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11th February 2020, 01:35 PM
#1
Charts and weather routeing
With all the talk of global warming/cooling, bush fires followed by torrential rain in Australia and storm claira in the u.k. coupled with heavy rain resulting in flooding in Yorkshire and the border's, for some unknown reason my thoughts turned to a couple of charts that were part of the world wide folio of charts we carried and are they still part of the electronic charts now mandatory on merchant vessels.
The charts are ocean currents of the world and ocean weather routes.
The currents chart showed all the major currents of the world, the Benguela, the gulf stream and the Pacific ocean currents, showing their average rates and direction etc. The weather routes showed the recommended passages from, for example, the great circle sailing from bishops rock to belle isle or cape race depending upon the season along with the recommended route for vessels heading for southern u.s.a. ports of the Panama canal. Similar routes were shown for trans Pacific crossings. All of the information on these charts were the result of hundreds of years of observations from merchant vessels and were an invaluable tools for masters in deciding what route to take, either a great circle or thumb line sailing.
Weather routeing I first came across as 2nd mate when voyage charters often included a clause requiring that masters use and follow the advice given by the various routeing services and whoa before any master who ignored the advice given should voyage time be extended or cargo damage occur.
Sometimes the advice given can be a bit strange though. As an example on a fully laden panamax with a cargo of orange peel from Brazil to Brest in France, somewhere in the latitude of Gibraltar on an almost northerly course heading for Ushant, the weather routeing service we had been told to use advised us to take a great circle route to our waypoint off Ushant, this due to bad weather moving into the bay of Biscay. The route advised, if I recall correctly, would have taken us around 20 miles westwards of our original thumb line track!!!!.
Never had much faith in someone sitting in a nice warm office somewhere as opposed to the master on board using received weather maps and his own experience to make the correct decision on the best route to take.
Rgds
J.A.
Last edited by John Arton; 11th February 2020 at 01:37 PM.
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11th February 2020, 03:36 PM
#2
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