Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Starpath Ship Reports Revised

We offer a free email service for mariners with which you can receive by email all the official ship reports of weather and sea state for the past 6 hours from within 300 nmi of your location on any ocean.  This service is described at


It is a powerful service, in that it is essentially a live look at the wind and waves around you, in any ocean at any time of day or night. You could also use it to check your barometer if you forgot to calibrate it before you left. Many vessels these day have email via sat phone or HF/SSB radio.

We have offered this service for almost a year now, but we just noticed that the way enhanced spam filters are now working, along with the increased use of html mail, that we were getting as many rejects as we were valid requests... not counting of course the tons of span that hit the server continuously.

To improve the functionality of this service we have restructured it so that you now use the subject line to send in your latitude and longitude, rather than the way we used to have it when we pulled your location from the body of the message.  Now the body of the text can be anything, in any format and it will not matter.

If you have not tried this, give it a go.  If you live on a coast, it is even a way to get "buoy reports" from offshore waters where no buoys exist.

Or if you are following a friend's voyage across the ocean, you can with an email learn in a minute or two what the actual conditions are where they are.

We have a similar free service for asact wind data at starpath.com/ascat.




No comments: