14º 43.253s 143º 41.979w
Thu May 30 2019
In
the old days folks didn’t have any way of knowing what kind of weather they
would find until they got out here. Our pal Gary Webb on SV Sparkle built his
own steel sloop complete with timber spars and traditional stays made from
galvanized steel cabling treated with tar or whatever. Either his financial
circumstances or his desire for simplicity kept all but a VHF radio off his
boat. Several years ago his son Spike, an amazing sailor, boat technician and
unmanned aircraft designer helped me sail JollyDogs from La Paz back up Baja
California to Ensenada. Coming North up the Baja can be quite a slog and having
access to detailed weather data and someone with a lot of experience in that
region can greatly reduce the risk you might be caught out. When Spike was a
kid growing up on Sparkle, they had no cell, SSB radio or Iridium, and simply
had to “stick their nose out into it” to find out if conditions were good for
sailing towards their destination. They spent a lot of time “hove to” if they
couldn’t return to a sheltered anchorage.
Out
here it’s all water for hundreds or thousands of miles. Our recent passage from
PV to FP took 21 days and we got well over 1000 miles from inhabited land. The
weather looked promising when we departed Mexico, but a lot can change in 3
weeks. The ECMWF model available with our PredictWind subscription proved
surprisingly accurate during that passage, and as we make our way from the
Marquesas to the Tuamotus it remains spot on. With his access to high bandwidth
data and a PredictWind Pro account, Jamie Gifford was able to offer routing
tweaks that kept us in the most favorable current conditions. That really paid
off, shaving days off our passage and keeping us away from the worst of the
ITCZ squalls and doldrums. It’s hard to put a price on the abuse we and our equipment
avoided just due to excellent routing.
Access
to PredicWind routing data is available with our Iridium Go communications gear
which we purchased through PredictWind along with a plan including unlimited
data and 150 talk minutes per month. New weather data is available every 12
hours and things can get a bit dynamic out here, so we update when new info is
available. That makes anything other than the unlimited data plan useless, as
data updates can take around 20 minutes to download at the maximum 2400 baud
rate.
Sending
out various blog posts and email communications to friends and family have all
proven to be very important to us. There are people who want to know where we
are, how we’re doing, and if we’re OK. As well, it can get a bit boring and lonely
during a long passage, so crew morale is boosted by maintaining a dialogue with
close friends. I’ve met single handers with nothing more than a VHF radio on
board. I don’t know how they do it, or why.
While
in Mexico we were happy subscribers to sail mail using our SSB (single
sideband) radio equipped with Pactor IV modem. It’s even slower than Iridium
for moving data back and forth and is susceptible to the whims of atmospheric
disturbances and sunspot activity, so not always reliable, but mostly so. It
worked fine in Mexico for short emails and weather updates, but when we got
over 1000 miles from San Diego we couldn’t connect any longer due to poor
propagation, and for some time the Manihi based station in the Tuamotus was
inoperative so we couldn’t get weather or email via SSB. Thank goodness for
Iridium.
VHF
is useful for ship to land and ship to ship line of sight communications only
so it’s useless for long range comms of any sort, routine or emergency. In
addition to our fixed 25 watt VHF transceiver, we have two 5 watt hand held
transceivers. These devices are useful for dinghy or ship to shore party
communications as well as backup in the event the fixed VHF radio fails.
Various
SSB and HAM nets are operated by volunteers who help us all stay in touch with
and look after one another. The nets encourage all participants to provide
in-situ information regarding sailing or anchorage conditions, availability of
fresh water, fruit or vegetables in small villages, emergency medical or other
resources, in short it’s sort of a verbal social media experience. In Mexico we
participated in three different nets on occasion, and once we arrived in French
Polynesia we began participating in a regional net that operates 0400 and 1800
UTC, or 0800 and 1800 ship’s time. We check in with our location, course and
speed, local sailing conditions, where we’re headed and when we expect to get
there. It’s an opportunity to be involved with a community of like-minded
people, make new friends over the air, and ask or offer assistance when
necessary. Many of the participants have been sailing this region for many
months or years and can provide invaluable information about local weather,
provisioning or anchorages. Besides, it’s fun and actually talking to people is
a much more human experience than typing messages back and forth. For us the
equipment cost was a lot higher than Iridium, but it’s free to chat so we can
amortize the cost over the years of use and feel just fine about it all.
There’s also plenty of inexpensive used gear out there for anyone to purchase
and install.
It’s
not unusual now to meet new cruisers who don’t have SSB equipment on board.
There are a variety of reasons for doing so, but that decision unfortunately
reduces or eliminates access to a large element of the cruising community.
Satellite data communications is a tremendous resource for us, but we wouldn’t
give up our SSB and HAM net participation, and we’re looking forward to meeting
the heaps of folks we’ve recently chatted with over the nets.
\
If
we’re in range of a cell tower our Google Fi services provides us with voice
and data. There’s something personal about having one’s own cell phone number,
so rather than have a single phone for the family, we each have our own phone
and unique USA phone number for friends and family to call. Google Fi works
seamlessly in most places around the world and the cost for data and voice
communications is both reasonable and predictable.
We
consider voice and data communications to be safety critical capabilities, so
we have redundancy. We can get weather and email data via Iridium Go or sail
mail over SSB. We’ve got hand held VHF radios in case the fixed VHF packs up.
We’ve got the Iridium Go voice capability for emergency medical consults and to
communicate with family and friends. We’ve each got a cell phone with worldwide
service, and very importantly each service has more than one credit card on
file. If we had to, we could make a HAM radio voice call.
One
way or another, we’re going to get through to someone when we need help, or if
we can offer it up.
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