Welcome to this episode of The Shooting The Breeze Sailing Podcast (STBSP) with our guest, Sailor, Olympian, America’s Cup winning team member, and founder of PredictWind, Jon Bilger!

With the Olympics fresh on our minds and weather creeping into our daily lives with Tropical Systems in our news feeds, it is a great time to talk to Jon about the Olympics, his time as a member of Team Alinghi, and how he took all that sailing experience and the technology used by his weather forecasting team out into the public space as PredictWind.

If you are even half serious about sailing you probably have used PredictWind, or at least have heard about it. It began creeping into my consciousness back around 2015 as it showed up in various YouTube channels as part of their passage planning. The graphics make the program very easy to visualize how the weather is going to impact the area’s where you are planning on sailing.

It comes down to a safety at sea issue at times, as you do not want to be stuck in the middle of a deepening low pressure system at sea. With Predict wind you can get real time and historical data from sailing grounds all over the world. You can install a data hub on your boat that sends live data to the grid via recently available tools like StarLink.

You can run virtual regatta’s, you can plan a passage, you can do all sorts of things on Predict Wind. Many of the features are free, but you can also upgrade to make use of the advanced features available.

Jon has such a great sailing venue over there in New Zealand, and takes advantage of it as much as possible with his family, a special memory of which he talks about where his father is helping his daughter wrangle a boat ashore that was built for him when he was a kid by his dad. He also talks about high tech and very adventurous Foiling boats taking us into the next phase of sailing.

You can listen to Episode 182 of the STBSP, by right clicking and downloading here,

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Intro Music by yours truly and Greg Young, of The Incoherents, a band I managed in college. The song is called Never Tell and is available via email. Find the other songs they did at The Incoherents. The Lean Years Volume 2, on Itunes.

Break music, “Wild Winds of Misfortune” by Leo Disanto of The Vinegar Creek Constituency, and “The Wild Rover” as performed by The Ogham Stones
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