The Ship's Report

A Hundred Years Old

The Shipping Forecast is celebrating its centenary this week. This is a reason for celebration because, except for the public footpaths in this beautiful country, there is nothing as beautiful and wonderful as the Shipping Forecast.

The Shipping Forecast is actually older than the footpaths (more about that another time). It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 4 July 1925, and its anniversary is being discussed extensively this week.

Until last year, it was broadcast four times a day, often at times when only skippers would hear it, such as at one o’clock at night and just after five in the morning. However, the broadcast at 5:54pm was heard at a time when many households were listening to the radio. Since 1 April 2024, the number of broadcasts per day has been reduced to two on weekdays and the evening broadcast is only on the weekends.

The sea map of Europe that’s relevant to the United Kingdom is divided into 31 regions. The conditions in each region are provided in a fixed order, starting with Viking, west of Norway, and ending in South-East Iceland.

It gives the regions’ weather conditions in four categories; what the wind is doing, what the state of the sea is like, what the weather is like in general and what the visibility is like. To save time, the descriptions are broken down to bare bones and the text can sound cryptic to the uninitiated. That’s the majority of the British people but it sounds poetic even if unintelligible. For example, “Dogger is good, sometimes moderate, between the Netherlands and Scotland.” This phrase refers to the visibility in that region.

The state of the sea has to do with the height of the waves. Waves up to half a metre are ‘smooth’, while waves over fourteen metres are ‘phenomenal’. There are eight variations in total. When it is said that something can change ‘soon’, that means a period of between six and twelve hours. When something changes ‘later’, it is after at least twelve hours.

If you know the code, “Hebrides; Southwest Six or Seven; Calm sometimes Light; Rain or Showers; Good sometimes moderate” becomes almost understandable. But the beauty of the Shipping Forecast is that you don’t have to understand it to find it beautiful.

Part of the beauty of the Shipping Forecast also lies in the presenter’s calm manner and tone of voice. Zeb Soanes, a regular Shipping Forecast reader, described it thus:

To the non-nautical, it is a nightly litany of the sea. It reinforces a sense of being islanders with a proud seafaring past. Whilst the listener is safely tucked-up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing-boats bobbing about at Plymouth or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall.

The Shipping Forecast is drawn up four times a day by the the Met Office and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The messages at night are a bit longer, but the evening message may consist of a maximum of 350 words, so about twelve words per region. Only when the weather conditions are extra bad can some extra information be provided, but then the BBC must be warned in advance. This mainly happens in the winter and especially in the far North, but that goes without saying.