Anne and I have been paddling our sea-kayaks around Scotland for over 30 years. We usually set off with the kayaks full of food and supplies for at least a week away from civilisation. We aim to have a very good time and not drown too often.

Weather forecasting is quite important, we like them as accurate as possible and for as far into the future as possible too. Wind is our enemy. In that if it's too windy we can't get on the water that day. Many times we have had to entertain ourselves ashore when the sea is too rough for us or the wind is too strong in the direction we need to go.

In the past, and right up to the end of 2023 we had 2 reliable ways to get a weather forecast in the wilderness.



Landing at our new campsite for the night the first thing we do is switch on our phones. If we have a signal it means we can get a forecast off the internet, so all is well.

Our preferred service is with XCWeather. XCWeather was setup over 20 years ago by Dave Billington. A nicely detailed forecast for where you are can be seen for up to 7 days, the first 3 days, including, today, can be detailed every hour. if you want.

The XC refers to 'Cross Country' and is a term used by UK Paragliders when they try to fly as far as possible in one continuous flight. My old mates, John Silvester and Pete Bursnall, put me onto XCWeather a long time ago. It's the reason for the hourly update. To go XC you need this kind of detail, so John and Pete told me. Very handy for sea-kayakers too. The last thing we want when out on the sea is to be surprised by an unexpected increase in windspeed. This could be a lot more serious than a little inconvenient.



The website is here: XCWeather.co.uk There is an iOS app too. Try not to use an ad-blocker as it's the only way the site gets funded.

Other forecasting services we use are the Marine Inshore from the Met Office and others. But XCWeather seems to be the most accurate and useful for our needs.



If there's no phone signal, and we would like a weather update we have to use our tiny Sony Short-Wave Radio that also does Long-Wave. It's a Sony ICF-SW100. Reputed to be the best Sony SW radio ever made, for the size. We can usually get a signal, noisy, but at least it works. I have two.

Here it is open


Closed


I'd updated the batteries to the very new, USB-C rechargeable AA's made by Newell. No external charger required. Just power and a lead. Nice.


Here is a card with the LW frequency and the four broadcast times for the shipping forecast.


0048 in the middle of the night was a bit of a killer. Both of us had to wake up with some pen-and-paper to write the forecast down. Otherwise we'd instantly forget it or even fall asleep before it got round to the bit we wanted. Handily the radio came on with its own alarm function. I use the tune 'Sailing By' as a ring-tone these days, just to evoke the atmosphere of listening to a crackly radio in the middle of the night in a battered, rain-lashed tent, nervously checking the boats to see if they haven't blown-away or been trampled by sea-monsters (or cows) in the night..

The BBC Long Wave Service has been 'under-review' for a while. But it always seemed to be there. Until last week. Going through our usual routine on Islay, no phone signal, dig out the radio: there was only a lot of static. Oh dear, is the radio broken, it is quite old and a bit obsolete, even though it is still quite small and cute. When we got home a trawl on the internet revealed a lot of the usual BBC spin and propaganda. Radio 4 has now 'expanded' its reach and can be heard with all of these modern and convenient services… cleverly not mentioning that they had switched off the Long-Wave transmitters. Very sneaky…

What to do for our next trip in September!

Alternatives could be some sort of satellite comms. Costly, usually by subscription, but would work. We already carry PLB sat comms for emergencies instead of flares (No subscription). However, with the Garmin satellite InReach type of stuff I've looked at, the forecasting isn't anywhere near as good as XCWeather. Their Marine forecast is only really for bigger boats offshore and wouldn't be of much use to us either. Something to consider if we were ever to paddle abroad I guess?

Our PLB


Truth be told we really didn't like waking up at 0048 or 0520 so had been for a while doing Screen-Captures of XCWeather pages off the phone. We can then look at them anytime we want without needing a phone signal.

Being reasonably tech literate, I was galvanised into thinking of a slicker way to do this. I am a big fan of keeping things as simple and as 'friction-free' as possible. So this is what I now do, as of this morning. It's pretty simple really, I should have done this some time ago…

• Pull up the XCWeather forecast on the iPhone as usual
• Print to PDF
• Save it in Apple's iCloud in a shared folder so everyone in the group can see it on their own phones if they want to
• Once downloaded to the individual's phone there is no need for a phone signal to read it again

Here are some images detailing the workflow:

Example forecast


At the bottom of the screen is the share button


At the top of the next screen in the Options button to switch formats. I hadn't used this before !


PDF is the one you want


Scroll down all of the many option and find 'Save to Files'


I navigate to my own iCloud folder and in there a folder I have already setup to share (the folder) with people.

Once the shared folder is opened by other people they can use it as if it were their own, both save to and load from. The space used comes from the owner. You can set their access to 'read-only' if you want to.