Herb Hilgenberg's smile lures no paparazzi. His name draws no celebrity. But his voice – at least among tens of thousands of boaters – is as well-known as any bell buoy or fog horn from Nova Scotia to the Grenadines.

For more than 20 years, Hilgenberg has served as a one-man weather service, delivering customized radio reports to cruisers free of charge. Though he has no formal meteorology training, his work is so respected that both the National Weather Service and the U.S. Navy have requested his help.

Hilgenberg neither sought this call to service nor shies from it, but he carries on diligently, like a skipper following a well-plotted course. Now more than 70 years old, at an age when others might have long ago veered, he continues to help cruisers survive every single day in a natural world that is occasionally hostile – a lesson he first learned before many of today's boaters were even born.

Herb Hilgenberg has been delivering the weather for two decades.WAR AND WEATHER

Hilgenberg was eight years old in 1945. He can remember Russian soliders marching into Prague. His mother hurried him, his 10-year-old sister, six-year-old brother, and infant sister into cattle cars, where he stood for days, shoulder-to-waistband with weary adult refugees. His family made it to East Germany, only to find deadly Allied raids.

"We were getting shot at by the aircraft," he recalls. "We had to jump off a truck and go into the woods to hide. We slept on hay in a cow stable for a while, and then moved into a building with a bunker. That's when the American troops came. We were in a bunker, and they dropped hydrogen sulfite down. It smelled like rotten eggs. A friend of mine got shot in the head, and I had to carry him out. We made it to West Germany and found my father, who had gone ahead for work, when I was nine. We were constantly on the move from destruction."

By the time Hilgenberg was 15, his family had escaped Europe for Canada. He spent much of the 1950s struggling to learn English and the basics from all the school years he had missed. He later earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, met the woman he would marry, got a master's in business administration, and settled in Burlington, on Lake Ontario. Everybody had a boat, so he got one, too. His war memories faded, and his marine skills grew. He and his wife Brigitte won their division's North American racing championship in a 26-foot lapstrake wooden boat before moving up to a C&C 27. Their two daughters were born and quickly educated as crew. The dream of extended cruising became attainable, and the family sailed southward in 1982.

That's the year of the storm that, Hilgenberg says, haunts him more than his childhood – and has led him to dedicate every day of his life to other boaters' safety.

FAULTY FORECAST

It was November when the family set off from Beaufort, North Carolina, in their Corbin 39 South Bound II. D'arcey was 14, and Cathleen was six. "The forecast was good, for 15-knot winds," Hilgenberg recalls, "but when we got about 10 miles offshore, the wind was 30 knots. The skies were yellow, blue and violet. I'd never seen anything like that. Cathleen asked me if we were on a roller coaster."

Herb Hilgenberg's operations are centered in his home in Canada.Hilgenberg feared tacking into the winds on a reverse course, and he listened again to the forecast from Cape May, New Jersey, which repeated the call for 15-knot winds. He figured he was in a local squall. "It was getting rough, and then it got worse," he remembers. "The forecast kept saying 15 knots, and here I was with a handheld gauge reading 40 to 50 knots."

The storm lasted five brutal days. He kept the boat on autopilot and angled so the motor could run with the storm sails up, pushing South Bound II at 3 knots. He worried the engine would stall and the boat would race uncontrollably down a wave.

Instead, a three-headed wave raced toward the boat. The first hit rolled the hull side about 10 feet into the air, the second about 25 feet, and the third broke over South Bound II's deck, swinging the mast over 90 degrees. The boat righted, but not before Hilgenberg flew into the mast and fractured his arm. He doesn't remember the pain or his daughters' screams so much as seeing fish swimming in the cockpit.

Some five years later, he still couldn't understand why there had been no accurate weather report in the first place. The Hilgenbergs were living on Bermuda by then, and he felt the terror anew every time word surfaced from boaters bashed by similar storms.

"I studied meteorology to understand why all of us were experiencing this same problem," he says. "Boaters would arrive in Bermuda, and they'd have a ham radio onboard. People said, 'Herb, why don't you share what you know?' So I did. I would give the daily forecast, and some of the boats asked to maintain contact. So I did. I wanted to see if I could give the boats a feeling that they were not alone, give them information they were not able to get otherwise.

"One day, the well-known sailor Warren Brown said, 'Herb, I don't have a ham radio, but I have an SSB. Can you stay in contact while I go to the North Pole on War Baby?' So I switched to SSB, and all of a sudden, other people asked to get a forecast. Within about six months, it became a daily affair. In 1990, I got a call from the National Weather Service. They wanted all the information I was getting from the boats, to put into their forecasting computers. This was before satellites. By the end of one year, they had received 14,000 reports from me. Then the U.S. Navy said they wanted my stuff, too. I was right in the loop."

Weather was among the topics Herb (center) discussed at the Naval Atlantic Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2000.HELPING OTHERS

As many as 70 cruisers a day relied on Hilgenberg's afternoon forecasts, which he personalized for each boat's projected course. Then, as today, boaters reached him at HF/SSB frequency 12359.0. (Check in starts at 1930 UTC, a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time, and the forecast starts at 2000 UTC.)

He developed such a following for accuracy that in 1994, when he and Brigitte retired back to Lake Ontario, the cruising community was devastated along the entire Eastern Seaboard and well into the Southern Caribbean.

"People still wanted my forecasts, but it is illegal to operate an SSB from your house," he says. "I explained the situation to the Canadian government, and it took six months, but by November 1994, I could legally collect and provide weather information. This was before the Internet, so I had two satellite dishes. People used to ask if I was working for the CIA."

Today, more than 20 years after his first ham radio reports, Hilgenberg still signs on as South Bound II to provide daily forecasts. His satellite dishes are gone, replaced by two computers, one for downloading satellite imagery and the other for crunching data. He talks over an Icom 710 SSB and keeps another as a backup.

"Many people go out on the ocean now without a single sideband radio," he says. "They have a satellite phone, and they ask if I'll work with them over the phone. I tell them no. There's a difference between being public on SSB and private by satellite phone. If it's private, it's not a hobby anymore."

The other thing that has changed is the number of boats he helps. During the summer season, he now tops out around 40 boats per day instead of 70. During the winter, it's maybe five. "The majority of people have been checking in with me for the past 10 or 15 years," he says. "They're not using the newer services that the younger generation uses instead of SSB."

He and Brigitte have not sailed since they left Bermuda in 1994, but he is an honorary member of the local yacht club, and he likes to look at the boats while standing safely onshore.

And he understands, but does not seem troubled by the thought, that he is much like the battles and storms that made him what he is today: destined to fade into memory.

"I'll be 72 in May," Hilgenberg says. "It's a hobby, and I'll keep it up for as long as I think there is a need. I'm sure that in another few years, forecasting is going to be so accurate that people on a boat can click a computer for their area and have all the information. People will say, 'Why bother checking in with Herb?'"