Few things can top a beautiful day on your boat, with calm water and blue skies. But mother nature is fickle, and we often "pay" for those perfect days. Get a couple of boaters together and the weather-related horror stories can go on all night.

Weather is, or should be, on the mind of every boater. What is it doing now? What is it likely to do in the future? Not only is this necessary for an enjoyable experience, but it can be critical for the safety of your crew and the boat. The trick is to be vigilant and still have a good time, and one way to maintain that balance is to access weather information on your mobile phone.

NOAA weather information can be obtained on a smartphone, making forecasts portable. A smartphone can play many roles aboard your boat, from a research tool with Internet capabilities to a mobile chartplotter that fits in your pocket. The ability to access high-quality weather information from any location adds greatly to this utility, and most of the best weather sources are now catering to mobile users.

Let's look at NOAA weather, still the most common source of marine weather information for boaters in the U.S. Many boaters turn to the appropriate VHF channel to listen to the forecast. As we know, this is presented as a continuous, pre-recorded loop that runs through predictions for a large geographic area. One must patiently listen to the loop until it arrives at the specific area you are interested in. If you're lucky, you won't be distracted by a conversation or small task and miss it.

Fortunately, there's a better way. The NOAA website carries transcripts of the recordings, posting text versions of what is being read over the VHF. Why sit through a long, pre-recorded presentation, when you can just read it yourself? And ifyou are reading on your phone, that means you can access weather information everywhere.

NOAA WEATHER

The most popular NOAA marine text forecasts can be found at www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/marinewxi.htm. You can choose from a variety of forecasts, including bay and coastal, offshore, lakes and even hurricane forecasts. The all-text format displays well on your smartphone and is easy to read.

Text versions of a NOAA forecast contain the same information broadcast via VHF.We use this service to quickly connect to the forecast we need, first by creating "favorites" to get to sites quickly and then by focusing on the predictions we want. It is true that you can get these same forecasts over the Internet on a laptop. But using the phone allows us to check the marine forecast from anywhere – while walking ashore, eating in a restaurant, or even before getting up in the morning (a nice luxury to have if you are trying to decide whether to leave an anchorage or stay one more day).

We have found that most regions are updated on a fairly predictable schedule. Learn the schedule and you won't be stuck waiting for weather information. And even if you are, the phone allows you to do something while you are waiting.

Another great weather site is the National Weather Service mobile website (mobile.weather.gov). This site provides weather forecasts in a format designed to display on your smartphone. You can view a wide variety of information, including weather by zip code, satellite images, weather warnings, radar images and marine forecasts.

NATIONAL DATA BOUY CENTER

NOAA's National Data Buoy Center website (www.ndbc.noaa.gov) provides access to current offshore weather and sea conditions around the world. Information provided includes air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, wave height and more. This data is extremely useful when you need to know offshore conditions immediately.

Additional links can provide weather forecasts for the vicinity of the buoy, local Notice to Mariners, and observations from nearby stations and ships. The data provided for a given buoy varies greatly from place to place, because international data is not controlled by NOAA. And this site does not offer a version formatted for mobile phones, so using their map to locate a buoy can be challenging. However, if you know the Station ID of a particular buoy, you can enter it in the website's search tool to access information about the buoy. This takes you directly to the data and generally works pretty well.