We used the Ocean Pilot Charts to determine the good sailing seasons and planned our voyages for those times. We were mostly sailing in Trade Wind belts, so the weather tended to be pretty consistent in the good seasons. We would pick a departure date. If the weather was good we'd leave; if it wasn't, we'd stay in port. Once we were on passage we didn't have any weather information, and couldn't do anything about the weather anyway, so just took what came along. This worked pretty well and we had mostly trouble-free passages weather wise.

Except once -- and we REALLY got caught out in a mess of weather. We left New Zealand in May -- which should have been cyclone free, as the season supposedly ends in April. We were headed for Fiji and had good sailing for a few days. Then the winds got stronger, the seas got bigger. More wind, more seas, more reefs in the sails until there really wasn't anything left to do but tie everything down on deck, lay ahull, and hope for the best. We tied the helm over so we were headed slightly into the wind. BACCHUS was a heavy displacement boat with a very long keel, 7 foot draft. We were laying right over on our side, sliding down the wave face -- but the slick left to weather smoothed out the toppling waves. At least we had plenty of sea room.

It was frightening: the noise was terrible! It seemed as if water was being blown into the boat straight through the hull! (Maybe it was.) The fiddle rail on the uphill side bookshelf let go and about 100 pounds of books came hurtling into the galley! It was hard to stand up, let alone do anything once you did. Al had to go forward on the deck to re-secure our staysail. I stood in the hatchway, and I could hardly see him through the windblown spray! All this lasted about 60 hours until we started noticing an easing of noise, wind and motion. When we were under sail and again able to get a sextant position, we found we had drifted 60 miles -- in the right direction!

Nowadays everyone is more conscious and concerned about the weather -- both in port and at sea. And there are more avenues for us to get weather information these days.

You can see that some sort of radio is essential for a lot of this input. Most yachties have computers on board these days that can become a weather tool too -- even more so as communication links improve. I would say that we are in the middle range of having equipment and resources for getting weather information.