Weather

My Dad spend a large part of his working life as a weather forecaster. I remember asking him one morning what the weather was going to be like today. Thinking, he’d been working the mid-night shift at the airport and could give me a hint whether I should take an umbrella or not. His reply, “The best thing to do is go out and stand on the back porch. Forecasters deal with macro-data and weather patterns are micro. If you understand your local climate, you will be better at predicting the weather than I am.”

This of course resulted in years of standing on the back porch before getting dressed for school. I actually became quite good a figuring out if an umbrella was going to be needed. Even though I had years of walking the dog before work and paid attention to temperature, cloud cover and type, wind direction and speed; my skills languished as the consequence of error was much lower driving a car to work.

Fast forward to boat ownership and I am back to standing on the porch – the cockpit this time – to fine tune my prediction skills again. The problem is that as a Looper one is constantly on the move and rarely has long enough in one place to learn its micro-climate. So the weather lesson for today was – don’t forget to look behind.

The photo above was taken as we headed east to Blind River. We arrived mid-afternoon without issue.