Here is the Shipping Forecast
Our yacht ANUK is sailing through most of the British shipping forecast areas. These surround the British Isles in square blocks on the chart, and every night and every morning the BBC Radio 4 service announcer reads out a weather forecast to a rigid formula that never changes.
This certainty, together with the distant romance of the sea, makes the BBC Shipping forecast a much-loved fixture in British culture, so much so that when it was suggested by BBC managers that it would be cancelled there was a nationwide outcry.
As a result, land people with little knowledge of.the sea lie sardine-snug in their beds after midnight, hugging with delicious horror the tales of hurricane-force winds and huge seas across the vast expanse of ocean.
The shipping forecast follows a haiku-like format of a General Synopsis of the weather, sea area forecasts, and warnings of gales.
Once we sailed through South East Iceland across the track of torpedoed merchantmen ships of the Second World war. Hundreds of fathoms below, old brass ships bells tolled out the words of the forecast with descending precision: `Viking, South Utsire, North Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Northerly, Force Nine, Poor…‘
The skulls of drowned sailors nodded together in tacit agreement: a dirty night tonight. No more „I love you“ to postcard-pretty girls ashore, no more, no more, no more…
ANUK sails on, through sea areas Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle…. The shipping forecast follows us with mournful certainty:
„Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, falling slowly. Good.“
After the forecast a piece of music is played, a piece called „Sailing By.“ This is filled with watery notes reminscent of gentle sweeping waves in the sunlight. I first heard this in a full gale in the Bristol Channel in an old wooden yacht, a long, long time ago. The sheer incongruity of the music counterposed to the terror of the situation has never left me, and it never will.
„Lundy, Force Ten, Poor…Outlook, uncertain…“
Text: Graham
