Description

Smart Sailors and Captains play weather windows all the time! They develop their sailing itineraries with flexibility based on the often changing forecasted weather. Captain Tony Green shows you how to look at the critical data so you are planning and not reacting! You will make better decisions based on applying information from this course. "The course is a critical step in becoming a much better skipper," noted Captain Thom Burns.

Anyone who ventures onto the water should do it with weather confidence and weather strategies. This weather course is highly beneficial.

This course covers all aspects of practical marine weather, starting from the very basics and ending with all you need to plan your voyages—or weekend outings—safely and efficiently taking into account the weather. This is intended to be a practical course that will indeed affect your decision making when planning and underway. We only cover those aspects of the "theory" that will help us with this goal. We will monitor real and some hypothetical weather systems at the time of the course to see how weather principles evolve over time and what decisions might be best.

Weather is a vast subject with many facets, but when it comes to marine weather it really boils down to wind prediction. Wind drives a sailboat and creates the waves. Severe weather and associated strategies are a concern, but sailors spend far more time dealing with too little wind than too much wind. In addition to avoiding too much wind, this course teaches you how to find more wind when there is little to none to be had.

Students will learn to integrate marine weather into their overall navigation and voyage planning using the latest technological tools as well as traditional maritime skills such as the barometer, wind, clouds, and sea state observations. Also included are the theory, properties and behavior of squalls, fronts, storms, hurricanes, fog and global wind patterns and the study of weather maps.

No prerequisites are required, we start from the basics. Coastal Navigation is recommended. Many thousands of students have successfully learned weather from these materials and gone on to bareboat chartering, extended day sailing or even world cruising in their own boats.

With weather being the most pressing factor in a journey by sail, this course is a must-do.