Out Of Office Living

  We got the Seakeeper Ride on Out of Office. If you have one you have no doubt discovered the Seakeeper Ride Nite Lite. The control panel, at least on ours, is hooked up to the House Battery, so it is always on lighting up the cabin. One can pull the fuse for it, but that would be too easy. Those that want to make boating more difficult by doing unnecessary improvements install a switch instead! The switch came from New Wire Marine. Wiring wasn’t hard but requires a lot of crawling around. Completely unnecessary, but now we can turn off the nite lite!

 Many boaters seem to monitor only channel 16, or even not that. However, you may want to monitor a few extra channels, especially if you travel to Canada. A few weeks ago we were transiting the Strait of Juan De Fuca to Victoria. There was a large Canadian navy ship patrolling up and down the border. Some pleasure boat got to close to her for comfort and the radio operator tried multiple times to hail the pleasure boat. However, they hailed them on 68 not on 16. The pleasure boat never responded. It seems like non standard practice and perhaps it was a mistake but every modern marine radio should have a scan function. You probably want to monitor at least 16, 9 (the new hailing channel), 13 (commercial hailing channel), 22 (US coast guard announcements), and apparently 68 if you are in Canada. 

 Ever since before we got the boat there are a couple of upgrades we have been wanting to do. First, you can’t ever have too much storage on a boat. One of the reasons we got the sedan version of the Ranger Tug R-43 instead of the command bridge was to have the ability to more flexibly use the roof top. Today King Marine Canvas came over and installed a pair of cross bars on the roof. This allows us to put a car top carrier up there that store things that don’t need to be down below.  As you can see, we also are using them to tie down our great crab traps from Northwest Traps . We will probably come up with other things to use them for, but they are also easily removable if we want to do that.  The second upgrade was this netting on the transom platform. One great feature about the R-43 is that the seats swivel to connect the transom platform to the cockpit, but this leaves the back of it open. Dogs are really curious and want to go explore back there. To keep them somew...

One of the questions many new boat owners ask is “how do I get Internet on the boat”? Designing a network strategy for a boat is another of those tradeoff challenges, like nearly every decision a boat owner makes. What are your priorities? Easy? Flexible? Fast? Anywhere coverage? Cost? Power consumption?  In this article, I will discuss some of these tradeoffs and talk about a few concrete ways to design a network. We will cover four different options, in order of increasing complexity but increasing flexibility and speed.  Uplink Options The choice all starts with uplink options, i.e. how a gateway device on your boat is connected to the Internet. Unlike your house, where you have fiber or cable to your front door, on your boat, it must be some kind of wireless. You have three options: WiFi, Cellular, and Satellite.  WiFi is available in most marinas today. In some cases, it is free. In our home marina, it is not. It is, in fact, quite expensive. It can run as much for a...