Weather routing for passages sure has changed since Marta and I last went cruising from 1996 to 1998. Then while planning for a passage we would listent to the High Seas forecast on the SSB, go to the port captains office to see if they had the latest weather faxes (72hr forecast maps), occasionally try to download weather faxes ourself on the SSB radio but it almost never worked, and check in with Herb Hilgenberg a volunteer forecaster in Canada who provides individual forecasts 364 days a year to boats all over the Atlantic and in to the Pacific.

Now days we can do all of the above, but we also have a lot of new tools. In most ports we have access to wifi of some sort, so can access the internet and all its resources. We can pick up the weather charts, but we can also download the forecast data for the next 8 days in GRIB files that our navigation software can display. A good resource on the web for viewing grib files is Passage Weather. To see where we are currently on passage weather select West Indies>Bermuda to West Indies from the home page.

As well as viewing the data on the web we can download it to applications on our laptops and iPad. Weather4D, one of the apps we use to view the weather on the iPad will also overlay our boats forecast path, as well as even calculating the "optimum" path using our boats performance data. I've uploaded a screen capture of it showing the forecast for our upcoming trip to Bermuda. The red boat is following the route I gave it, and the green boat is the software's suggestion for a faster route.

Mark.