Perhaps someone can point me in a better direction in regards to Planning, APPs and safety. I do between 6000 & 10,000nm per year mainly in the Pacific and Asia, and was in the last Category 5 Super Typhoon in December Philippines.
Firstly: Typically for anything big and ugly in my neck of the world the forecasting models ( for big and ugly stuff) are pretty good and the only complaint I have is that they constantly weight to long to raise the flag, or even say things like there is a 20% chance this will be come cat 4 or cat 5. Once its announced then tracking and forecasting from my view is pretty good. So to combat this I set a number of Alerts up in Windy usually 300nm east of me, because most of my big an ugly stuff comes from the east, be North East or SE. So I get the email from Windy that alerts me well ahead of time and I can pay more attention, and generally get more than a week's warning. I do the same thing for passages I want SW type winds around 14knots, so I set an alert for this along the proposed route. Once I have set this up I don't have to pay a lot of attention to the latest forecast, I can focus on other than being a meteorologist. I cant find any other proactive tools to do this, do any others exist ?
Second problem: I plan larger trips over around 2 gears, so currently looking at Ozy, to New Caledonia, to Fiji, to Marshals, Micronesia, Japan (or Palau), back to Philippines. 2 years and around 15,000nm. So when are the best winds, can I get a sailing line, least cyclones, most sunny days, best current etc All of these things make for great, ok, or horrible experience. There is nothing that Im aware of that pulls this together. Even the simpler aspects seem to fall short. ie I keep grib files going back in some cases two or 3 years, and for the world at least 1 year. I know history doesn't mean that it will be repeated, but it is an indicator, it gives you typical weather pattern tracks, shows the transitioning ITC zones and where it converges. I now get other sailors asking me for this historic information. So I keep all the old gribes and it forms part of my planning. I then take a simple excel spread sheet add the places in order Im thinking about down the left colum, then months across the top colour code for wind and rain and very quickly you can see where you need to find a place to hide over the cyclone season, where its likely to be wet, where the wind will be on the nose and you will struggle to get a sailing line, where your timing for great weather (green) runs into Cyclones ( red), or rain (blue). As far as I know there is no known tools to pull this together.
Safety: From a safety aspect we need proactive tools. Something that will poke us in the butt when we are enjoying ourselves. There is little sense in my view having an oil pressure light on a dash you cant see unless you go looking at it every hour the motor is on, so hopefully it has a buzzer. I want a buzzer for weather, that I can taylor to suit how and under what conditions it alerts me. In my case i use email, as its one of the few off boat communication tools I have 99% of the time.
So I have solved most of my own requirements, but it would be so good to have some generic tool/APP that pulls all this information together that has some customized alerting.
