Final Preparations & Tracking Tips

With just a little more than a week remaining before our planned departure date, final preparations are well underway for all boats and crews and nearing completion.  In addition to all the provisioning chores and sea trials, captains and crews are checking charts and loading routes, preparing paperwork required at our ports-of-call, calculating fuel consumption and refueling needs, and keeping a wary eye on the weather patterns.

And since one of the boats in our fleet is departing from Nassau rather than Palm Beach, we also have to coordinate a rendezvous on the high seas.  That extra 200 miles requires some additional planning around weather, departure dates & times, as well as with planned communications.  None of that is rocket science, but it does require some thought, and some alternate “just in case” war-gaming.

Getting from Nassau to the RZ Point

Right now the plan for the Nassau-based boat (Relish) calls for a departure around 1100 on 16-May, which (given acceptable weather) would put her at the rendezvous point 30 miles northeast of Palm Beach at the same time the rest of the fleet should arrive given their planned departure time of 0800 on 17-May.  Should weather intervene, Relish would have the option of ducking into West End to wait out next steps from a closer port.

Regardless, a good communications channel is needed to apprise all vessels of the status of the planned rendezvous, especially if timing adjustments may be required.  While all boats will have sat-phone capability for any long distance communication needs, an interesting alternative we will have is the inReach device.

As you may recall from previous posts, the Garmin (formerly Delorme) inReach is a compact satellite-based communications device that provides for web-based graphical tracking as well as text & email messaging capabilities. As it turns out, five of the boats will have one of these aboard. (Note that the SPOT Messenger has similar capabilities.)  Further, while normally text or email messaging requires the receiving party to have a standard Internet or SMS connection, the inReach device allows inReach-to-inReach messaging using only Iridium satellite connectivity.  Thus it becomes a very handy boat-to-boat communications channel for the fleet regardless of distance, and completely independent of cellular, WiFi or VHF range limitations.  (And yes, as a part of our preparations we test that out, too.  And as a side note, the inReach also has the capability to fetch abbreviated OCENS weather forecasts for points along our intended route.)

Expand Left Pane

Since we’re talking about the Garmin inReach, we’ll close out this blog entry with a few tips on how to track us via that device as we progress on the journey.  The first tip is to CLICK HERE and bookmark the web page on which you’ll land so you can return to it at any time.  (There is also a link to this tracking site in the upper right hand corner of this blog page.  If you’re looking at this before 16-May, you’re likely only seeing the track that Relish laid down on its recent return to Nassau.)

Click on First Entry

Normally, when a track is active, the web page will zoom in automatically on that active track.  (If not , simply click the “>” arrow in the leftmost pane to expand the list, then click again on the first entry in the list.)  Zoom in/out controls are in the upper left corner of the map display frame, plus you can drag the map around using your mouse cursor.

Relish's Track from Palm Beach
to Nassau (ignore the straight line)

Our tracking points are neatly overlaid on the map display at the programmed time interval (20 minutes in our case), and you can click on any of the small round tracking points to see a pop-up display of key metrics (time, speed, course, lat/lon.)  You may see some larger rectangular boxes displayed (some only visible if you zoom in)….those are periodic cases where we will send a text message from the boat to the tracking map display to augment the default info – for instance you may see an “Ops normal” message (our lingo for “we haven’t broken anything major”) and perhaps wind and sea conditions being encountered at that point.

Click for Popup Boxes and then
"More" for Additional Detail

You will also see a “Center” button at the top left of the page display – that can be handy to re-center the map on our last reported position (as of this posting that’s Fort Myers, so not useful until we get underway again.)  You will also see a “Message” button….so yes, you can send us messages, although we ask folks use constraint there, as that can add up to extra charges for us.  It should be reserved for critical communications.

One final note....you can also use the Marine Traffic web site (CLICK HERE) to track vessels by name since all will be AIS equipped.