Useful links - Local Current Conditions.
Wind speeds are taken from a few different points around the harbour, there is also a wave height boy just off the Peninsula,
Below are some links we encourage our students to study on regular occasions to get used to the weather forecasts & trends
LPC Weatherstation - Located on the Eastern Mole on the approach to Port Lyttelton. This is an excellent resource especially the tide indicator which shows predicted vs actual. The Easterly winds tend to show about 5 knots less then actual readings from the middle of the harbour, Southerly (SW) winds also tend to be 5-10 knots more at the Magazine Bay marina because of its alignment with Gebbies pass. Check out the weather history link too.
Windnet wind speed indicators - There are a few of these, not always online though, however the one in Lyttelton Harbour is particularly useful. It is located in the lighthouse on the reef (not eastern light), the information is relayed by radio to a station that converts the data to a digital format for the website. This gives you a realistic figure of wind speed, especially if you're leaving Naval Point Yacht Club on a strong Easterly wind
Canterbury Wave Bouy - The Canterbury wave buoy is moored in about 76 meters of water, 17 kilometers east of Le Bons Bay, Banks Peninsula at Latitude 43° 45’ South, Longitude 173° 20’ East. It sends information about the waves off the coast every half hour. Just take a look it after a strong southerly flow!
New Zealand Metservice (local forcast for the Lyttelton Harbour to the Waimakariri River Mouth, Quite a useful guide, I have found that the southerly predictions are either late or early, and this can swing quite a bit, check the site regularly, it is updated at set times through the day.
Metvuw I like this site because I can see the wind speed in the isobars, gives me a clearer impression on whats going to happen
Buoy Weather More of a surfers site, very detailed with wave and weather conditions, well worth checking out
Wind Predict - A professional yacht racing site, uses two major computer models to compare data to, it is a pay per view site but has some free emelents. The local clubs have found this very accurate.
Yacht brokerage for Trailer Yachts & Keel Boats
Download free charts, tidal info & more
Notice to Mariners for Lyttelton
Maritime Training
Coastguard Boating Education Services
Class associations
More trailer yacht associations
More Weather & Conditions
Maritime NZ links
The Safe Ship Management system
Recreational boating publications and forms
Distress Beacon info - will yours still work?
Yachting New Zealand links
Search for your yacht by sail No.
Local Yacht clubs:
Canterbury Yachting Association
Books & Publications
Easterly - Naval Point Yacht Club
Canterbury Sailing Handbook
Banks Peninsula Cruising Guide - out of print, but I have a copy you can borrow!
www.transpacific.co.nz - marine publications
Yacht Chandlers
Obourns
Burnsco
Boat Christchurch
New GPS phones give incorrect readings on Charts
We arrived near the club mooring at Port Levy at 9.30 pm and it was quite dark. There were no navigation lights to take a bearing off only a few house lights dotted around the bay. We knew roughly where we were and the depth gauge gave us some confidence of our position but even with a powerful torch I could not locate the mooring. “I get a GPS position from my new Nokia mobile phone,” I stated to my wife confidently, (after all the club handbook has the GPS coordinates listed and after entering these into my phone as a waypoint it would guide me to the exact spot just like a car navigation map). To my horror it said I was 38KM SE of the mooring. I searched frantically through the advanced options and re-checked the waypoint I had entered but could not find any reason for this huge error. I threw out the anchor and settled down for the night disappointed with my new phone’s accuracy.
Club handbook – Port Levy – 43 deg 38.4 minutes S
172 deg 50.1 minutes E
My phone shows my location as 43.645 S 172.828 E which in fact looks like its in north Christchurch. The GPS phone was not faulty, it has no maps stored so it’s not a WGS84 mapping problem, it’s something completely different but very important to any mariner. My phone, like most phones or non marine GPS devices, displays information in Decimal Degrees NOT Degrees & Decimal Minutes, as a hydrographic chart shows.
Google Earth, to confuse you further, has 4 methods of giving you different locations
1 – Decimal Degrees (required by some land-based GPS devices)
2 – Degrees, Minutes, Seconds (for very old charts)
3 – Degrees, Decimal Minutes (modern nautical charts)
4 – Universal Transverse Mercator (another alternative system)
So if you use a GPS with Google maps on your notebook, or GPS on your phone, make sure you have the correct notation displayed!
My next challenge is to download charts & satellite photos onto my phone, then use the GPS function to plot my position. And, as an added advantage, it will not need mobile phone coverage to work since the maps will be stored on the internal 2GB card and be totally free! A cheap easy chart plotter? I’ll let you know how that goes soon, and if you have already done this then please drop me an email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Decimal degrees - (from Wikipedia)
Decimal degrees (DD) express latitude and longitude geographic coordinates as decimal fractions and are used in many Geographic Information Systems (GIS), web mapping applications such as Google Maps, and GPS devices. Decimal degrees are an alternative to using degrees, minutes, and seconds (DMS). As with latitude and longitude, the values are bounded by ±90° and ±180° each.
Positive latitudes are north of the equator, negative latitudes are south of the equator. Positive longitudes are east of Prime Meridian, negative longitudes are west of the Prime Meridian. Latitude and longitude are usually expressed in that sequence, latitude before longitude.
Dudley Jackson. Learn to sail on ‘Good Point’ www.maritimetraining.co.nz
