SailFlow & FishWeather, how did I miss these?
I was a little stunned this morning to discover two very interesting and ambitious marine weather services that seem to have sprung up fully formed, but without my knowledge! SailFlow and FishWeather are sister services, each offering tailored weather products either graphically via the Web or a WAP enabled cell phone (there are lots), or via a regular voice call. The services boast their own weather sensors covering a lot of the U.S. coastline, plus their own meteorologists and even computer modeling programs (in addition to public resources, of course). It turns out that both are the spawn of WeatherFlow, a company which has spent 15 years building a “national coastal mesonet with a presence in over 20 states…The WeatherFlow staff of engineers, meteorologists, and IT professionals are dedicated to increasing the understanding of the complex nature of climate within the coastal zone.” I intend to try out at least each service’s free month trial Web subscription. By the way, Eli of EliBoat—whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week—has been using WSI live satellite weather, which is a whole other animal than SailFlow. He posted some comments yesterday.
I’ve been checking SailFlow forecasts here in the San Francisco Bay Area and comparing them to other forecast services over the past 9+ months, and I’m sorry to say I’ve been underwhelmed — SailFlow forecasts have been much less accurate than other services (e.g., AccuWeather), not all that much better than throwing darts blindfolded. I’m reminded of a sailing race late last year where SailFlow forecast light wind from the south, but the actual wind turned out to be moderate from the west.
Easily the best forecasts I’ve used were from Coast Weather, but it sadly shut down at the end of last year.