Changelog

A new board lets anyone who's just been to the harbour say whether the Ilala, the Lamani, or a north-shore boat sailed, waited, or didn't run — for the Likoma/Chizumulu, Usisya, Ruarwe and Mbamba Bay crossings. It's neighbour reports, not an operator schedule, and it says so plainly.

Official DCCMS warnings for Nkhata Bay and the Lake Malawi shore — Mwera winds over the water and heavy rain — shown as the weather service issues them, unaltered. It is not itself an alert service: when a warning is in force, ask at the harbour and wait for the wind to drop before you travel by water.

Usipa and utaka are caught at night with a lamp over the water, and the lamp pulls best when there is no moonlight to compete with it. This tool reads the moon for the next two weeks: which nights are dark and good for the lamp, which are bright and slow, and when the next new and full moon fall. It is pure astronomy — no feed, nothing to go stale — and it shows the moon and the dark hours, never a promise of a catch or a judgement that it is safe to go out, so it points you to the wind and lake conditions first. When the lake's closed season is on, it says so before anything else.

Getting the catch dried before it spoils is the binding constraint on the town's fish trade, and the rains are what threaten it. Drying Days reads the forecast sun, rain and humidity for the lakeshore and says, in plain words, how many good drying hours each day offers, when rain is likely, and the best window to have usipa or cassava out on the racks. It is a weather outlook, not a promise — rain crosses the lake fast — so it tells you to keep cover within reach.

Nobody here can look up whether the lake boats are running — so the new pages do the honest version: a dated status board for the Ilala and the island boats, a wind-and-rain read over the open water to Likoma (no wave forecast exists for Lake Malawi, and the page says so), WFP market prices for the boma and nearby markets, a rain-season tracker, common questions, and who to call with every number's provenance stated. The requested crowd-updated ferry tracker is recorded as an idea waiting on a trusted way to verify reports.