News

In recent months, there has been some criticism of Met Office Inshore Forecasts for UK waters. In a letter published in the April PBO, the MCA has given some figures for “accuracy” of forecasts. They state that over a period of one  year, 

• The “hit rate” for gale warnings (for sea areas) was 92% 
• The “hit rate” for coastal strong wind warnings 96%.
• Within a typical 24 hour period forecast, 94% of winds were within one Beaufort force of prediction.

Leaving aside any remark about lies, damned lies etc, what do these figures mean? 

First, assessment of gale and strong wind warnings should be reasonably accurate. It is an objective assessment that a gale or strong wind has or has not occurred.

The figures on accuracy of the 24 hour forecasts must be much more questionable.   I doubt that any assessment possible can  deal satisfactorily with the major problem of the need to express an inevitably complex wind pattern in a few words. Further, no assessment possible will cope with topographical effects such as headlands and sea breezes nor local events such as showers and thunderstorms. Currently, these can only be predicted in general terms and not in detail by any operational system.

From the MCA letter, I assume that the assessment has been taken objectively from the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) output using the Met Office 4 km (~2 nautical miles) grid length model for the United Kingdom. Undoubtedly this will give good results as the Met Office is a world leader in NWP.

Remembering that even this model can, at best describe weather on a 10 mile scale and that small weather details have short life-times and cannot be predicted in detail, sailors have three choices.

1. To use forecasts unthinkingly, as some seem to do – and then complain.  I hope that no CA members take that approach.
2. To recognise forecasts as broad guidance for use with experience, care and nous.
3. To supplement MCA broadcasts using more detailed (meso-scale) forecasts available free from such as Passageweather.com and Windfinder.com or on repayment from Theyr.com, Predictwind. com or Clearpointweather.com. I doubt that any is consistently better than any other.

The two latter options used together  will give both the best results and a good steer on what can and cannot be predicted. From reading the yachting press, from discussions on forums and from letters to the RYA, it seems that some sailors have lost touch with the realities of weather and its predictability. We have moved a long way since we had to draw our own charts from the shipping forecast. However, using weather information effectively still needs intelligent thought. 

I am sure that the majority of CA members recognise that fact.

Seekers after truth might like to idle a few minutes away by browsing my pages on using and understanding weather forecast,

The Cruising Association, with the International Sailing Federation and the Royal Yachting Association, has a team in touch with MSCHOA (Maritime Security Centre Horn of Africa) concerning transits by yachts through the zones of high piracy risk in the NW Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden.  MSCHOA co-ordinates the Navy providing a deterrent to pirates in the area.

 A single sheet flyer summarising advice to yachtsmen and the full advice, occupying 7 pages, has been agreed by all the organisations concerned.  The full details are available for downloading from the attachments below.

 

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Yachts and Deterrence Operations.doc	29.5 KB
Advice to Yachtsmen v2.3.doc	145.5 KB
Summary of Advice to Yachtsmen v6.2.doc	114.5 KB

Around the west of Scotland Portpatrick reception can be difficult to impossible because of topography. On 518 kHz, Malin Head broadcasts Sea Area forecastss for Shannon, Rockall, Malin and Bailey (as well as Irish Coastal  and some High Seas Areas).

As noted in the recent RYA Magazine, HMCG has been in negotiation with their Irish colleagues. The result is that, after a little more trialling,  Malin Head will use the 490 kHz, national NAVTEX frequency to broadcast UK Inshore Waters forecasts. Areas will be the same as Portpatrick ie Land's End to Cape Wrath, the Minch, Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough.

The B1 letter will be A so that broadcasts will be every four hours from 0000 UTC. I do not know which slots will be for weather; if anyone knows, please tell me. I assume that the other two slots will be used for weather actuals, again, as in the Portpatrick broadcasts.

Between them, Malin Head and portpatrick are expected to give good reception over much of the area.  When around the West of Scotland, it is advisable to select both Portpatrick and Malin Head on both NAVTEX frequencies. That is good advice generally ie select whichever transmitter you want as well as neighbouring stations that  you may be able to receive.

The three UK NAVTEX stations will continue to broadcast four Inshore forecasts each day. However, that means that actuals will only bebroadcast at the other two slots. There is simply not enough time to do otherwise at present.

See my NAVTEX page for schedules of most European NAVTEX transmitters.

It is the season to be out there cruising the Caribbean Sea, sailors are dropping anchor and looking through the binoculars’ at the cross trees of the others in the bay. The CA burgee is a magnet and much convivial planning has been achieved, a ‘Blue Water’ Section is now being launched.

The Section facilitates web based communication for CA members who are away cruising in the ‘rest of the world’ - that is not home waters, the Mediterranean, the Baltic or Europe. The Section will welcome CA members who are currently out and about on ‘blue water ‘; those who have been there, done that, and got the T shirt, or those wishing, dreaming and planning to set off at some time. The successful models for this venture are the Baltic and Med Sections and like them the Section will have a ‘forum’ and a ‘net’ on MyCA. Members will be able to request and share information about cruising areas, routes, pilots, charts etc. It will also put members in different areas of the oceans in touch with each other via web areas for the different parts of the world e.g. Caribbean, Antipodes’ etc. so they can know each other are there and arrange to meet, SSB chat etc.

If you are interested in joining the Blue Water Section please send the following details via email to Jill Trew, Sections Group, at dennjord@yahoo.co.uk

Your name; address (if you have one); boat name; communication details, email, SSB net, mobile no(s); your website details, and link to MyCA if you have one. If you would be willing to assist with co-ordinating, e.g the website, the ‘net’ or the ‘forum’, please include this with your reply.

The Blue Water Section is being co-ordinated by Sandy Duker 'MOONSHADOW STAR'. She will be assisted by Sue and Andy Warman 'SPRUCE' with initially assistance from us who are ‘shore side’ to set up the web pages on MyCA and the membership database.

We look forward to hearing from all of you who are out there, have been out there, and who are hoping to be sailing the dream.

Jill Trew

We hope you like the improved look of the website and that regular users don't have too much difficulty relearning their way round it. We've tried to simplify the menu structure so that all the main options are at the top. When you select one of these you will see extra menus on the left hand side that are relevant to the particular part.

Apart from the appearance, the main difference is that the front pages both for guests and for logged-in members are much more similar to each other although some of the items are different. The old "teasers" of front page news have been replaced by lists of recent items and events.When all our contributors have learned the ropes

We will shortly be changing the address back to cruising.org.uk from myca.org.uk. Don't worry if you have MyCA bookmarked, you will get diverted automatically.

Thanks to those who helped in the transition, particularly Ivan Andrews, David Teall and Jim Baerselman. We're still sorting out a few details and will be experimenting with the format, so let us know through the CA Matters forum if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Chris Moss
CA Webmaster

If you would like to know more and join the Section, please contact either of the Joint Secretaries, directly using their contact details in the CA Yearbook, or soon via MyCA.

 

There is no charge to join a CA Section. For information of how Sections can enhance your CA membership, please contact any member of the Sections Group.

We are now pleased to announce the date for the first meeting of the Thames Valley Section of the Cruising Association. 

Date: Tuesday 16th March

Time: 7.30pm (Bar will be open from 7.00pm)

Venue: Harleyford Golf Club, Marlow, SL7 2SP 

The club is situated off the Marlow to Henley Road, roughly 1 mile from Marlow.

For those of you who don't know it, it is on the river and as well as the golf club it has a marina and chandlery. Directions can be found at www.harleyfordgolf.co.uk. 

We are in the early stages of forming this group so the aim of this first meeting is to get to know one another, gauge what you would like to get from your group and to share ideas for future meets.  

We hope that as many of you as possible can make it and to give us an idea of numbers we would appreciate an RSVP either by: 

Email: thames_valley@cruising.org.uk  

or phone: 

David Kench, 01628 531805, Jim Smith, 01491 628349,  

We look forward to meeting you all. 

David Kench & Jim Smith

Joint Secretaries CA Thames Valley Section

 

The Cruising Association enjoyed a very successful London Boat Show this year. We were delighted to welcome almost 400 of our members to our stand, and we now have more than sixty new members who signed up at the show. Our Patron, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, visited the stand midway through the week and is pictured here with General Secretary Wendy Hodkinson and watch keepers Brian Hammett and David Beane. Thank you to all of our watch keepers for their time and enthusiasm.   

The CA has over 300 old charts for sale...all at least 40 years old, and many much, much older! Perhaps covering lovely places you've sailed to, they make beautiful presents.

Where a Y is shown in the Elevation column, sketches of views from seaward/lighthouses etc are shown on the chart. A beautiful touch!

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Ancient Folios.pdf	115.07 KB

We have now moved to another new web server and are hoping that this will solve the problems we've been having. Only time will tell, I'm afraid.

We apologize for the long period of outage today.

Chris Moss

After a few glitches, the transfer to the new server has been completed. There was a problem with character sets caused by the transition between database servers and I've had to revert to Sunday evening's state of the database. We are in the process of restoring the updates that have been made since then.

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The outage was to enable us to move the system onto a new webserver with more memory which we hope will improve performance significantly and eliminate many of the errors we've been having over the last few weeks.

This has also affected people who use email addresses at cruising.org.uk and myca.org.uk and they have been informed of the new arrangements which can also be found at http://myca.org.uk/node/312.

A number of posts to forums or MyCA during this period have been lost because of the problem mentioned above. We are in the process of restoring the entries in MyCA and may be able to restore the forum entries. We're sorry about this.

Now I can get back to the much more important transition of reuniting cruising.org.uk and myca.org.uk.

Chris Moss
Hon CA Webmaster