Today we’ll take a look at this week’s storm, which brought stormy conditions some places around the region, but missed others.

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Well, in typical Mother Nature fashion, she’s doing what she likes, and our predicted storm is a bit late. But arrive it will, and will likely make things messy for vessels out in it, and delay departures for ships that are in port here. We’ll talk today about what to expect, with the usual caveat, “subject to change.”

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We have some of our usual, messy fall weather coming in today, and I thought it would be a good time to review some of the weather jargon we start to see in our forecasts at this time of year, and what those words and numbers mean.

We’ll talk about ships on the bar in bad weather, and also what’s happening with other river bars along our PNW coast, where vessels may also be seeking refuge from the weather.

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Big changes happening as of this week, with regard to the show.

Beginning this week, the Ship Report will no longer air on KMUN on Fridays, but will air Monday-Thursday instead, and as a podcast on my website at shipreport.net.

KMUN will air the Ship Report twice a day on the radio, at 8:49 am and again at 5:49 pm, Monday through Thursday.

The changes come on the heels of big federal funding cuts to the station, which have resulted in their needing to make significant programming changes resulting from the loss of NPR programming.

I completely respect the necessity for change in this situation, and support KMUN’s efforts to regroup. I’m regrouping myself, and considering what’s next for me in terms of Friday podcasts. I’ll keep you posted as I sort it out.

In the meantime, as always, I’ll continue posting ship schedules on my website (shared on Facebook) and also marine weather on my Ship Report Facebook page.

Thanks for your understanding. More to come.

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We see many signs of fall in the Pacific Northwest, as cruise ships head south and one beloved ship, the icebreaker USCGC Polar Star, heads home to Seattle to prepare for another round of her annual mission: Operation Deep Freeze, where she breaks a navigable channel through pack ice to open McMurdo station to the world, which means access to supplies and fuel.

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A look at today’s ship traffic, and a change in the weather coming this weekend.

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The Columbia River is a busy water highway, with lots of vessels working, many of them upriver in places that folks near Astoria and even upriver in Portland and Vancouver, don’t see. Today we’ll talk about some of what happens as vessels do their work upriver.

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One of my favorite ships is here in town: the research vessel Atlantis. She’s owned by the US Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, located on Cape Cod. She’s been doing research on underwater volcanoes in the Pacific in recent years. She comes into Astoria occasionally to change crews, pick up supplies, etc.

She’s a superstar of a ship, she’s been the subject of many documentaries about her and her famous submersible, the Alvin. We’ll talk about the ship and about times I have been fortunate to go aboard.

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A listener raised an issue about cruise ships and the pollution they create, so I thought I’d explore that topic today. As I was gathering info, I started looking at how sewage is treated both on land and at sea. Turns out, while wastewater treatment is a lifesaver, we are a planet filled with people, and that can be hard on our waterways, despite modern technology.

Today we’ll talk more about the weather, which is in for a change this weekend, and about an unusual meteorological phenomenon we could see called the coastal jet that happens from time to time here. It causes winds along the coast to speed up, sometimes dramatically, while winds offshore can be much calmer.

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