All of us who take our boats out for fishing or other recreation need to be concerned with the weather.  The direction that the wind comes from, the strength of the wind and the duration of its blowing all affect the condition of the seas.  In addition, storms from other areas can generate waves which will also be a part of the sea conditions.  But how to know what the sea conditions will be for today, tomorrow, or even a week ahead?

     Fortunately for us fishermen, the federal government feels that it's important to forecast weather and sea conditions;  what follows is a series of links to useful marine weather forecasting websites accompanied by a brief description of how to use them.  Initially, we'll focus on the Big Island.

     NOAA (National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration) provides many of these useful websites.  The first is the Big Island Windward Waters Forecast.  This forecast covers a 5 day period and gives hourly information on wind speed and direction from 15 Big Island coastal observation stations as well as wave and wind information from eight deep water moored buoys.  The 5 day forecast gives estimated wind speed and direction, wind wave height and swell height and direction.

     A good complementary website is the NWS (National Weather Service) radar loop from South shore Hawaii.  This Doppler radar loop gives images of rain showers for a ~1 hour time period.  The color of the shower images gives a sense of their intensity and the loop shows the direction of movement.  This is a very valuable fishing website in that local shower activity can have a strong effect on sea conditions.  Each user will have to decide for themselves how the varying rainstorm conditions create seas which are a problem for their size boat, but at least now there is a real time graphic to help.  Here is an additional link for the Northern and Leeward sides of the Big Island.

     Two other NOAA website gives graphical representations of Wind Speed and Direction and Wave Height.  Note in the wind speed and direction graphics that the winds decrease in speed as they approach the Big Island and that there is a "wind shadow" on the leeward side of the island depending on which direction the wind is blowing from.  From a Hilo standpoint, this means that fishing "point to point" (Pepeekeo to 6-Mile) is often possible even when it's too rough for smaller boats to go to the buoys.

     The Naval Oceanographic Office produces two useful websites.  One gives Sea Surface Height and Ocean Current Speed and Direction.  This site is very useful for locating FADS (Fish Aggregation Devices).  Each FAD has a particular scope or amount of slack line that allows the buoy to move somewhat in the direction of prevailing currents.  This means that a cloud of points is necessary to describe where the buoy will be at any one time.  But if you know the general sea surface current direction (as shown by the arrows), then you know which side of the cloud to search in order to find the buoy.  The second website gives Sea Surface Temperature.  Areas of strong changes in temperature are often places where fish are found in abundance.