Navigating choppy waters
The Shipping Forecast helps those at sea, as well as those on their final voyage into the unknown, says The Rev Richard Coles
BBC
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It’s the centenary of the Shipping Forecast, first broadcast by BBC Radio for mariners to know the chances of a gale as they steamed into the Bristol Channel, trawled the North Sea or tacked across the Solent. Today, while they rely on weather satellites and GPS, mariners still listen to the Shipping Forecast on long wave. There’s nothing that comforts a stormtossed crew like Sailing By, the theme tune.
It’s popular not only with seafarers, but with insomniacs, nostalgists, fans of continuity announcer Zeb Soanes, and hospices. As the dying prepare to sail toward whatever lies beyond the horizon of this life, they like to hear the weather coming to Bight, Fastnet, South Utsire and FitzRoy. I guess that’s partly familiarity – I know from the deathbeds I’ve attended as a priest, people often want to hear familiar words in moments of great uncertainty – but perhaps it’s also the sense of voyaging that it provides?
I have been on a voyage, too, not only into the mystery of what lies in store for us, but to four of the places in the forecast’s long-wave litany – Lundy, Wight, Thames and Faroes – for my More4 documentary series, Sailing the Shipping Forecast. What is it like for the people who live and work there, how do storm and tide affect them today, how do they relate to each other and to the land dwellers who still rely on them?
I returned to land much more aware of an obvious and often forgotten truth. We are an island nation. We depend on the sea, it provides food for our bellies, tales for our imagination, challenges for our resourcefulness, defence for our realm and even a soothing soundtrack for the end of our lives, yet I hardly think of this. I grew up in Kettering, Northamptonshire, about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK, but even people living on the coast often lose any lively connection to “the wet side”, even though it shapes every aspect of our daily lives.
Diana Speed voiced the Shipping Forecast for over 20 years. Charlie Gray
Lundy, so named from an island at the point where the Bristol Channel meets the Atlantic ocean, feels like the Outer Hebrides but is in fact on the same latitude as London. There’s a small community, a shop, magnificent church and naturalists who conserve its bird population – puffins and Manx shearwaters. Supervised by a ranger, I got to gently hold a shearwater chick, a ball of grey down with an enormous black beak, that will have fledged now and be acquiring the aerobatics the species is famous for.
Lobster fishing off Port Isaac in Cornwall (where I managed to deposit my breakfast over the gunwales), I discovered that while brown crab are in sharp decline, tuna are on the rise due to warmer sea temperatures. I learnt how to do sea-donuts on a rigid inflatable boat thanks to Border Force, who recently used it to chase drug smugglers picking up packages of cocaine from bigger ships offshore.
I talked to lifeguards overseeing what’s occurrin’ at Barry Island, the women who run a project for women recovering from domestic violence on a beautiful old red-sailed Thames barge at Brightlingsea Harbour, the RNLI at Cowes (taking care of everything from lilos to multimillion-pound superyachts) and the harbour pilot at one of our major ports, boarding an enormous 400m container ship from the Far East stuffed with Christmas presents for the UK market.
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I felt, powerfully, what it’s like to depend on the sea to exist. I hope the series gives viewers insight into places whose names we recognise and like to hear without knowing much about; and to see and hear the faces and voices that tell one of the most enduring tales in human history, the history of our relationship with the sea.
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