Skipper Wilson is expecting to sail into a storm sometime in the next day or so. He has been on a boat during storms before, so he knows that although the strong winds and big waves can be scary, he should come through it all okay. (When someone talks about “weathering a storm,” this is exactly where the phrase came from.)

The boat’s long keel (that you saw in this post) is designed for rough weather and helps to keep the boat upright. And Skipper Wilson’s computers give him an advantage that sailors didn’t have a hundred years ago: He’s able to find out almost immediately when the storm shifts. Meteorologists (weather men and women) examine information from satellites and from buoys and from the sailors themselves and can give pretty good estimates of what the storm is going to do next. In the olden days sailors relied on traditional records of where storms moved in the oceans and on the weather that they could see from the ship to guess what was happening around them. Today’s computers give a much more accurate view, offering Skipper Wilson more options.

Listen to Skipper Wilson talk about the coming storm here. You can also read his most recent thoughts on the storm here.