Category: The General Synopsis At Midnight

Categories
The General Synopsis At Midnight

Sea area Fastnet: The wreck of the Sirius, or ‘hey, let’s move the lighthouse!’

IMG_3138The General Synopsis At Midnight heads for East Cork and Waterford, where sea areas Fastnet, Lundy and Irish Sea all get a look-in.

‘I’d a hen party out here last Monday,’ the tour guide says. We’re walking up the hill from the small jetty at Ballycotton Island to the lighthouse. Between the matt black – this lighthouse is one of only two in Ireland painted black – and the red glow from the lamps at the top, it looms ahead like an overgrown Tardis. I’m half expecting the Doctor Who of my childhood, all curly hair and long scarf, to appear around the bend, accompanied by a pulsating woo-hoo-woo soundtrack. We pause half way up at what she tells us is called the ‘elbow’. The lighthouse keepers would stop here for a breather while lugging their provisions from the boat to the top. (The keepers had hens, goats and a flourishing kitchen garden, presumably in an attempt to keep the hauling uphill to a minimum.) But there wouldn’t be a lighthouse at Ballycotton – black or otherwise – if it wasn’t for the ill-fated paddle-steamship Sirius. Work on a new lighthouse on nearby Capel Head was already well underway when the Sirius struck Smith’s Rock south west of Ballycotton early one foggy Saturday morning in January 1847. In April 1838 it had found fame as the first vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean completely under steam, but the treacherous underwater rocks of East Cork and terrible weather conditions meant the end for the Sirius (not to mention 19 of those on board). The London Daily News a few days later reported, ‘…amidst the confusion and alarm that prevailed the life-boat which is usually carried over the paddle-box was attached to the davits and lowered though unfortunately on the wrong side of the ship … melancholy to relate, she was swamped and all in her met a watery grave save Captain Cameron of the Prince river steamer who was a passenger from Dublin in the vessel.’ As a result, it was decided to build the lighthouse on the nine-acre site of Ballycotton Island instead. It commenced operation in 1851 and was permanently staffed by keepers until it was converted to automatic in 1992 and placed in the care of an attendant. Gulls and goats have had their run of the place for years, but thanks to an active local campaign and the support of the Commissioners for Irish Lights, they are once more forced to share it with the newly-launched Ballycotton Island Lighthouse Tours. Two small cottages sit to one side of the lighthouse. One was once used for accommodation until in the 1970s a new building took over this function. An unfortunately ugly lump of a thing, locals call it the Ballycotton Hilton (see image below). ‘It looks like my primary school,’ a man remarks. The closer I get to the lighthouse itself, the more benign the black and red colour palette becomes, and once through the door it is nothing other than beautiful. From the 1.5m thick sandstone walls to the stairs made from granite slabs, our little tour group clusters inside the door to marvel at the labour that created this example of Victorian precision and dedication. Above us, an oak handrail curls upwards and the dark twists of the ceiling are that of a fossilized shell (see image to the right, below). It’s a hot day and outside at the foot of the lighthouse the air was still and unmoving. It hung heavy, smelling of calm seas and dry grass. Yet several floors up on the observation deck a breeze whips crossly around us. interior the hiltonOn this brightly blue afternoon it’s hard to believe any other weather can exist, yet there must have been many, many days and nights when the hearths and homes of the mainland seemed impossibly far away to the keepers. Today even the clouds are the sort painted by a 17th century Dutch Master with a spare bottle of titanium white and time on his hands. The head of an occasional seal breaks the waves and bobs around before dropping under the water once more. The wildlife regard us human visitors with disinterest. (‘That rock is moving!’ a woman exclaims. ‘It’s a goat!’ a little girl tells her.) When our time is up, we stroll back down the hill to the jetty so that our tour can swap over with the next one. The incoming guide recognises a woman in my group. ‘What are you doing on my island?’ she asks as they hug. The boat leaves the island and chugs back to the harbour. The skipper is a man whose father’s boat brought the provisions out to the keepers. His father before him was on the RNLB Mary Standford, famous for the Daunt Lightship Rescue in 1936. Its crew won well-deserved medals for gallantry, as did the boat itself (a gold one, no less). We are still talking about the hen party. There were nine of them took the tour, the guide tells us. Every one of them local, they’d all been looking at the lighthouse their whole lives. ‘Still though, a hen party?’ a woman repeats, incredulous, before deciding,‘it must have been a very sophisticated hen party, so.’ to the lighthouse

Want to sea more? The Commissioners for Irish Lights: cil.ie The Ballycotton Lighthouse: http://www.ballycottonislandlighthousetours.com/ A great read is the memoir ‘The Lightkeeper’ by Gerald Butler, published by Liffey Press. And a footnote involving sea areas Irish Sea and Fastnet: This wreck is to be found 40k from the Ballycotton Lighthouse, in Co. Waterford. It’s the wreck of the crane barge Samson, which came a cropper on a journey from Liverpool to Malta in December 1987 in a fierce south-easterly gale. Its tow-line broke off the Welsh coast and it ran aground at Rams Head, Ardmore. Apparently a man called Jim Rooney managed to climb onto the crane and lived there for 40 days in order to claim salvage. Samson reminds me of the skeleton of an extinct bird. A doomed, flightless creature: something I’d stare at in a museum and wonder how it ever flew at all.

Samson Thanks to Ivan Fitzpatrick for the Samson image.

The General Synopsis At Midnight is my exploration of the sea areas of the BBC R4 Shipping Forecast, thanks to the Maeve Binchy Travel Award. The earlier post ‘Counting Down To Midnight’ explains what I’m up to and where I’m going.

Advertisement
Categories
The General Synopsis At Midnight

Sea areas Sole, Lundy and Fastnet: a trip to the Isles of Scilly

My trip to the Isles of Scilly for The General Synopsis At Midnight project kicks off in rural Devon…

The taxi driver collects me in the village of Tipton St John. On our way to Exeter airport he careers down the narrow country lanes, calling out a giddy ‘whoopsie’ every time we round a bend and encounter another car. Where am I going, he wants to know. ‘That’ll do,’ he says, when I tell him about the Isles of Scilly. ‘That’ll do nicely.’ Yes, I nod enthusiastically. Yes, it will. Once collectively called Area Severn, these three Sea Areas of Sole, Lundy and Fastnet meet in a point just northeast of the Isles of Scilly. Sole doesn’t touch land, the other two have land boundaries. The flight from Exeter to Hugh Town on a 17-seater Twin Otter plane takes less than an hour and I spend a lot of that time looking out the window and mulling over John Gore Grimes’ comment about the invisible boundaries between one sea area and another.

The girl sitting next to me on the plane looks to be about 12 and worried to be travelling alone. Her magazine – which I sneak glances at – is full of teen dilemmas and ads for make-up and boy bands I’ve never heard of. Our pilot and first officer sit cosy-close in the small cockpit at the front of the plane. They leave the door to the cockpit open and the smell from the bag of bananas the first officer has hanging from his seat keeps me company for the journey. I’ve never been this close to the controls of a plane and the similarity between them and those of a car surprise me. Sure, this plane has a lot more knobs and dials and countery-whirly things, but it also has pedals and a tiny rear view mirror. (What could be behind us worth looking at? It must be for checking on the passengers rather than the rush-hour air traffic). At one point mid-flight the first officer twists in his seat and looks behind. He appears to be counting the passengers and I’m glad the girl is reading, her attention distracted by an article entitled How to Stage a Comeback.

The safety demo was a dvd shown at the boarding gate in Exeter. In it, a large man in glasses and a high-vis jacket demonstrated how to pop open a small window in case of emergency. Unwittingly, I realise I have chosen the seat next to emergency exit. ‘Did you watch the demo?’ the first officer asks me. I nod. ‘So you’re happy you know how to operate the window exit?’ I nod again, too nervous to mention that I was so busy wondering how the large man could possibly have fitted out the tiny window and whether he would have to take his specs off first, that I didn’t actually notice how he removed the glass. The girl looks over and I smile reassuringly. No bother, I hope my smile tells her; breaking windows is my specialty. I surreptitiously cross my fingers and look at the window instead, my attempts to silently figure out the push-pull of the frame forgotten when we leave Cornwall behind and fly over the sea. I watch the flickering, clock-hands reflection our propeller makes as it turns. The water below is the gemstone green of Murano glass. Ponderous container ships appear to be barely moving. There are occasional dense shadows that I decide are long-lost wrecks shifting deep in the water. A lonely lighthouse is the single structure on an impossibly tiny outcrop of rock.

The first glimpse of St Mary’s, the largest of the inhabited Isles of Scilly, is beautiful. It is all sweeps and arcs, with intricate cut outs that make it look as though it has been delicately laser cut. On either side of its squeezed waist are the yellow curves of beaches. The Isles of Scilly are 28 miles southwest of Land’s End. Five of 140 in this archipelago are inhabited – some barely so – and even the big ones are little. At three miles wide and about 10 miles all around, St Mary’s is strollable in a day. More than once, in fact: I clock up four town-wide strolls in the first afternoon. Old Town, Old Town House, Old Town Road: by the end of stroll one, I’m beginning to see a pattern in the nomenclature system. The charity shop on the main street of Hugh Town is called Charity Shop. Hugh Town is where the action is on St. Mary’s. It’s a pretty, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of a place with an independent atmosphere that reminds me of Sidmouth, a town on the East Devon coast. Everyone I meet is talking about the weather. But isn’t it always like this in summer, I want to know. Hugh Town seems set up for heat. Designed for ice creams and salt-sticky faces. ‘Double your sun cream factor’, the bus driver had warned me. ‘You’ll fry otherwise.’ The island’s roads are being resurfaced and an Irish lad working there laughs when I ask him why everyone is going on about what a sunny day it is. ‘I’ve been here since February,’ he says, ‘and I’ve seen four seasons pass in four hours.’

Most people I chat to tell me that Harold Wilson is buried here on St Mary’s. In fact, so he gets so much airtime that I decide I’d better go and check out his grave on the far side of Hugh Town, in the 12th century Old Church. I bump into the Chaplain, who guides me through the graveyard. There is no crime here, he tells me. None. He never locks his house or his car. Children have to leave the islands to attend secondary school and before they go, they are taught what security means. (I pass a house later on – called, yes you’ve guessed it, Chaplain’s House – and notice the front door is wide open and I realise he wasn’t exaggerating). Harold Wilson’s grave is simpler than I had expected. A small bunch of fresh flowers rests against the headstone. A tiny red-hatted gnome stands on the granite edge. The Wilsons’ holiday home is nearby, I pass it as I walk back to the harbour. The curtains are closed. A small, plain stone bungalow, it puts me in mind of a breezeblock bunker outside a rural GAA hall. Perhaps the gnome strolled up from its garden.

It’s a hot, sunny afternoon and I am the only visitor in the Isles of Scilly Museum. The volunteer behind the cash desk thanks me profusely for coming in when I thank him for selling me an entry ticket. It is shipwreck heaven in here. In fact, the museum was founded in 1963 because they needed to house the Romano-British finds thrown up by that winter’s storms. One of my reasons for choosing the Isles of Scilly was the shipwrecks. You can’t swing a flip-flop in St Mary’s without hitting a shipwreck story. The Museum is home to many artifacts from the 1798 wreck the Colossos, which had on board the gems of noted collector Sir William Hamilton’s collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. It was found in 1975, and a second wreck near the site of the first yielded up its own long-hidden haul in 1999. Just as I’m about the leave the Museum I spot a display devoted to the Cita, which was en route to Ireland when she sank in 1997. She was on automatic pilot while all the crew slept when she ran aground. The Cita’s cargo spilled for miles around. The display features bits of tyres, St Bernard branded shoes, keyrings with ‘the luck of the Irish’ emblazoned on them.

A shipwreck I have never heard of before is the Thomas W Lawson. The world’s only seven-masted ship and largest pure sailing vessel without an auxiliary engine ever built, this schooner was destroyed nearby in a storm in December 1907. Its cargo of 58,000 barrels of paraffin caused what is believed to be the world’s first recorded oil spill. But the biggest shipwreck story is that of the wonderfully-named Sir Cloudesley Shovell. An Admiral of the Fleet, in 1707 he was sailing home in the HMS Association from a skirmish with the French when thick fog closed around his fleet. The story – given as true by Dava Sobel in Longitude, but disputed by some maritime historians – goes that one of the crew was a Scillonian and recognized the waters they were heading into. He disputed Sir Cloudesley’s reckoning that they were heading for Plymouth, and was so bold as to tell him so. Before the sailor had a chance to say ‘no, guv honest, I think that’s the Bristol Channel ahoy,’ Sir Cloudesley had him hanged for inciting mutiny. Not much consolation for the poor chap that he was proved right: within hours the Association, along with the Romney, the Firebrand and the Eagle, went smash-bang-wallop into the rocks. Only one man among the crew of close to 2,000 is said to have survived. Sir Cloudesley, his two stepsons and his dog apparently escaped on a small boat as far as the waters of nearby Porthellick Cove but most likely drowned trying to get onto the shore. A story persisted for many years that Sir Cloudesley did make it to land alive, but was murdered by a local woman for his priceless emerald ring and, in some versions, his shirt. It was decided that this disaster occured because the sailors could not correctly estimate their longitude, and as a result the Board of Longitude was set up at Greenwich in London.

I take a boat to St Agnes, the most southerly island. St Agnes makes St Mary’s look like New York. The winter population here is tiny. The summer tourist population swells the island, but most are day-trippers and so it falls quiet again in the evenings. From the harbour Porth Conger I walk past the decommissioned lighthouse to the inlets at Periglis Cove and St Warna’s Cove, named for the patron saint of shipwrecks. The further into the island, the quieter it becomes. I paddle around in the water, oddly aware of how far I am now from Cornwall and the mainland. Far out to sea is the lonely tower of Bishop Rock lighthouse and white-edged rocks break the water like old toothpaste smears on a sink.

I stop to read the community notice board. ‘If you have clothes for the fete please leave them in the snooker room’ it says, and it’s hard not to imagine the inhabitants as a casual sort of bunch, straight out of central casting for The Good Life, all happily buying each others’ cast-offs and stopping for a game of pool while they’re at it. St Agnes is connected at low tide by a sandbar to a tiny island called Gugh (pronounced Goo or Gue, depending on who’s talking). There are only two buildings on Gugh, each with a gently-curved aerofoil roof. I get chatting to a chap who turns out to be their owner. Gugh was uninhabited from the Neolithic period up until the 1920s, when an eccentric Irish surveyor decided to build himself a barn and a house. He is buried on the prow of the island, standing up. The current owner reckons he was quite a short chap, so that probably wasn’t as tricky a digging job as it sounds.

There is a home-made weather vane by the beach on St Agnes. A rough wooden cross, with a rope hanging down the middle and ‘Troy Town Weather Station’ written by hand across the top. (That’s it in the photo above). The dryness or otherwise of the rope determines the weather:

Rope : Forecast
Dry = Sunny
Wet = Rain
Still = Calm
Moves = Windy
White = Snow
Invisible = Fog
Gone = Force 10

The rope is dry and hangs perfectly still. I think of Craig Snell in the Met Office and the way the shipping forecast has its perfect codes, designed to convey so much with a single word. I stand on the beach on St. Agnes staring out to sea. Somewhere out there Sole, Lundy and Fastnet greet each other invisibly in the water. The only noise I can hear is the unsettling sound of gulls, their screeches the cries of unseen children.

____

The General Synopsis At Midnight is my exploration of the sea areas of the BBC R4 Shipping Forecast, thanks to the Maeve Binchy Travel Award. The earlier post ‘Counting Down To Midnight’ explains it all. Honest, it does… 

in the sea on st agnes

Categories
The General Synopsis At Midnight

Meeting The Met Office

Thursday July 24th and where better to begin The General Synopsis At Midnight than the Met Office? And where better in the Met Office than the desk where the Shipping Forecast is created?

Andy Yeatman is a thirty-year veteran of the Met Office. He has forecasted the weather, presented the weather and now, in his role as Deputy Head of Communications, has the unenviable task of explaining the weather to me. It’s all about dealing with uncertainty, he tells me. (That and understanding the Met Offices’ different audiences and their very different needs.) The Met Office HQ on the outskirts of Exeter – it moved to this purpose-built location from Bracknell some years ago – has the feel of a well-run and friendly small town. People are working in shared meeting spaces. Busy open plan offices spread out from a vast atrium. There’s a shop, a café, a gym. The Met Office employs 1,800 people at 60 locations throughout the world and on the Thursday lunchtime of my visit, it’s a busy spot. So despite what we in Ireland think, we’re not the only ones talking about the weather all the time.

Andy sits me down with Craig Snell, one of the team of Maritime Forecasters. The Chief Forecaster produces an overall forecast every six hours and it is Craig’s job to turn that forecast into the shipping briefing, using a computer model and a number of real-time information and observation sources such as ships and oil platforms. When the forecast is ready, he emails it to Radio 4 and the UK coastguard stations. He sits facing a triptych of screens. Today’s lunchtime broadcast on the desk in front of him and I am oddly thrilled at my one-hour-early preview of the Shipping Forecast. Craig’s job is to write a Forecast in as close to 350 words as he can (it goes up to 370 for the late night broadcast), giving as much information as is feasible, as clearly as possible. That information has to include sea-state, wind, weather and visibility but there’s only a limited palette of words he can use. No veering off into ‘a bit rough’ or ‘watch out there’ allowed. And yet he and the other Maritime Forecasters each have their own style and approach the information slightly differently. The priority in writing a forecast is to find what will have the most impact. As he puts it, ‘to concentrate on the things that would affect life.’ He suspects one of the reasons it’s popular with a generation older than his own is because they grew up with the Beaufort scale.

How many words are in his palette I wonder. Fifty-odd maybe? It reminds me of Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, the way Craig can make a word work so hard. It is this repetition, he thinks, it what creates the poetry of the forecasts. ‘South’ appears in a single sentence several times, yet has a different meaning each time. For example, ‘fog’ can have only three adjectives: Patches, Banks and Extensive. More Extensive is allowed, if the fog is covering over half the area. There are no pea soupers at sea. Imminent means the first six hours of a given twelve-hour period, Soon means the second six hours. Visibility can be nothing other than Good, Moderate, Poor and Very Poor. Imagine if life was that simple, I think as I sit next to him and he explains these codes. Imagine day-to-day experience being that easy to grade and anticipate – and even to understand. Life would be simpler, that’s for sure. Would it be more interesting?

He tells me I can keep the copy of today’s lunchtime forecast. But before I stash it away, I ask him to sign it. Now that’s a souvenir.IMG_3445

 

Want to sea more? (Sorry) http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/marine-shipping-forecast/#?tab=map

The General Synopsis At Midnight is my exploration of the sea areas of the BBC R4 Shipping Forecast, thanks to the Maeve Binchy Travel Award. The earlier post ‘Counting Down To Midnight’ explains it all. Honest, it does.

Categories
The General Synopsis At Midnight

Counting down to Midnight

Counting down to The General Synopsis at Midnight…

I stared yet again at my map of the 31 Sea Areas (see Map here). From Iceland and Norway down as far as the coast of Spain, the sea seemed to stretch on forever. And I remembered a many-years-ago edition of Mastermind and the four contestants with their four completely different specialised subjects. I couldn’t recall three of them. (The Moomin books of Tove Jansson perhaps, or something equally learnable; The Walls of Limerick, the Fjords of Killary.) The fourth person had ‘agriculture’ as their specialised subject. I imagined him lowering himself slowly down into Magnus Magnusson’s famous black chair and thinking, uh oh, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. I’ve had what I’ve come to think of as my agriculture moments since I began to properly plan my exploration of the 31 Sea Areas of the Shipping Forecast. Too much sea! Too much land! Too many areas! But now that I’m counting down, and getting ready to visit to the Met Office in Exeter to see how the Forecast is prepared, I find that I’m getting excited all over again. Agriculture? A doddle.

The Shipping Forecast is broadcast four times a day on BBC Radio 4: 0048, 0535, 1201 and 1754. An essential tool for those at sea, it has become much more. Recently I met Captain Harry McClenahan of the Commissioners of Irish Lights, who talked about the power it has to transcend navigation. ‘At night, in a strange ocean you hear it,’ he said, ‘and it gives you a sense of security, and family.’ The music that precedes the late night broadcast is Sailing By, composed by Ronald Binge in 1963. Many listeners regard this waltz as a soothing lullaby, yet for Harry it doesn’t depict calm weather conditions, but rather is all about movement. ‘It is a painting of the sea,’ he said. Already I owe both Harry McClenahan and John Gore Grimes of the CIL a big thank-you for their help and advice. (For Shipping Forecast novices, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnQ2Lk20n3U is the perfect introduction. Laurie McMillan reads the late Forecast on radio and tv as part of BBC’s Arena night in 1993.). I was on the Marian Finucane radio show on May 31st to discuss the project and again on September 20th with an update about my overnight stay on Fastnet Lighthouse.

For my starting point, I have taken one of the four Shipping Forecasts broadcast on Wednesday May 28th 2014, which was Maeve Binchy’s birthday and the day this travel bursary was announced. (The full Forecast is included at the end of this post). In the photo I’m with her husband, Gordon Snell. With Gordon Snell In each Forecast, the Sea Areas are grouped by the prevailing/anticipated weather conditions, and in the Forecast broadcast at 0535 on May 28th, the groupings went like this:

Viking, North Utsire, Northern South Utsire
Southern South Utsire
North-East Forties
South-West Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger
Fisher
German Bight, Humber
Thames
Dover
Wight, Portland, Plymouth
Biscay
Fitzroy
Sole
Lundy
Fastnet
Irish Sea
Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey, Fair Isle, Faeroes, South-East Iceland

(Those keen listeners among you will have noticed that Trafalgar isn’t on the list. That’s because it only ever features in the 0048 bulletin. I’m sure our paths will cross at some stage somehow…)

In The General Synopsis at Midnight, I’m going to explore the areas as dictated by the prevailing weather conditions on Maeve Binchy’s birthday. Those areas I can’t literally dip a toe into, I will explore in other ways such as through folklore, culture or a shared history.  John Gore Grimes, who is on the Board of the Commissioners of Irish Lights, was one of the first people I met while planning this project. As he rightly pointed out, the challenge of those Sea Areas that don’t touch land is to find what does distinguish them from each other – apart from the weather conditions. And he is a man who knows his weather: he has made 14 successful voyages to the Arctic, and seven attempts to reach Franz Josef Land (every single one of which was defeated by sea ice). He says that the weather in Bailey and South East Iceland can be ‘absolutely terrifying’, while Shannon and Rockall are ‘particularly lively.’ He described Biscay – with what I suspect is typical aplomb – as ‘the gathering place for a gale tea party.’

I am kicking off The General Synopsis at Midnight with a visit to the Met Office HQ in Exeter and a trip the Isles of Scilly. Just north-east of the Isles of Scilly is the common nodal point of Areas Sole, Lundy and Fastnet.

Seas, shipwrecks and seals beckon….

Shipping Forecast broadcast on Maeve Binchy’s birthday:

AND NOW THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET OFFICE, ON BEHALF OF THE MARITIME AND COASTGUARD AGENCY, AT 0505 ON WEDNESDAY 28TH MAY 2014.

THERE ARE WARNINGS OF GALES IN SOUTH UTSIRE, FISHER AND GERMAN BIGHT. THE GENERAL SYNOPSIS AT MIDNIGHT: LOW SOLE 1,014 LOSING ITS IDENTITY. NEW LOW EXPECTED SOUTHERN ENGLAND 1,011 BY MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. THE AREA FORECASTS FOR THE NEXT 24 HOURS:

VIKING, NORTH UTSIRE, NORTHERN SOUTH UTSIRE: VARIABLE THREE OR FOUR. FOG PATCHES LATER. MODERATE OR GOOD. OCCASIONALLY VERY POOR LATER.
SOUTHERN SOUTH UTSIRE: EASTERLY FIVE TO SEVEN. OCCASIONALLY GALE EIGHT AT FIRST IN EAST, BACKING NORTH-EASTERLY FOUR LATER. FAIR. GOOD.
NORTH-EAST FORTIES: EASTERLY FIVE TO SEVEN, BACKING NORTH-EASTERLY FOUR OR FIVE. FAIR. GOOD.
SOUTH-WEST FORTIES, CROMARTY, FORTH, TYNE, DOGGER: EASTERLY OR NORTH-EASTERLY FOUR OR FIVE. OCCASIONALLY SIX EXCEPT IN CROMARTY AND FORTH. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
FISHER: EASTERLY OR NORTH-EASTERLY FIVE TO SEVEN. OCCASIONALLY GALE EIGHT AT FIRST IN EAST. FAIR. GOOD.
GERMAN BIGHT, HUMBER: EAST OR NORTH-EAST FIVE TO SEVEN. OCCASIONALLY GALE EIGHT AT FIRST IN GERMAN BIGHT. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR. THAMES: CYCLONIC BECOMING EASTERLY FOUR OR FIVE. OCCASIONALLY SIX LATER IN NORTH. RAIN OR SHOWERS. FOG PATCHES AT FIRST. MODERATE. OCCASIONALLY VERY POOR AT FIRST.
DOVER: WEST BACKING SOUTH-WEST THREE OR FOUR. OCCASIONALLY FIVE AT FIRST. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
WIGHT, PORTLAND, PLYMOUTH: VARIABLE THREE IN SOUTH-WEST PLYMOUTH OTHERWISE WESTERLY OR NORTH-WESTERLY FOUR OR FIVE. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
BISCAY: VARIABLE THREE OR FOUR. OCCASIONALLY WESTERLY FIVE IN NORTH EAST. RAIN OR THUNDERY SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
FITZROY: VARIABLE MAINLY NORTH-WESTERLY THREE OR FOUR, INCREASING FIVE AT TIMES. RAIN OR THUNDERY SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
SOLE: CYCLONIC BECOMING VARIABLE THREE OR FOUR. OCCASIONALLY FIVE AT FIRST. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
LUNDY: NORTH OR NORTH-WEST FOUR. OCCASIONALLY FIVE IN BRISTOL CHANNEL. RAIN OR SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD.
FASTNET: VARIABLE THREE OR FOUR. MAINLY FAIR. MODERATE OR GOOD.
IRISH SEA: NORTH OR NORTH-EAST FOUR OR FIVE. OCCASIONALLY SIX LATER. RAIN OR SHOWERS. GOOD. OCCASIONALLY POOR.
SHANNON, ROCKALL, MALIN, HEBRIDES, BAILEY, FAIR ISLE, FAEROES, SOUTH-EAST ICELAND: VARIABLE MAINLY EASTERLY THREE OR FOUR. OCCASIONALLY FIVE EXCEPT IN BAILEY. SHOWERS. FOG PATCHES. MODERATE OR GOOD. OCCASIONALLY VERY POOR.