Pepper, I have never been able to get my head round Marine Call. In the early days, when the web was not yet born, being able to get the weather forecast on a fax seemed a good idea. But it was just too expensive for me to use on a regular basis.
Nowadays it has been bypassed. Everything is available, free of charge, on the web. There's been a pile of weather stuff on this Forum and I shoved in my fourpence worth when I first started exploring this site.
To keep it simple for us coastal waters crowd now, all you need are two sites:
The first is the Met Office Inshore Waters forecaste. That is updated at least twice a day - at 0500 and 1700 and gives me what I need for my area for days 1 and 2.
www.meto.govt.uk/datafiles/inshore.html
The second is the European Centre for Medium range forecasting. That gives the North Atlantic as it effects the UK for days 3 to 7. One of the recently introduced and really usefull additions to the weather maps on the site is colouring for wind speeds at surface level.
You now need to know very little about interpreting pressure charts other than to know that (in the Northern Hemisphere) wind circulates round an area of low pressure anti-clockwise and round a high pressure zone, clockwise. As all the pressure contours have a little H or L in the middle it's easy to work out in which direction the wind will be blowing and how strong it will be where you want to be out ribbing. Dead easy.
http://www.ecmwf.int/products/foreca...msl_uv850_z500
Bookmark these two sites and save £££££££s. Mind you, you'll do that anyway if you can't get through to Marine Call!
- yes, they're all WRONG 
) - well, I hadn't much choice as their web site is no use whatsoever 
