Lessons Learned Cruising From Florida
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Lessons Learned Cruising From Florida |
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Lessons Learned Cruising Editor’s Note: Since selling Bluewater Books & Charts two years ago, founders Milt and Judy Baker have cruised extensively aboard their trawler Bluewater. In the intervening two years, they’ve cruised their Grand Banks 42 from Florida to Canada twice, also spending several months cruising in Maine and elsewhere along the east coast. We asked them to write about some of the lessons they’ve learned in the 10,000 miles of cruising they’ve done in the past two years. |
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If there’s one thing that’s changed cruising for us and many other cruisers, it’s good communications. I’m not talking about VHF radios, though those are much better than the ones we used when we were cruising aboard our little ketch in the 1980s. I’m talking about real communications: telecommunications and e-mail. Cruising in the 1980s, we sometimes went for weeks at a time without talking to parents and friends. It wasn’t a matter of choice. We simply didn’t have access to telephones on a regular basis. E-mail, of course, didn’t exist. We used ham radio phone patches from time to time, but mostly we wrote and received letters--something that seems unthinkable with today’s communications. Some cruisers today still equate cruising with dropping out, but Judy and I are not among them. We like to be in touch. In fact, we thrive on it. So we carry a two cell phones as well as satellite communications equipment aboard M/Y Bluewater and we send receive e-mail daily, almost no matter where we are. It has made cruising much more enjoyable for us. To be sure, cruising communications is still at least as much art as science. Today’s cruiser has so many communications options available that it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the choices. The choices I’ve made may not be right for your needs and your style of cruising, but they’ve proved workable for us. In an earlier Bluewater newsletter, I wrote about our experience with Iridium, the satellite-based telephone service. We continue to carry our Iridium phone, but I have to admit that at $1.50 a minute, we use it sparingly—and only when our cell phones are out of range. But it’s a very nice ace in the hole, especially far offshore. For cruising in 2000, our main communications tool was our AT&T OneRate service. We signed up for 1,500 minutes per month of toll-free calls anywhere in the United States for $150 a month. We used our trusty Nokia 5160 phone for virtually all our incoming and outgoing telephone calls and e-mail. There were places along the waterway where our service was spotty, but mostly it worked just fine—especially after we added an external antenna. AT&T Wireless uses a protocol known as TDMA. Not being a technician, I won’t try to explain TDMA, but I can tell you that in my experience it works fine for voice but it is not the best choice for e-mail. Using the AT&T service, we connected for e-mail at a very slow 4,800 baud—about 1/10 the speed of a normal modem at your home or office. It was adequate for e-mail, but frustratingly low. Using the Internet at this speed is just about out of the question. For the 2001 cruising season we added Verizon Wireless service using a Kyocera cell phone with 400 minutes of toll-free calling anywhere in the U.S. Verizon uses a different communications protocol known as CDMA, which is very e-mail friendly. In fact, my CDMA Kyosera cell phone connects directly to my laptop with a cable and functions as its own modem. The good news is that it connects quickly and easily at 19,200 baud, nearly four times the speed of the AT&T service. Sending and receiving e-mail at this speed is a snap. We’ve used the Verizon phone in coastal waters from Florida to the Canadian border and back again, and our service has been terrific. By using a combination of Verizon and AT&T, we’ve had good, reliable communications nearly 100 percent of the time along the coast. Almost invariably, a poor signal in a particular area on one service is complimented by a good signal on the other—and that’s what competition is all about! Our Verizon service is like our AT&T service in one respect: we can make calls to any number in the U.S. without paying long distance tolls. Much to our surprise, we found that our Verizon Wireless plan includes 2,000 "free" weekend minutes. Think about that: 2,000 minutes is over 33 hours. That means we can spend over eight hours a weekend on the phone or the Internet. And we’ve found that the 19,200 baud connect speed is fast enough to use the web, though it’s best if we set our browser not to download pictures. Dropped calls are always a problem plaguing cellular users, and we’ve certainly had our share. Adding an external cellular antenna has help reduce the number of dropped calls. You’ll find a good selection of cellular antennas and connector cables for many popular phones at: http://www.shakespeare-marine.com/catalog/galaxy.pdf Our Internet Service Provider is Earthlink, a national provider that has hundreds of local access numbers across the country. Thanks to our AT&T and Verizon service, it costs us no more to use a Fort Lauderdale number, for example, than a Rhode Island number when we’re calling from Newport. However, we usually have better luck using an Earthlink number for the local area from which we’re calling. For anyone visiting Canada, AT&T has a nifty plan known as "Canada Calling." For $19.99 a month, our toll free calling is extended into Canada. That means we can call any number in the U.S. or Canada while we’re cruising in Canada, all without long distance tolls. AT&T does have one "gotcha" on this, however. If you’ll be in Canada during two billing periods (even though it’s less than a month), you’ll have to pay the $19.99 charge twice. Verizon offers no service at all in Canada. Once we reached Nova Scotia, my Verizon phone showed a strong signal, so I tried to make a call. Alas, I was greeted with a nice recording saying, "We do not recognize your number as an authorized user." So it was back to the AT&T phone for both e-mail at 4800 baud and voice. M/Y Bluewater also carries a Trimble Inmarsat C transceiver. This is a wonderful little box about the size of a VHF radio and it has an antenna about the size of a half basketball. It sends and receives e-mail worldwide. Because the service is rather expensive (almost a penny a character), we use it only when we’re offshore or otherwise our of cell phone range. But it’s especially useful for receiving up-to-the-minute weather routing information from Walt Hack, our weather router. Finally, we still carry a Pocketmail device as a backup for e-mail. It’s been a long time since we’ve used it, and we’ll probably let the service expire. But we know many cruisers who depend exclusively on Pocketmail for their e-mail needs and who are completely satisfied with it. If you don’t mind waiting until you have access to a "landline," Pocketmail is a wonderful and inexpensive way to send and receive e-mail. Besides talking with friends and sending and receiving e-mail, what do we do with all our communications capacity?
For Judy and me, good communications make a giant contribution to enjoyable cruising. Being in touch is important to us both, and we’re just as in touch with friends, family and business associates while cruising as when we’re at home in Fort Lauderdale.
In the interest of full disclosure, Milt
reports that he and Judy do not own stock
in any of the companies mentioned in this
article. |
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