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Another sailor had said to me the day before, "Without Herb, you're blind. You don't know what's coming. It's like driving along a country highway without headlights. Herb is your beacon."

Southbound II this is Schooner Arcadia. Good afternoon, Herb. How copy please?

Loud and clear Arcadia. Wliat is your position and conditions?

Our position is 37°24 N and 74°03 W, barometer 1012 and falling steadily, wind is northwest and light, wave height two feet from northwest.

The Arcadia, with captain Dennis Greenwood, is part of the great "they" that constitutes the devoted—not to say obsessive— listenership of the "Herb Show." "They" are the crews and owners of yachts and small boats from the Canaries to the Caribbean, from Venezuela to Newfoundland. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Herb sends his voice out into the Atlantic, and by doing so he helps to save lives, deal with and minimize crises, head off tragedies, track storms, and give early warning of dangerous lows and hurricanes. His listeners, the free spirits of the Atlantic, have come to trust him with their lives and their possessions. And though many Caribbean boaters have become wary of giving their exact position on air, for fear of hijackers and pirates, they know Herb needs impeccable information, and they give it to him. Many of them have learned to their cost that to doubt him is to risk having their boats mercilessly mauled by an Atlantic storm.

Arcadia, I'm coming to you out of sequence. Arcadia, that second low I mentioned yesterday is moving into a position north of you. It is very intense and dangerous. I must urge you to alter course for Bermuda.

Okay, Herb, thank you. We will head for Bermuda now.

On an average night Herb will talk directly to twenty, thirty, forty yachts. For every person he talks to, maybe a hundred are listening. Every night maybe a thousand people tune in to 12.359 (or sometimes 8.284) megahertz to hear the steady, knowledgeable, competent, informative, comforting voice of Herb Hilgenberg.

Sailor Hans Himmelman, from Halifax, put it this way: "When a sailor is down to his last amp of battery power, I'll bet you he's using it to talk to Herb."

Herb is a weather router, and his single sideband radio broadcasts help ocean travelers navigate the always unpredictable weather of the Atlantic.

For this he gets paid—nothing.

And he does it from, of all places, Burlington, Ontario, a thousand miles from the sea.

Herb learned to sail in the challenging waters around St. John's, in Newfoundland, where he grew up, but he moved away from the Rock when he took his engineering degree and then an MBA from the University of Toronto. In 1982 he built his own boat and went to the Caribbean. "On the way, we got hit by a November storm. We were leaving Beaufort in North Carolina, and we weren't prepared . . . We had no idea it was coming. The U.S. weather service hadn't warned us. It took us six days to get out of it."

A few months later he got a job in Bermuda, "the center of the yachting world. It's the perfect refueling and provisioning port. And every week, you'd hear some horror story about a boat in trouble, demasted in a storm, its sails in shreds, taking on water . . . Caught unprepared."

Herb started to accumulate more and more knowledge about weather. "With an HF receiver, a single sideband radio, a modem, you can pick up a lot of raw data. I started to call out daily, but informally, forecasts just for my friends." In 1987 Hurricane Emily made a turn over the Turks and Caicos Islands. The weather services forecast it would stall and peter out offshore, but Herb disagreed. His data showed the eye would pass right over Bermuda. He battened down, told his friends to do the same. Finally, the U.S. Navy issued a warning at six A.M. The storm hit at eight. The eye passed just where Herb had forecast.

After that Herb became a constant presence in amateur radio circles and worked with the Bermuda Emergency Services Organization. Every Monday he'd be part of a routine broadcast about weather