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Next: Should we split rec.boats? Up: General Information Previous: Winter storage for batteries,

Online information

First of all, Mosaic/Web pages about boats are sprouting up like weeds, and there's no way I can keep track of all of them. I can, however, give a pointer to a page that seems to keep track of a lot:

http://www-engr.uvic.ca/ jlsmith/

This page is maintained by Jeremy Smith.

Second, there's the Live-Aboard mailing list: To join, send E-mail to: majordomo@centaur.astro.utoronto.ca; the subject line is not critical but in the BODY of your e-mail write:

SUBSCRIBE LIVE-ABOARD

Stefan (the maintainer of the list) provided me with the following information:

Previous contributions are available by anonymous ftp. Just ftp to centaur.astro.utoronto.ca, login as "anonymous" and use your e-mail address as the password. Go to the directory pub/archive. The directory pub/digests contains earlier posts filed into folders. The material in both directories is updated periodically.

(The following section courtesy of sb)

You can FTP hourly surface analyses (one of the things you can recieve with a weather fax receiver), in the form of .GIF files from vmd.cs.uiuc.edu, in directory WX.

There is also hourly raw visual and infrared satellite imagery, (from GEOS-7) which I don't know what to do with these.

The files are SA*.GIF, CI*.GIF and CV*.GIF, where the * is the date and GMT hour of the picture.

Then, if you are on a unix system, you can use xloadimage to display them.

There are also .DOC files which describe many other sources of weather related information on the network.

Also,

telnet madlab.sprl.umich.edu 3000

gets you any forecast you like. If you enter the city ``BOSM,'' you get the forecast for Boston, PLUS the marine forecast. This may work for other cities as well.

You can also try telnetting to duats.gtefsd.com. This is an aviation weather service funded by the FAA. It's really meant for pilots to get weather briefings, but they don't seem to mind non-pilots using it (in fact, the particular hostname I mentioned is specifically for non-pilots; there is another host with the identical service for pilots which requires an account and allows use of some additional functions).

When you get to the main menu, select "Weather Briefing", then "Local Briefing", then "Standard Briefing". Anytime it asks for a "Tail Number", just enter "N1234".

The user interface is kind of clunky, and the reports are all in technojargonspeak which is probably pretty much incomprehensible if you don't know how to decode it. You will probably need a book on interpreting weather service reports to make any use of it, but for raw weather information, it probably can't be beat as a source. For example, here's the last three hours worth of reports from LaGuardia Airport:

LGA SA 1850 E140 BKN 12 122/55/46/0513/989 LGA SA 1750 M110 BKN 12 122/54/46/0517/989/ 214 1070 54 LGA SA 1650 80 SCT M110 OVC 10 115/55/45/0616/987/WSHFT 28 FROPA BINOVC

The 1650 (UTC) report is the longest, so I'll decode that. It says:

LaGuardia Airport, Normal scheduled report at 1650 UTC (i.e. 12:50 PM Eastern Daylight Time). First cloud layer is estimated to be at 8000 feet and is scattered (which I think means covering between 10sky). Second cloud layer is measured at 11,000 feet and is overcast (i.e. covering more than 90barometric pressure is 1011.5 millibars. Temperature is 55 degrees F. Dew point is 45 F. Wind (this is the part you're interested in, right?) is from 060 at 16 kts. Altimiter setting is 29.87 inches of Hg. Windshift from 280, frontal passage, breaks in overcast.

The coding is baroque and opaque, being designed for the days of 110 baud teletypes when saving every character mattered.

There are also forecasts for the next 12 hours or so for selected locations, predicted winds aloft (sometimes useful for predicting surface wind shifts), locations of fronts, etc. As far as 24-48 hours in the future, I don't suspect you'll find much in the way of that, except in the most vague and general terms. (rs)

More weather stuff:

ftp://archive.afit.af.mil/pub/space/
  NORAD (TLE) for NOAA sats, tide code
ftp://atlantic.ocean.fsu.edu/pub/Tides/
  Tide code (shareware) for IBM-PC compatible

The racing rules updates can be found on the Ship-to-Shore BBS (the number is listed in the Max Ebb article). Here's a list that I got from the BBS: (hc)

Ship to Shore OIS
Marine Net for Sailors

   Arlington      VA   703-525-1458   Boston          MA   508-256-1775
   Moncton        NB   506-386-8843   New York City   NY   212-865-3787
   Norwalk        CT   203-831-8791   San Diego       CA   619-435-3187
   San Francisco  CA   415-365-6385   Salt Lake Cty   UT   801-968-8770
   Toronto        ON   416-322-6814   Vancouver       BC   604-540-9596

There are also the following mailing lists for discussion of various topics:

live-aboard@centaur.astro.utoronto.ca MARINE-L @VM.UOGUELPH.CA YACHT-L@GREARN.BITNET

YACHT-L owner address: E.R.Kooi@CRI.Leidenuniv.NL list address : YACHT-Llistserver : LISTSERVor LISTSERV@NIC.SURFNET.NL

TALLSHIP owner address: CBROMLEY@NVMUSIC.VCCS.EDU list address : TALLSHIPlistserver : LISTSERV

The SAIL-TX mailing list FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) File: ------------------------------------ Listname: SAIL-TX Title: Texas Sailing announcements and discussion To post: sail-tx-l@mdf.fidonet.org To SUBscribe: sail-tx-r@mdf.fidonet.org To UNSUBscribt: listserv@mdf.fidonet.org in the msg body state UNSUB SAIL-TX ------------------------------------

From Joe Hersey, of Coast Guard Communications: For those who are interested, the Coast Guard Research and Development Center in Groton CT now has an operational World Wide Web server, accessable from: http://138.29.250.20/

I'll try to keep an up-to-date summary of the Coast Guard's Internet services in the CG Navigation Information System BBS, accessable from fedworld.gov.

Finally, Boat/US maintains an online mailing list:

``Some info will still be posted in rec.boats, but to avoid cluttering the group, we've decided to create a mailing list open to all interested boaters. To subscribe, just email your request directly to boatus@aol.com.''


next up previous
Next: Should we split rec.boats? Up: General Information Previous: Winter storage for batteries,
John F. Hughes
11/6/1997