Shipping Forecast: BBC has published weather reports for seafarers for 100 years – News

In the United Kingdom, shipping forecasts are part of the basic service. The BBC publishes the weather for people at sea twice a day. For exactly one hundred years, the maritime bulletins have been providing fishermen, helmsmen and sailors with storm warnings, weather forecasts and much more.

“The shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency…”

It’s the first thing you hear on the airwaves in the morning. And the last thing you hear after midnight. A mysterious sequence of sounds and ciphers.

“There are storm warnings in place for Bay of Biscay, FitzRoy, Sole, Fastnet, Shannon and Rockall.”

As reliably as the ebb and flow, they are read daily in a slightly pastoral voice on BBC Radio 4. The shipping forecasts. They keep the ones alive. Others rock them to sleep.
Rockall. Vikings. Trafalgar.
The exact meaning of the maritime bulletins remains hidden to most landlubbers, but the meaning is clear; Man lives on an island surrounded by an unpredictable sea.

When the kitchen table starts to rock

At night in London you feel like you can feel the kitchen table starting to rock slightly while the smell of salt water and pipe smoke spreads from the radio, alongside isobars and wind speeds. Always fanned by a slight wanderlust and adventure.

Even in the age of satellite navigation, sea weather reports on the radio are irreplaceable, an old captain on the Shetland Islands recently explained to me. “As islanders and a seafaring nation, we hear on the radio what awaits us at sea when we leave the harbor.” At night on the bridge on the high seas, they are a leash to home so that we don’t forget where we come from.”

Shipping Forecasts were created a hundred years ago. Precise instruments make weather forecasts possible. And thanks to long-wave radio, these could also be received on the high seas. The sea around the British Isles was divided into 31 maritime zones – from Iceland to the Bay of Biscay. Every evening they are read out clockwise. Standardized meteorological bulletins. 370 words. None too much. Nothing too little.

“Trafalgar: Southwest 3 to 5, varying 2 to 4. Rough or very rough, occasionally moderate in the southeast. Just. Good.”

Only one sea region does not have a geographical name: Fitzroy in the Atlantic. Named after the creator of Shipping Forecasts, Admiral Robert FitzRoy. On his moss-covered grave in northeast London, a sentence from Preacher Solomon: “The wind blows south, it turns north, it turns and turns and blows and comes back to where it started.”

For many, the “Shipping Forecast” is a daily piece of poetry. “Language made music,” said a BBC spokesman in a recent interview. When he reads the bulletins in the studio after midnight, he has music in his ears. For a hundred years, Shipping Forecasts have been bringing confidence to sailors on the rough Atlantic at night and lulling landlubbers to sleep under the warm duvet.