Red Sky at Night, Sailor’s Delight

Miss Understood off Sandy Point

In light of our weather this morning, I thought I would explain some weather lore.  One of the most famous quotes of old weather lore is “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailors take warning”.  This was the first piece of mariner’s wisdom my Dad taught me.  Of course this saying has been around long enough (since biblical times) and enough of us know it that there must be some truth to it.  There is, but why?  A good place to start is knowing how weather systems move, how sunsets are made, and how the sun moves through the sky.

In the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere (the US, UK, and whole bunch of other people) fronts or storm systems generally move from west to east. The obvious exception to this is hurricanes, but they’re another story.  Colors in the sky at sunset and sunrise are caused by the light from the sun refracting off of particles in the atmosphere.  Sunlight contains all of the colors in the rainbow, all the way from the shortest wavelength, blue, to the longest, red.  The sun moves more or less from east to west through the sky.  As such, it rises in the east and sets in the west.

Given all of this information, when the sun is setting in the west and the sky lights up red (sailor’s delight), we know that the sun is getting through the clouds to the west of us and refracting off of dust particles in the sky.  This means that we have clear skies to the west, and they are coming our way tomorrow.  The opposite is of course true.  When the sky lights up red in the morning (sailors take warning) it means that the sky is clear(ish) to the east and that we, as sailors, should keep our weather eye to the west for the next storm.

Life as a commercial fisherman is mostly about weathering storms, be it the actual rain and wind kind, or the falling market price, boat breaks down, fuel price up variety.  At least with this old adage we can try to avoid the former.  I do recommend a few outside resources, like the NWS and Wunderground, though.