CAPTAIN'S LOG | Blue Water Sailing • May 2011


Phone, Where Are We?

Smartphones—and by extension iPads and otherPads—are changing the way we do a lot of normal things, like communicate, navigate and even prognosticate. This is true even for sailors, who are notoriously conservative and immune to progress.

Obviously the phone is still a phone so we can call each other. But it is also an e-mail device that can receive weather forecasts from your weather routing service. And it’s a texting machine that allows you to shoot quick asynchronous messages to sailing buddies who are wondering what time you’ll reach the next anchorage. It’s a camera, so you can record your cruise and send pictures to those who couldn’t come with you; or, you can just pop them onto your Facebook page. If you have downloaded an airhorn app, the phone can be your signaling tool when piloting in pea soup fog. And now SPOT, the satellite personal locating device company, has introduced a portable one-way satellite interface that will allow you to tweet your followers or update your Facebook page from anywhere in the world.

For navigators, the smartphone’s built-in GPS and cell-location functions mean the phone knows where you are all the time. Ashore, you can navigate anywhere with a simple voice command into a free navigation app. On the water, you need to download charts (Navionics dominates the smartphone charting world) for your area or the whole world before you can actually navigate your boat with it. We are obliged to remind skippers that they need to carry paper charts as a backup, but we have to believe that most modern skippers, even if they own the charts, will use a chartplotter and handheld GPS plotters as backups to their smartphones. Every time I head offshore these days, it seems that each crewmember arrives with his or her own chart-loaded phone and GPS.

Increasingly, our Internet-interfaced tools are thinking for us, too, whether it be by looking up how to spell “Rarotonga,” giving us a reliable 36-hour weather forecast or telling us where the next marina is along the coast. Because it is such a tireless and omnipotent resource, a smartphone allows us to learn on the fly and adapt instantaneously to changing situations—weather- and boat-related or otherwise. That should make us better and safer sailors if it doesn’t turn us into screen-obsessed tweet-geeks first.

Blue Water Sailing Media has responded to this new world with a full array of digital offerings for your pleasure and information. Blue Water Sailing is available in pure digital format, readable on all computers and Pads through Zinio (www.zinio.com/bwsailing). We also publish a free, weekly e-newsletter called Cruising Compass that you can read on any smartphone or computer (www.cruisingcompass.com). And, this winter, we introduced the new Multihulls Quarterly blog (www.mulithullsquarterly.com), where multihull maven Derek Escher can be found expounding on all things with multiple hulls.

There has never been a more exciting time for creators of content (like BWS) and consumers of content (like you). Okay, phone—where are we?