N 07° 06.200
E 171° 22.407

I didn’t believe myself that I wrote 48 emails on a single day.

A big chunk were emails to push again for the permit to sail into Kosrae, Micronesia. There is – fortunately – S. Smith who always reacts to my mails but he is – unfortunately – not the person who has to issue the permit. But again I pushed the group of persons who are involved. And I got an email with a forwarded “not deliverable” email to me. The reason was a mispelling of “mare” in the email address. Instead of using the reply button it was misspelled and never cross-checked when the “not deliverable” message arrived. After all the mails on this matter, I got, beside apologies, a mail that the person in charge will issue the permit once he had finished another work. This should work now, and if not, I have his name and valid email address.

Internet made sailing into a country pretty cumbersome and no one in the authoraties sees the increase of work on their side…

Another big chunk were related with weather forecasts.

I’m using since this year the forecasts from saildocs. The following short history I copied from an information mail of saildocs.

“Saildocs was started in 1999 to provide internet weather data to Sailmail members. It was created and is supported by Jim Corenman, who co-founded Sailmail with Stan Honey and wrote the Airmail software. The grib project started in 2002 as a “science project” and has recently moved to a new server with high-bandwidth connections to NOAA’s servers. Saildocs continues to be available without charge thanks to the support from Sailmail (www.sailmail.com).”

“Grib” is short for “gridded binary”, a data format originally used for computer forecast-model data but also used for forecaster-generated dat. (Taken from a saildocs document. )

From saildocs there are the forecasts of the global GFS, ECMWF, and ICON models available. I get the forecasts of these three models for the sea area I specify with coordinates of the corner points. I compare the forecast of these three models. The better they match, the higher is the chance the wind shows up as forecasted.

I looked yesterday for the reason that me extension of my subscription for the ECMWF model doesn’t work anymore. It seems, I used one wrong parameter, which is not checked when requesting a subscription. Thus, I got a confirmation that my request is valid, but the forecast in grib format did never come. Now it seems it works again.

I also looked for bulletins with information about storm warnings, troughs, ridges and fronts in the area just north the equator. I have links to bulletins on the homepages of NOAA (US) and JMA (Japan) but they cover only areas further north, while I’m looking for Micronesia, and Mariana Island. After searching through the long saildocs list on available items I found what I looked for. I got files send as single requested ones and wait now to see if I can get them in the subscription mode as well.

On top of all these mails I had to write a few other emails and messages in Signal and Threema.

At the end, I was exhausted.