(Written by John) Whenever we meet people and tell them that we have sailed across oceans, they always want to know about how we deal with big storms. My answer has always been “We avoid them”.
It has been said that there is a time and place for everything, and in boating, you never want to be in a location during hurricane or typhoon seasons. So a constant moment north and south to get out of the storm belt is a yearly or twice yearly occurrence.
When I first got the boat and we were coastal cruising, we simply used our cell phone to get wind and weather updates. In the Caribbean, we bought a new cell phone chip for each country, or used WiFi internet from a local bar. It honestly was a decent solution. Relatively cheap, and not difficult. A bit time consuming, but that was the only real downside.
During our first transatlantic trip we used a Single Sideband Radio (HAM radio) with a pactor modem. This enabled us to get our weather reports in the middle of the ocean and it was basically free. It also worked. Sort of. Some of the time. When it wanted to. Sometimes after 4 hours of trying. To tell the truth, it was a pain in the butt and I would never use one again. I have actually removed it from the boat and tossed it into the dumpster.
From there we moved up to an IridiumGo satellite modem and that was a HUGE improvement. It worked every time. It was fine for email or text messages from your Iridium email, but you could not search the internet or get your Gmail. It was also fairly expensive. But it did a good job with getting the weather forecasts.
We are now using Starlink and it is a bit more expensive than IridiumGo was, but it enables us to surf the internet and get long range forecasts, talk to friends, send emails and pretty much everything you do while you sit at home. Go Elon Musk! When you are not using it, you can pause it and pay nothing.
The IridiumGo had a real disadvantage in that if you stopped the service when you did not need it, there was a hefty initialization fee. It was actually sometimes more cost effective to go to the cheapest plan and not use it for 4 months than to shut it down and start it up again. Don’t get me wrong, it worked well for our purposes, but Starlink really is the way to go.
A LOT of sailors use a program called PredictWind for weather predictions and it is honestly a good service. It also costs 250 dollars a year for the “standard plan”. Every year. Year after year. If you use it for 4 years, you have just spent 1000 dollars.
I bought LuckGrib on the Apple Store when I needed something to interface to the IridiumGo. There is a free trial that you can download, and after that, you pay for it, and you OWN it. No more fees to pay ever again. It also has a weather router built in which for a one time extra fee will take the data for your boat and given the weather file that you download generate a sailing/motoring plan to take advantage of the winds that are changing along your predicted route and time. It even has a host of built in sailing performance curves for various sailboats. If you have an IridiumGo, LuckGrib does a great job on data compression so, your huge file gets squashed way down and you do not use up your precious satellite minutes.
At first I was a bit skeptical and pessimistic about the router. I thought this can’t work. Now after playing with it for two years and tweaking some parameters I love it.
The developer of LuckGrib is also outstanding at answering your emailed questions, so the product support is awesome. You are literally emailing the guy who wrote the program, not having to go through a help desk and fill out a form and maybe someone will get back to you. He has never failed to return an email or answer even the stupidest of questions. The program comes with a built in tutorial (which I sort of watched, which maybe explains why I had to email him so many times).
We have used LuckGrib from Colombia, through the Panama Canal, up to the sea of Cortez, back down around Cabo San Lucas up to Ensenada, and then through the Pacific all the way to New Zealand with IridiumGo. In New Zealand we got Starlink and used it from New Zealand to Australia. LuckGrib was used on both pieces of hardware and worked flawlessly.
I literally would not leave the dock without it.
The cost difference between PredictWind and Luck Grib is so large that it will enable you to BUY a new iPad to run it on every two years. No subscriptions, a one time price and you OWN it. It is a terrific product at a bargain price and is only getting better.
Here is a screenshot of the program from the Apple Store. You can see that I am not the only one who thinks this thing is terrific. Go there, read up on it, and I think you will be sold on it also. Download it onto your Apple device for the free trial, and you will be hooked.
I also did a screenshot of a hypothetical sail trip from the Dominican Republic to Dominica. It shows several choices and allows you to decide which path is the right one for you. Various settings allow you to set the maximum wind speed you will accept, sail only, sail and motor, allow heaving to, and so much more. It also calculates estimated arrival time, lets you update your new gps position, download the latest weather file, and rerun the solver.
Oh did I mention no more yearly subscriptions?