they predict the weather will be. We try to add our own opinions to the mix, and consult our coaches and other sailors for their opinion. If all looks good, we can weigh anchor and proceed to wherever we planned on going that day. If we have a big passage, we try to predict even farther out, which is more unreliable.

Our next passage is one of those big passages. We are going on our first overnighter (115 miles to Port Canaveral), so we’re being extremely conservative. We’ve been sitting in at the marina, waiting for the perfect weather. The big gale system didn’t hit, but there have been a lot of squalls.

After 8 days here, the time has finally come, and today’s the day! The weather looks good for the next 24 hours (unless it changes. it always changes), all of our packages have been delivered, and the mechanic came by yesterday. We leave at noon. Wish us luck!

Update:

Everything above was written on Friday morning, and we then set out for an overnighter to Port Canaveral. I must have jinxed us by talking poo poo about the weather, because we had squalls all day. We had the engines floored trying to dodge them, but ended up pulling into Fort Pierce to anchor. We really didn’t want to go to Fort Pierce, as that was the site of our encounter with the Demon Bouy of Fort Pierce in the spring. Sigh. We’ll just have to try an overnighter some other day…