Aurora Winds
Two free tools that answer one question for a sailor — what is the wind doing right now, and is it a sailing day? One reads Port Phillip Bay, the other the Gippsland Lakes. Built for young sailors first: a big, plain picture that a nine-year-old and a race officer can both trust.
These are pitched at youth dinghy sailing. A keelboat racer will read the same numbers differently.
The tools
Live wind for Port Phillip — the Bureau's bay stations, seven yacht clubs' own weather stations, and Ports Victoria's PortWeather network, including wave heights at the Heads. A quick mobile board, a drawn bay map, a focused Northern Bay view, The Rip at the gate, and plain “is it a sailing day?” pages for each spot.
Open Bay Winds →The same idea for the Gippsland Lakes, built for the January Sea Scouts camp on Bunga Arm. A board, a lakes map, and a camp page pitched at the young crew — the wind on the water they're about to launch into.
Open Lake Winds →Built for the Bunga Arm camp · Sea Scouts.
Across the bay
The spot pages answer “is it a sailing day?” where you launch. These read the whole of Port Phillip — the drawn map, the top of the bay, and the conditions at the Heads, where Ports Victoria's stations add wave height to the wind.
Reading the wind
The read has to work for a child and for a race officer, so it has two settings. Everything starts as a colour and a number; the detail is a layer on top, never a replacement.
The young-sailors pages lead with one big emoji and plain words — calm, good breeze, too much. That's Easy.
Flip to Pro and the same reading becomes a compass rose and a meteorological wind barb: the precise direction, the degrees, the strength in knots. Same wind, more detail — for when you're ready for it.
The maps use proper Southern-Hemisphere wind barbs — the staff points into the wind, a half-feather is 5 knots, a full feather 10, a flag 50, a ring means calm. Colour shows the strength band; the exact number sits beside it.
How to read a wind barb →Some spot pages go one step further and carry rigging and reefing guidance for the boat sailed there. The Sandringham page reads the wind for the RS Quest and shows which sail to set and when to take a reef.
GSWAC — with RS Quest rigging →Why we built it
Before a session, the question is always the same: is it a sailing day? The answer lives in the wind — but the places that carry it, the Bureau's feeds and the clubs' own stations, are scattered, technical, and rarely on the water you're launching into.
So we gathered them into one place and made them plain. A young sailor checks the board, reads the colour, and decides — and if they want to understand why, the barb and the compass rose are right there to grow into. It's a small tool with a large intent: to hand the reading, and the judgement, to the person about to go out on the water.
How it works
The site is static pages talking to one small serverless proxy — a Cloudflare Worker — which reads the public sources, tidies half a dozen different feeds into one shape, and hands them back clean. No server to keep alive, no database, nothing to run.
The backbone is the Bureau of Meteorology — a state-wide feed for the live reading (about every ten minutes) and per-station history for the 24-hour graph. On top of that sit the yacht clubs' own stations, each read with its own small adapter, because every one of them speaks a different dialect.
A wrong-but-confident reading is worse than none. City weather is not on-water wind; a fetch time is not a reading time; a webcam image is not data. Where a station can't tell us when it was read, the page says “checked” rather than “updated” — and stations that only dribble a stale, three-hourly wind were dropped for ones that don't.
The full build note — on the LogSoon
For young sailors
The big, plain “is it a sailing day?” pages, one per launching spot — all for youth dinghy sailing, with an Easy⇆Pro toggle when you're ready for the detail. The two groups below are simply who runs the sailing: Sea Scout groups, and yacht-club youth programmes.
Sea Scouts
Yacht-club youth sailing
More spots are coming. Spotted something off, or want your club added? wind@aurorasailing.com.au
An idea, further afield
The World Scout Jamboree in 2027 sails on the Martwa Wisła at Sobieszewo, in Pucks — a dinghy designed and owned by the Polish Scouts. After a training weekend there, I built the same kind of page for that river, to see whether the idea travels. It reads the marina and the coastal stations, shows whether it's a sailing day, and gives rigging guidance for the Puck. It's a draft, and not an official Jamboree tool — just a sketch of how this could work for another Scout activity.
