Actually the whole thing is mostly moot: The boat's VHF radio has something like eight channels on which to receive NOAA weather forecasts and current conditions, including marine conditions such as wave height and swells data.

And if the boat's VHF isn't handy, my FRS radio has the same weather channels.

I have found that the easiest to use source, however, is http://www.weatherunderground.com, as it displays both regular forecast data and marine information, including small craft advisories.

And of course, I live in Southern California, where weather problems are rare anyway. Still, I found the exercise of putting together this little script to be educational and fun. I think I may take the time to add better command-line argument handling with Getopt::Long.