Mini user guide to sailing and yachting with Windy.app

Learn about the five most important things about weather forecasting for sailing with Windy.app. This guide also works for yachting, boating, marine pro fishing, sea kayaking, lake and river canoeing, and other similar boat and wind sports.

1. Find a yachting marina in your place of living or traveling

Marinas, or ports, are places where all sailing trips start and end. The Windy.app has a huge marina database of tens of thousands of ports around the world in all bodies of water: oceans, seas, major lakes and rivers.

To find a marina, open the Wind Map from the Home Screen of the app. Then go to the Advanced Settings and select "Marina" among the spot types.Now the app displays you only marinas on the map, the other spots are hidden for a quicker search.

Go to the marina page to get info about it and a weather forecast.

Windy.app Home Screen for iOS

Advanced Settings for chossing types of spots in the Windy.app for iOS

Marina type of spot in the Windy.app for iOS

2. Open the special Sail Weather Profile

To do this, click on the icon to the right of the slider with weather models.

The profile contains a ready-to-use set of more than 10 different weather parameters, which will be useful for every yachtsman, regardless of his or her experience in sailing.

Among them, you can find basic parameters like wind speed, wind direction, wind gusts, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, and clouds and even more sophisticated parameters like CAPE Index, Deviation, or the different global and regional weather models — the sources of these parameters.

And, of course, get tides data in the app, thanks to the Tides feature. All three most common tidal datums in the world are available to you here: the LAT, MLLW, and MSL.

Sail Weather Profile in the Windy.app for iOS

Weather parametes in the Sail Weather Profile in the Windy.app for iOS

3. Find out about weather changes in the region

Regional weather models like ICON7 for Europe or HRRR for North America are considered to give better weather forecasts than global models life GFS. But models alone are still not enough. You need to understand the weather to be able to predict it better.

In particular, you can see the regional weather changes and the general state of the atmosphere with the Weather Fronts and Isobars features in the app, which is available on the same Wind Map under one button. This time, you can go to the Map directly from the spot (marina) page. To do this, click on the map icon to the right of the Wind Rose.

Weather Fronts help you to see strong winds, rains and thunderstorms, mists, and other similar weather phenomena extremely important in sailing — and, what is more important, to be ahead of it. In other words, knowing Atmospheric Fronts significantly improve the safety of sea trips.

This is a unique feature in Windy.app, which is not available in other yachting apps for iOS. It works for the territory of the US, Europe, and North Atlantic Ocean.

Learn more about weather fronts in general and cold fronts and warm fronts differentes.

Isobars help to assess fronts, wind rotation, and speed, cyclone depth, etc. With Isobars, sailors can plan long trips and have a more complete picture of the weather more than a week ahead. The forecast is for 10 days (GFS27) with updates 4 times a day.

Learn more about isobars.

Weather Fronts and Isobars features on the Wind Map in the Windy.app for iOS

Important: This feature can be also used in offline mode when there is no internet access if you save a section of the map in advance.

Read press release about these two features.

There are also several other useful features on the Winds Map: Wind Bards, Wind History (Archive), Live Weather Stations, Total Accumulated Precipitation, which will also be useful to you on your sea, lake, or river trips. Learn more about them by clicking on the links.

4. Save the weather in Offline Mode

This feature will help you to get the weather offline for the places with no internet connection or slow mobile coverage zones.

Activate the Offline Mode feature by saving the part of the world map you need for a particular sailing trip to save space on your smartphone or tablet through Settings in the Main Menu bar of the app or on the Spot page.

Offline Mode in the Windy.app for iOS

Offline Mode in Spot Menu in the Windy.app for iOS

Offline Mode Map in the Windy.app for iOS

Have a good sailing!

In case you don't find some features for sailing you need in the Windy.app or just want to have different app experience, try the WindHub for iOS or Android.

WindHub is a special app developed by the Windy.app team primarily for all kinds of sailing but also for other sports. The app contains only the features you need, with a simpler design and an overall simple presentation of information that will save you time at sea or on land in preparation for your future sailing adventure. In particular, the app contains a database of 17,000 marinas with contacts.

Text: Ivan Kuznetsov, an outdoor journalist, editor and writer from the Dolomites, Italy, and Karelia, Finland, with 10 years of professional experience. His favorite sports are hiking, cycling and sauna. Read his other articles

Cover photo: Cottonbro / Pexels