Changing times

chabrenas

chabrenas

Active Member
Joined
2 Oct 2008
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52
Location
a bit to the left of the middle of France - 200Km
www.newfreebooters.com
I've been away a long time (how many of you remember using RDF and the echo sounder to find your way in to Dieppe on a murky day?), so all this computery people now carry amazes me. However, one makes the best of what is current.

Can anyone tell me what proportion of boating folk carry something that can access the web, and how they use it (e-mail, searching for pubs, restaurants and service providers in a strange port, Wiley's weather and tide info,.....)?

How many people carry a web-enabled mobile phone? How many carry a laptop and use it for the web? How do they access the web? Can you reach wi-fi hot spots while you're still outside Hamble Point, for instance?
 
Personally, I like to go sailing to get away from all this computery stuff.

I've got a VHF (non-DSC) to call for clearance to leave from the harbour control, GPS to tell me where I am, a depth sounder to tell me when I'm getting near the putty, a log which works for the first couple of weeks after I launch then gives up the ghost. Oh, and a LW radio/tape for the shipping forecast.

Forgot the tiller pilot which I put on when I visit the heads, or have a brew.

KISS principle is my motto.
 
I suppose that if you count the i-Phone then we have web access on board when we are within range of a signal.

We sometimes look the weather forcast up on it.

My wife has brought her wifi enables lap-top with us once. We found one marina (in France) that we could use it for checking e-mails and surfing the web. We weren't trying very hard and I know there are techniques that we can try when we move on board in a couple of years.

In the meantime its not a priority.
 
A nice mix so far. I'm encouraged to see there is still plenty of variety. John, since you are an RYA examiner, do you get a feel for how geeky your students are? I guess they represent the new generation of boaters (not necessarily the young generation - just the ones that have seen the light or found the time to do what they always wanted to do).
 
Good to have some weather info, so when on the ocean I'd cough up for some airtime on the Iridium satphone so that I can download gribfiles. If I'm staying within Navtex range I don't bother to activate the satellite kit.
 
I go Solo or Family cruising around N Wales coast.

I take my netbook with a GPS mouse as a plotter using Tsunamis99. I also have a Nokia E71 with unlimited internet access that can be used for forecasts/ tides (BBC weather site) and news/ footy results if in range. Obviously, I can also use it for accessing the web on my netbook too.

However, it depends on what I am doing & how I feel whether I bother with either or just revert to pottering 1950's style.
 
Internet On The Boat - Not Yet - But Its Becoming Easy To Access

chabrenas said:
....... RYA ..... do you get a feel for how geeky your students are? ......
Click to expand...

I still do a bit of RYA tuition. Most students bring their mobiles on board and check out the connectivity from sea then put them away and forget about them. In the evening one or two students will make whatever calls / texts they have to make. In nearly every case by the end of the week no one is bothering about their phones. Students of all ages don't bring laptops. The phones always come back out on the final passage back to base in order to tell whomever what time they will be departing the boat.

When chartering with my friends who all like their technology, they too go through the above motions.

So what I have observed is that technology doesn't appear to be too important. Like Searush I find that the use of a mobile phone connected to the web can be convenient for example, for weather information on demand, instead of waiting for the CG.

Even the plotter becomes more redundant as students learn that pilotage is a much more convenient and sufficient method of navigating.

When it comes to shore facilities the mobile phone on the web has been used for Taxi, restaurant and street maps.

Personally I cant be bothered with internet when I am sailing but my marina has now got WiFi access and it is very fast. I am finding that quite useful to contact vendors, for example. I would class myself as old school but I have been finding that technology is now easy to use and therefore more acceptable to me.
 
I carry an old lap top which I use when cruising, for about 15 mins whilst at anchor, every other day, to print out tides and currents for the next leg(s) and to connect through my mobile phone (tether) to download weather charts for the next few days. I try to remember to e-mail my shore contact to report plans and progress at the same time. If I forget to e-mail, I text him.

Some anchorages have no signal, but most do. I have taken the laptop and phone ashore occasionally when there was no signal at anchor and my weather forecast charts were too old.
 
Thanks, everyone, for your responses. Let me tell you why I am asking - other than to satisfy my curiosity and get a feel for how much the world has changed, which is also part of my motivation. (I'm getting lonely living 200Km from the sea).

For years, I've been dabbling with websites that are mostly whimsy and something to keep my brain active. Now I want to make a serious effort to create something useful, and I thought that a stripped down service typical of the things you see on simple mobile phones would be a place to start.

One of the things I want to provide is a list of local boating service providers, so that someone entering an unfamiliar port with a problem (anything from a torn dodger to an electrical or electronic problem) could contact local businesses then choose where to come ashore and perhaps even have someone waiting for him.

For example, you're in the middle of a fortnight's cruising holiday and entering the Hamble River. You could just use VHF Channel 80 to call various marinas, but my impression is that, even if a relevant business operates from the marina site, the dockmaster can't tell you whether they can fix your problem in time for you to get away again reasonably quickly.

If I take a berth in Port Hamble then go ashore and eventually track down the guy who is qualified to fix my broken instrument - and he is in Swanwick, at the top of the river - I may have lost a whole day as well as having to move up river and pay another set of mooring fees. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to arrange a rendezvous with the fixer before I get much beyond Hamble Point? For smaller harbours, I might even choose to skip it and go a bit further up the coast.

Question 1: Is this a realistic scenario?

Question 2: Is there any point in creating a site that will work on a simple web-enabled phone (user chooses one of half a dozen categories of business, then I send the phone a list of name and telephone number for each one that satisifies that choice, and user then tells his phone to dial one of them). Or has every potential user got either a notebook/laptop or an iPhone class mobile handset which can provide a bit more info? Is the tariff charged by mobile phone service providers high enough to be a factor? (Or is there so much wi-fi around that no-one in his right mind would use a mobile phone network for the purpose?) I know that iPhone roaming data charges are prohibitive, so maybe it is if you are entering a French channel port.

To give you an idea of what triggered my idea, consider the local weather and tide info that Wiley Nautical offers as a mobile phone service. Has anyone here used this?
 
chabrenas said:
. . . . . One of the things I want to provide is a list of local boating service providers, so that someone entering an unfamiliar port with a problem (anything from a torn dodger to an electrical or electronic problem) could contact local businesses then choose where to come ashore and perhaps even have someone waiting for him. . . . .

For example, you're in the middle of a fortnight's cruising holiday and entering the Hamble River. You could just use VHF Channel 80 to call various marinas, but my impression is that, even if a relevant business operates from the marina site, the dockmaster can't tell you whether they can fix your problem in time for you to get away again reasonably quickly. . . .
Click to expand...

Hello Chabrenas, this just might have been done already by Wiley's Nautical Almanac, albeit only the south and southern east coast so far?

http://www.wileynautical.com/view/0/almanac.html

I suppose you could start with Scotland and meet up somewhere in the middle? :)
 
I'm in the club with Rowana and seven Spades, this lap top is plugged into shore power at the moment down here in Sardine land but once I go to sea, it gets chucked under the bunk. O2 said they wouldn't play anymore because I hadn't used my mobile phone for 6 months. Can they do that? They've still got my 2 quid, pay as you go, the rats!! I shall write to my MP...:D :D
 
Lenseman: Yes, the Wiley Nautical Almanac provides the function I was contemplating. It also does a lot more - and appears to do it very well. However, it is an Adobe Air application. Works beautifully on my PC, and its format suggests it might even be usable on an iPhone or similar device - has anyone here tried that? I can't really justify getting one to find out, even if it is an amazingly good video camera, compass, GPS and spirit level.

The only Wiley app that has a mobile phone version is the weather service. Maybe that's because it's the only one that has proven worth providing, or maybe they just haven't got round to expanding that offering yet. I could try asking them, but I'd also like to do a bit of my own research into what might be useful to boaters.

From the responses I'm getting on this thread, it sounds as if people likely to make use of the locality-specific information I'm talking about are also very likely to have a laptop or notebook and the choice of accessing the Net via either a mobile network or a WiFi hotspot. In that case, the only justification for providing a mobile-targeted site is for the yachtsman ashore - and then it should clearly also address the shore-based visitors to the area.
 
Online Almanacs

Thge big problem that Wiley and other paper almanac publishers is how to have a web presence without detracting from their core revenue of book sales. If Wiley provided all of their data online in a way that anyone could pick it up with a smartphone, their revenue would drop off significantly, so the quality of the data would decrease, the book price would go up, or they would change to an online subscription model.

Online advertising, especially in a small niche area such as leisure marine, will never generate enough revenue to compensate for lost print sales.

But if you look at the printed almanacs, most of their value is in collating a wide range of information that is either publicly available from a number of sources, or is easily gathered, rather than any unique content.

I have been thinking for a while about setting up an online almanac powered by crowdsourcing, i.e. some core information such as weather, charts and tides etc would be provided by the web site provider, and all the useful local information would be able to be entered by sailors, along the lines of Wikipedia but in a more structured format. What do people think of this idea?

Tim
 
A nice thought, but wikis need constant monitoring. If I create a site, I'd like it to contribute a little towards topping up my pension - which is paid in GBP and spent in Euros (:=< , and I'd like my time and effort to be in reasonable proportion to whatever the site brought in.

Two big time-eaters are data gathering during start up (must be better to negotiate a licence to use someone else's data, like the Almanacs do for a lot of their content), and moderating any public input in this spammy world. That's been the greatest weakness of the sites I've payed with to date.

The other side of the coin is generating income. Even if you get plenty of traffic, it isn't always clear how best to get any income from it. And you have to keep working on it - the world keeps changing.

Fun trying, though. Keeps my brain in gear a bit.
 
I use my iPhone (mainly) on 3G for WX, and play with Navionics in the pub or at anchor - Google earth is fun for shore expeditions.

I've sometimes used a laptop (patched into boat stereo) to watch DVDs, but not much more than that - I've got a good stash of info on PDF - equipment manuals* & the entire US world-wide pilot guides 'tho.

I once used an on-board PC (& Hamble Point wifi) to find a PDF of some furling gear and location of a hidden grub screw *just* before someone reached for a bigger hammer.

* I <heart> being able to download PFD manuals *before* buying kit - I think I've done it for almost all significant purchases in the past 5 yearss.

Pre-iPhone, I used my old mobile to phone-a-friend and got him to Google for the NMEA-out wire colours on an obsolete GPS ;-)
 
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