Gentle Seas of the Midnight Hour

It is a strange magic that transforms data readings from straight-edged chunks of sea into poetry. That magic which swirls sadness and beauty through the monotone. It is the idea of adventure in the restless middle of the night. The promise that, in our darkest hour, wherever around these islands we might (but probably never will) be, we won't be sailing completely blind. Perhaps the magic comes from the countless, often nameless souls whose lives were lost to the deep, or to the unflinching reefs and rocks of our coastline. For as long as these islands have been inhabited, there has been a seafaring culture of one type or another. And for as long as there has been a seafaring culture, seafarers have lost their lives to sudden storms, to mysterious banks of fog, to the whims of our omnipotent sea.

The storm which led to the earliest iterations of the Shipping Forecast has come to be known as the Royal Charter Storm after the largest of many ships which were wrecked in its ferocious, hurricane force 12 winds. The ship, Royal Charter, was wrecked on the shores of Anglesey (the historic home of the Celtic druids) and over 450 lives were lost only a handful of miles from their destination port of Liverpool, after the ship had come all the way from Melbourne, on the opposite side of the planet. This tragedy led to Robert FitzRoy, then the head of the Meteorological Office, developing the first Gale Warning system, which would eventually go on to become the Shipping Forecast.

Of the many treacherous obstacles for ships attempting to find safe passage around our islands, the numerous offshore sandbanks, reefs and smaller islands which surround the mainland of Britain are perhaps the most dangerous. It is from these underwater and offshore places that the areas of the Shipping Forecast get their names.

This is also where the poetry begins...  

Dover, Plymouth, Thames, Fair Isle, Malin, Sole. The familiar and the mysterious combine to cast a spell on the casual listener. A linguistic meadow of wildflowers, of clear skies and fog, of jostling seas or raging wind. Just as each spell is as ephemeral as the passing weather, the area names are not set in stone. Indeed this brand is named after an area of the Shipping Forecast which no longer exists, Finisterre having been renamed FitzRoy at the behest of the Spanish meteorological service in 2002.

These names seep into our national consciousness – as brands, or into songs by Blur. They are areas on a map, but they are so much more. In fact, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I first looked at a map of the Shipping Forecast areas and set eyes upon the linguistic jigsaw laid out on a printed page. I must admit, for a long time I didn't even know that Lundy was my own area, nestled as I am in its south western corner. I’m one of the many for whom the Shipping Forecast was only ever distantly related to the physical world. Instead, for me, it existed in the liminal darkness of the midnight hour...

I like diving below the surface when I’m surfing in a storm. However windy or wild it might be above the water, it is always calm below. Calm and deep and dark and blue. It felt like that in my bedroom, when I was a teenager in the light handed grip of pubescent insomnia, listening to radio 4 at what I now know to have been 12.48am. Sailing By would start, and I would slip into a calmer world. Eyes open in the dark, while the cold and mysterious fierceness of the Shipping Forecast played out, in that warm and familiar calmness. I was not on a vessel at night. I was not treading water through a Viking storm. I was wrapped in a duvet and safe. The Shipping Forecast was the metaphorical rain against my window, and listening to it I knew that I would soon, at long last, slip into sleep.

Throughout my teenage years I was regularly lulled to sleep in this manner. As an obsessed surfer and later a lifeguard, I was better placed than many to understand the myriad obscurities of the forecast, to rearrange the controlled patterns of the announcers voices into the endless chaos of capping ocean waves and crunching coastal ones. I can't say that I ever really did, but perhaps my wave riding dreams were in fact the ripples of the Shipping Forecast reaching my sleeping mind, groomed to perfection by the gentle hand of liminal fetch and a slumbering wind.

As well as causing dreamworld waves, the Shipping Forecast describes the procession of real world waves, long before they make landfall. Low pressure systems in Trafalgar might butt up against high pressure systems in Plymouth, swell meeting favourable wind. But that is about as precise as you're likely to get – a vague idea of swell-creating pressure systems and perhaps inshore waters giving an insight into conditions at the coast. Modern surf forecasting has been able to take the geographical features of individual breaks and offer a more tailored, site specific forecast for waves. But even with the abundance of technology we have available to us today, we can never really say what each new day might bring. The main wild card for British beach break surfers is the quality and position of the sandbars. A notoriously difficult-to-predict factor in determining wave quality at any given beach, it has become a lifelong obsession for many a leather skinned, salt encrusted local.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned difficulties of translating the Shipping Forecast into a wave forecast, I am going to call upon its magic and the poetry to describe a particular morning of beautiful waves. Waves which made up a truly special session at the beach where I learnt to surf and have spent most of my life either in the water or watching over it as a lifeguard.

Describing surfing is one of the aspects of writing which I've never felt much good at, so the Shipping Forecast will most certainly make a worthy substitute:

Trafalgar, variable 3 or 4 becoming northerly or north westerly later, but easterly 6 to gale 8 in south east, fair, good.

FitzRoy, Sole, easterly or south easterly 3 to 5 occasionally 2 in south FitzRoy, showers, good.

Lundy, Fastnet, variable becoming east or south east 2 to 4 increasing 5 at times in Fastnet, fair, fog patches in Lundy, good, occasionally very poor in Lundy.

Inshore waters. Scilly automatic, east by north 2, mist, 2 miles, 1028 rising slowly.

Suffice to say the surf was 1-2ft clean, running lefts and the sun was shining. There were no fog patches in our particular corner of Lundy and the gales in Trafalgar were yet to make themselves known. Whatever the Shipping Forecast means to any given individual, whether it be the seafarer reliant on the clipped prose to navigate potential storms, or the insomniac, hoping the poetry of far off seas and good visibility will lull her to sleep, its spell is as strong and seductive as ever.

It has without doubt saved countless lives and contributed to the transformation of the sea, from an entity to be feared and avoided to something which provides livelihoods and recreation for millions of us around our jagged coast. For me it is the mother storm, the far off wind which lulls me to sleep and sends swell through my dreams.