Predicting Weather By The Moon - Xavier University Libraries

Journey
Once we learned what they were doing, and it was in
their interests to tell us so we didn’t steal their food supplies
if we accidentally foiund them, we started doing it
too. So we had to know when to plant.
My wife and I acquired old planting calendars, found
in second hand bookshops. We started noticing that the
Maori fishing guide and the planting calendar often seemed
to match up. Both were based on the perigee/apogee cycles
of the Moon. It turned out that you fished and planted
mainly on the apogee, whatever that was. Then someone
told me about the old tohungas’ measuring sticks.
I wanted to discover the reasoning behind these calendars.
It seemed to me that planting and fishing depended
on the climate, which meant weather, so what caused heavy
seas, strong winds and rain, must be very patterned. By then
I had also started to notice that the worst storms often happened
at the time of highest tides. Was there a link, and if
so, could a system of prediction be devised that covered a
whole year? What did the old sages know, and how did they
get their information?
It turned out that the Maori elders who had been so
knowledgeable about fishing and planting drew blanks when
it came to weather patterns. It was up to me. I knew I had to
start collecting records. That was the obvious place to start.
I had already studied the cloud patterns somewhat, and could
roughly ‘read’ the sky.. It’s easier in the country - your eye
travels along the line of the hills and then upwards, a restful
and natural thing to want to do, whereas in the city the
houses on the skyline seem to scramble the visual transition
and discourage the eye from looking up. Perhaps it’s
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