It was probably too good to be true, but too good to miss.  Wiley’s offer of a free, online nautical almanac (click on the above logo) arrived in a rush of press release and screen shots shortly after 12.00 noon today.  The moment I clicked the ‘Install now’ button, I regretted doing so, and wondered why I hadn’t obeyed my strict rule of only installing software I didn’t know on a hard drive that didn’t matter.  Especially when the text immediately below the install button warned me that this was only a beta version.  But I needn’t have worried.  Wiley’s are a big, well known, nautical publisher, and their software works without causing problems. In fact, its a bit flash, with a series of revolving-door pages to select.

You can find the almanac at www.wileyalmanac.com. It's the culmination of 18 months’ intensive preparation by a team led by Neville Featherstone, who edited MacMillan and Reeds hard copy almanacs for many years. It doesn't yet have as big a coverage as something like Reeds, or (my favourite) the Cruising Association Almanac. 

The area extends from Lowestoft to Padstow and Vlissingen to L’Aber-Wrac’h, incorporating some 150 ports and harbours, and is divided into five areas.  The content, which includes tides, weather, navigation and passage planning information for each port and cross-channel passages, can be downloaded in part or in full to a laptop and printed out.

And with more and more yachtsmen and woment taking their laptops to sea as part of their standard navigational kit, this is a bonus.  WiFi isn't always available,and in UK marinas usually only at high cost.

The home page (pictured left) is probably the most boring of the lot, with a rather incongrouous news section that looks a bit like an RSS feed from the BBC, and the inevitable advertising links that make the project worthwhile from Wiley's point of view.  Get past this, and you find a massive amount of information, including ariel photographs and chartlets, about the various ports and their marinas and facilities. 

Portsmouth, for example, gives a comprehensive survey of the entrance, the harbour rules, and the marinas.  It's good.  And Wiley’s expectations of interest from cruising and racing sailors have been exceeded and registrations for this new free service already run into the thousands. 

With all of this being downloadable direct to your laptop,the online almanac is a great reference.  It won't yet challenge the market leader, Reeds Almanac, but then perhaps it's not intended to. I don't like going to sea without paper charts, and I would be hesitent about relying on an electronic alamanac.  After all, paper charts don't crash or run out of memory.

But with the demise of Reeds Online earlier in the year, this one looks like having solved the problems.  Wiley already owns a lot of the data, and no doubt sees this as a way of raising its own profile.  And with all this free information, tye might just have achieved their goal.

The Wiley Almanac contains information on the following for each of the 150 ports and harbours: 
•    Tides – times and heights of high and low water, graphical tidal streams and rates
•    Weather forecast – 1-7 days including wind direction and force in knots and Beaufort scale, sea state, air temperature, cloud cover, sun and moon rise and set
•    Ports & Harbour navigation:  waypoints, aerial photographs, charts, navigation and pilotage notes
•    Reference section:  including information on Navigation, Communications, Safety and UK and Continental Weather sources
•    Local facilities:  contact details for marinas, fuel, restaurants, chandleries, marine engineers, sail makers etc
•    Notices to Mariners and Trinity House advice updated on issue