"Bailey, Rockall, Shannon and Fastnet or then Forties, Dogger, Humber and German Bight. These are terms you will hear if you're awake at 6 a.m. and tune into the BBC's shipping forecast. As does a friend, a landscape gardener who enjoys starting the day early. It has been going on a long time, this forecast, which began in 1911 in Morse code. It was 1923 when the BBC translated the broadcasts into spoken English. During the 1939 to 1945 war, they were suspended. People here will remember how strict was our censorship on weather news. The original carving up of the sea areas has been enlarged, the last being the addition of North and South Utsire in 1984 i.e. part of the western coast of Norway. Fisher is a block just south of that - the entrance to the Baltic, and covering a lot of the west coast of Denmark, which we learn from our source, an article in a recent Field, is a 300 km long sandy beach.
Trafalgar is mentioned only in the bulletin which comes 48 minutes after midnight, otherwise only for gale warnings. Its western boundary is the 15 degree-west boundary of longitude, which is the same for, in descending order, Finisterre, Sole, Shannon, Rockall and Bailey. Around our island, clockwise are, then, Malin, just north of us, Irish Sea and Lundy (both obvious) and then Fastnet. A spread in the English Field for December gives the full map and lovely illustrations. When the writer, Peter Collyer, comes to Fastnet he reminds us of the biennial Cowes to Plymouth yacht race via the lighthouse rock; of Cobh, naturally and the world's first yacht club, founded in 1720; The Royal Cork Yacht Club; then the emigrant ships and the fact that the Sirius in 1838 made the first transatlantic crossing by steam from Cobh.
News to some will be this: "Between Fastnet Rock and the mainland of Clear, which in the 19th century was the terminal of the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, messages put into floating containers and thrown overboard from transatlantic ships arriving from America would be collected by local boats and taken ashore for transmission to London. News of the progress of the American Civil War reached Britain this way." He enjoyed a force seven wind, spume being blown into the air by the updraft and falling like a blizzard's beginning. All from his book Rain Later, Good, Illustrating the Shipping Forecast. Thomas Reed Publications, £37.50. Y