Sailing off Vancouver Island
Canadian Yachting
The Big Wave Dave website is an essential source of weather information for windsurfing and kiteboarding on Vancouver Island, BC. It is also the go to site for most boaters, sailors and sailboat racers in and around Vancouver Island. The site features 14 webcams, current wind reports, forums, photo galleries, wind predictions and weather statistics.
For over 15 years up and down Vancouver Island and throughout the Islands, yacht clubs, in the racing community have used Big Wave Dave as a highly valued resource. With the tide, weather and wind speed information that the site provides, race committee’s are able to better preplan races. When discussing tactics before a race skippers and crew include the Big Wave Dave information as part of the discussion.
Donations are being accepted to keep this website going. There are a lot of costs to running the site: web hosting, webcam purchases, monthly internet bills for the webcams, domain name costs, weather station costs, and paying to access the University of Washington wind model. The sponsors help to keep the site going, but more money is needed for webcam upgrades and maintenance. This site takes a lot of money to run, so if you can afford a small donation it would really help out.
Why donate to a website when it looks like there are sponsors that pay for everything? In 2016, eight new live webcams were purchased at $800 each. Each weather station costs about $800 (four of them so far). Along with the initial purchases, Dave also pays the internet fees for some of the webcams. That adds up to a large monthly bill. The money from the sponsors just covers the monthly internet and web hosting bills. Individual donations are needed if we want to have money to maintain the existing equipment and possibly buy more.
The best ways to support the website are by making donations through PayPal or by sending checks in amounts of $10, $20, $50 or $100. Cheques can be sent to: Dave Billenness, 745 Ardmore Drive, North Saanich, BC, V8L 5G2
You can also click on the Google ads on the homepage, WebCam, and forecasts pages that interest you. Big Wave Dave get dollars per click.
It also helps if the sailing community is active in the sailing log and forum. Lastly, go to the sponsors pages and let them know that you saw their ads on BWD.
Originally published here.