Temperature in Celsius
Current air temperature at the club's exact coordinates, rounded to the nearest degree.
Live conditions for your club
Live Weather for Sailing Clubs
Members can check wind speed, temperature, and conditions at your club's coordinates before they leave home.
Last updated 19 May 2026
What members see
A complete read of conditions, in one widget
The weather panel sits on the member portal dashboard and on event pages, so the question "is it sailable today" gets an answer without anyone phoning the duty officer.
Wind speed in mph
UK-friendly miles per hour, with a plain-English classification next to the raw number.
Wind direction
Compass bearing translated into N, NE, E, SE and so on, with the raw degrees on hover.
Conditions description
"Clear sky", "light rain", "fog" and the rest, mapped from the WMO weather code in the API response.
Weather icon
A matching icon so members can read the dashboard at a glance without parsing the description.
Cached 15 minutes
Server-side caching keeps the widget snappy and steers clear of any rate-limit pain on a busy race morning.
The whole feature is free. There is no API key to register, no per-call billing, and no setup beyond entering your club's coordinates once. If your club has a postcode and a map, you have everything you need.
Wind classifications
Plain-English labels next to the raw number
Numbers are useful, but a member glancing at their phone wants to know whether to bring a thicker wetsuit or stay home. SailHQ tags every wind reading with a category alongside the speed.
Under 5
Light · Drifting conditions. Cadets and beginners welcome.
5-12
Ideal · Good club racing weather. Most fleets out, most members happy.
12-18
Fresh · Lively. Dinghy fleets reach for the trapeze, keelboats reef.
18-25
Strong · Experienced sailors only. Race officers thinking carefully.
Over 25
Storm · Most clubs cancel. The widget makes the call obvious.
The classification sits next to the number on the dashboard. Members see "14 mph (Fresh)" rather than just "14 mph", which means a visiting sailor or a parent of a junior cadet can read the conditions without translating Beaufort in their head. The thresholds reflect what most UK club fleets actually treat as the cut-off points, and race officers use the same labels in plain conversation so the language between the dashboard and the briefing matches.
Setup
Setting your club's coordinates
The whole feature runs off two numbers - latitude and longitude. Both are entered in the Location and Weather settings panel. Once they are in, the dashboard widget, event pages, and any future tidal lookup all use the same coordinates.
The fastest way to get your club's exact coordinates is Google Maps. Right-click on the slipway, the clubhouse, or wherever the wind reading should reflect, and the first option in the menu is the lat/long pair. Copy them in, save, and the weather widget refreshes on the next page load.
SailHQ shows a small map preview next to the coordinate fields, so admins can confirm the pin is over the right patch of water. If the location looks wrong, adjust the numbers and the preview updates. No more guessing whether the wind reading is from the harbour or from a weather station three miles inland.
No API key required
Powered by Open-Meteo, free and open
Most weather APIs want a credit card on file and meter every call. SailHQ deliberately avoided that. Open-Meteo is open-source, free for non-commercial and small-scale commercial use, and does not require an account.
No key, no signup
No registration with a third-party weather provider. Coordinates in, weather out.
No per-call charges
No metered billing surprises when a busy race morning sees every member loading the dashboard at once.
Cached 15 minutes
SailHQ caches the response server-side, so 200 dashboard loads in 10 minutes is one upstream call.
Open-Meteo aggregates output from national meteorological agencies, including the Met Office, ECMWF, and others. The data quality is the same data quality your local TV forecast is built on, which is to say good enough for deciding whether to launch a Wayfarer.
The 15-minute cache is set deliberately. Wind does change in 15 minutes, but a member who refreshes the dashboard six times in five minutes does not need a fresh API hit each time. The cache window is short enough to feel current and long enough to keep SailHQ a polite citizen of the Open-Meteo network.
On the roadmap
Tidal data is settings-only for now
The settings panel already includes a tidal station ID field and a feature toggle for tidal data. The plumbing exists. What is not yet live is the actual fetch and display of tide times and tidal heights inside the member portal.
Coastal clubs that genuinely need tidal coordinates today should keep using their existing tidal app, EasyTide, the local harbour board, or whatever is on the chart table. There is no point pretending SailHQ does something it does not.
We will integrate tidal data when there is a stable, free, UK-friendly tidal API to plug into. The bar is the same as for weather - no per-call billing, no surprise rate limits, accurate to UK harbours and slipways. As soon as that exists, the toggle gets switched on and tides appear on the dashboard alongside the wind.
How it fits
Weather sits inside the rest of the platform
The widget is not a standalone tool. It surfaces inside the parts of SailHQ that members already use, so the weather is always next to the decision it informs.
Series and events
Each event page shows the conditions on the day, so race officers and helms see the same forecast.
Member portal
The dashboard widget is the first thing members see when they log in on a Saturday morning.
Yacht club software
Visiting yachts and weekend cruisers check conditions before driving down to the marina.
Live weather FAQ
Live weather - questions answered
What clubs ask about the data, setup, and roadmap.
No. SailHQ uses Open-Meteo, a free open-source weather API that does not require an account or an API key. Once a club admin has set the latitude and longitude in the Location and Weather settings, the weather widget starts working straight away. There is no signup, no billing, and no per-call charge to worry about.
Weather data is pulled from Open-Meteo, an open-source weather service that aggregates output from national meteorological agencies. SailHQ requests the current conditions for the club's configured coordinates and translates the WMO weather codes into a plain-English description and a matching icon.
The weather payload is cached server-side for 15 minutes. That keeps the widget responsive for members without hammering the upstream API. For the kind of decision a sailor makes - is it worth driving down for a club race - 15-minute granularity is more than enough.
Not yet. The settings include a tidal station ID field and a feature toggle, but the live tidal data fetch is not implemented yet. Coastal clubs that need tide times today should keep using their existing tidal app or the local harbour board. SailHQ will integrate tidal data once a stable, free, UK-friendly tidal API is in place.
See conditions before you head down
Live weather is one widget. SailHQ is the rest of the platform around it - duty rosters, member portal, events, boat registry, and a club website.