With the advent of GPS and electronic charts some of the art and mystery of navigation has been removed. Chartplotters and computer programs will plot precise tracks for us whether we cross oceans or weave through reefs, and many keep an electronic log for us as well. However, most cruisers today still keep at least a minimal deck log by hand when in transit, noting hourly position reports plus heading and speed as an emergency baseline against the possibility of electronics failure. Many add more data about wind, sea, weather and vessel or marine sightings, not to mention, as Marcie of Nine of Cups says, ”Comments on what broke!”

I confess to being a bit compulsive about logs. I like the tradition and discipline of it, and I like that it keeps me mentally involved with the boat and the journey. For the same reason, my husband has kept an equally-detailed (but separate) log of all that goes on in the engine room. Either one of us can go back through ten years of cruising and reconstruct what was going on when and where.

But I also have been the sort who likes to keep track of the story of our adventure — and not only to keep track of it, but to share it with others — so in between passages my log is more like a journal, chockablock with details that I can refer to when it comes time to write emails and website updates.

The urge to share is not unique. It seems like most cruisers you meet these days have a website or blog on the Internet. This ability to ”broadcast” is probably the biggest single change to impact cruising. It was not so long ago, that sharing your story with anyone meant, at best, a typewriter, carbon paper and lots of stamps.

“When we started cruising,” remembers Mary of Camryka, “email was unknown in our lives. Instead, I typed a single-spaced page daily describing not only places and events where we cruised but also the wonderful characters we met along the way. When someone flew back to the US, I sent this to one daughter who made copies for the other three. They still have those letters and perhaps someday our grandkids will read them, too. The sad part of these years is that our daughters didn’t write back to us much. since we so rarely had mail delivered.”

The Internet has changed all that. Whether from onboard – via radio or satellite phone – or from shore – via Internet cafes or cellular links, today’s cruisers upload accounts of their latest adventures, and seconds later folks back home can be reading about it and responding!

How you decide to go about sharing your story will depend on several factors: who you want to share with (family, friends back home, cruising friends, or strangers), whether you are better with words or pictures, how you will upload, and how much time you want to put into it. Oh, yeah…and how good you are with computers. The most common venues for group sharing are email newsletters, websites, blogs, and published articles. To this I would add the surprising phenomenon of Facebook and sites like it which many Admirals have discovered this past year!

The simplest and most personal way to share your story with family and friends is to send newsletters, just like Mary did, only via email. Beverly of Cloverleaf, for example, sorts her contact list into a short one of family she writes weekly and a longer one of extended friends she write less often, and, like many cruisers, Marcie does one big newsletter a year in lieu of holiday cards. The pleasure of getting a real letter in your mailbox (even an electronic one) is hard to match, and it is the best way to share your adventures with other cruisers (who with only expensive or intermittent Internet access don’t tend to be good about following other people’s web postings!)

If images are more your thing than words, your best option is albums of pictures on photo-sharing sites like Picasa, Snapfish, KodakGallery or Flickr, or even on Facebook where you can easily add a quick line about what you’re up to. These options, however, do require shore-based Internet.

The next step up is to do a website or blog. Websites allow you to do all sorts of things – nesting hierarchies of information and embedding photos, videos, maps, etc…if you know how to do it. Therein lies the rub. I’ve had my huge website for ten years, and – CONFESSION TIME – I’ve never grasped out how to manage all that HTML stuff myself. Lucky me to have family and friends to help. Cruisers with software backgrounds like K.T. of Billabong and Sherry of Soggy Paws, not only have websites that document their own cruises, but have extensive sections with help articles for cruisers coming behind them. It’s a lot of work, but clearly such projects are rewarding for their authors.

A better online publishing option for the average cruiser, once you get past the ugly name, is a blog. Blogs entries appear in journal style, displaying in reverse chronological order so your latest post is always on top. “A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other relevant Internet sites,” says Sherry, who helped me switch three years ago. “Many are free, easy to set up, and you can post straight into them by email.” The most popular blogging sites among cruisers are Blogger, Sailblogs, and WordPress.

A blog is a lot less work than a website, but it still demands a commitment of effort and time. “I frequently find myself with writer’s block and go long periods without putting in new entries,” admits Judy of Ursa Minor. Debbie, of Illusions, is considering starting a blog but wants to avoid being the kind of cruiser who is “so tied to blogs or email that destinations and anchoring are determined by WiFi availability!” Sheri of Procyon agrees. “We see cruisers spending their entire time in port at an internet cafe updating websites or blogs. We would rather spend that time exploring where we are.”

Still, for those of us who like to write and take pictures, all this documenting holds huge rewards. It’s a high-tech version of scrap-booking, and, if you can keep it up, you end up with a vibrant historical archive of your journey, plus I’ve found, over the years, that it has stimulated me to do things I might otherwise have lazily let pass by. Camryka’s Mary puts it well, “Writing has helped me be more observant. I pay closer attention, absorbing details like sounds, smells, feelings, and conversations to provide readers with a more vivid sense of what we experience. What great memories come roaring back when I read those old paragraphs!”

Ah, you see! In the end we’re not doing it for others. In the end, we do it for ourselves.

Contributing Admirals: Sherry McCampbell, Soggy Paws; KT Roddick, Billabong, Marcie Lynn, Nine of Cups; Judy Knape, Ursa Minor; Debbie Leisure, Illusions; Sheri Schneider, Procyon; Mary Heckrotte, Camryka; Maribel Penichet, Paper Moon; Mary Verlaque, I Wanda; Beverly Feiges, Cloverleaf

(You can find helpful overviews of websites and blogs prepared by Sherry at svsoggypaws.com and KT at creative-cruising.com.)

This article was published in the August 2009 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.

Most of my Admirals have, like me, been cruising long enough that, when they started, their onboard options were the same ones that served generations before us. As Jean of Jean Marie says about their first circumnavigation, “We were only able to call home from land once when we were about to depart and once again we’d arrived. For detailed news, we depended totally on snail mail, and when a letter was waiting it was a highlight.” Getting snail mail in far-flung ports required an itinerary that both they and their contacts back home could stick to, and breaking news of, say, a sick parent might reach them weeks late!

As little as eight years ago, when Don and I set out on our open-ended cruise, our onboard communications options were only one step higher…but it was a big step. Our HF radio transceiver (SSB and Ham) gave us access to the give-and-take of radio nets through which we could talk to other cruisers or get access to help – medical or mechanical – via phone patches to experts. HF radio also brought us voice weather and , with a computer, weatherfax via the easy addition of a software program and a demodulator. We could even receive phone messages and make return phone calls home via the Marine Operator. I couldn’t (and still can’t) imagine cruising without my radio.

Besides being unable to receive calls directly, the big problem with phone calls by radio, besides cost, was that at least one half of the conversation was open to eavesdropping! To make a private phone call, we had to get off the boat, buy a phone card and find a phone booth.

The advent of email began to change things for cruisers. Initially, it was only available ashore in Internet cafes. Fortunately, most of the out-of-the-way places cruisers like to go quickly embraced the Internet café concept, since it was often a huge jump forward in communications for the locals. About the same time, Pocketmail became popular, enabling cruisers to compose short emails on a calculator-sized device and send from anywhere they could get a phone connection. Ironically, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in this new age was persuading family members back home, often older parents, to get computers and get connected.

Internet cafes and Pocketmail still depended on being ashore in a port with at least a phone connection. Everything changed with the introduction of Airmail . This wonderful software program coupled cruisers’ onboard computers via TNC modems to their HF radios and brought email right aboard, whether in port or in the middle of the ocean.

Today, almost every cruiser I know has either a Winlink (Ham version) or Sailmail (commercial Marine version) email address or both. With a General Class Ham license, a cruiser can send up to 30 minutes of email a day through more than a hundred volunteer stations around the world at no charge. Without a ham license, or if needing to do business-related communication, a cruiser can connect to any of Sailmail’s commercial stations around the world 15 minute a day for a reasonable annual fee. With onboard email, not only have cruisers been able to reassure folks back home with regular communiqués and position reports but to stay in touch with each other as well, a revolution in the connectedness of our worldwide floating community. Winlink and Sailmail have also brought us increased access to weather information, downloadable by requesting specific products to be put in your e-mailbox, as well as to remote troubleshooting of onboard equipment malfunctions via email exchanges with manufacturers’ tech reps.

The one thing radio has not been able to bring us is the Internet. Cruisers are heavy users of the Internet. We use it to research passage information and weather (from sources like Jimmy Cornell’s Noonsite and NOAA); share experiences through personal websites; pay bills via online banking; locate spare parts; book air travel home; keep up with the news; and to make international Skype voice calls at a fraction of overseas telephone rates. We can even collect our radio email, Winlink or Sailmail, right online via their built-in Telnet Options.

There are three ways to bring the Internet on board. The simplest is to bring your boat into a harbor or marina that has WiFi, a service which seems to be proliferating everywhere. While the built-in Wifi modems in laptops aren’t designed to work over distances much wider than the inside of a house, the addition of an external WiFi antenna and amplifier can increase reception range up to several miles.

Coastal cruisers in many countries can often get decent cell phone service, and another way to get Internet aboard, is a cellular broadband card. Cell reception can also be enhanced with an external antenna and amplifier; however, it’s good to remember that cell companies have little incentive to aim their towers out to sea. In the US, cellular service contracts are often inflexible annual commitments with one company. In Fiji we are getting Internet on board Tackless II through a cellular card for a reasonable month-by-month charge. In Europe, Mary of Iwanda tells us, cellular is a good option. “Cruisers can purchase an ‘unlocked’ cell phone (or broadband card) into which you insert a SIM card chip for the amount of prepaid service you want, changing the SIM card in each country you visit to minimize long distance charges.”

Last but not least are satellite telephones. Out here in the Pacific, for example, Iridium’s worldwide service with special compression software lets cruisers get email and weather anytime of day in a minute or two download. We can call home from anywhere for special birthdays or a forgotten Mother’s Day, pay credit card bills, argue with insurance companies, even call the Coast Guard if we’re sinking. Being portable, we can take it in our abandon-ship bag, and it’s the perfect backup should a dismasting bring the antenna down with the rig. We can even have Internet access….. if we’re willing to pay the per-minute price.

So, you see, it is really much less a question of whether you can stay in touch than how. Obviously, not every cruiser will have every system. It will largely depend on where you are cruising and how much you want to spend. Most cruisers today are equipped to take advantage of a variety of options in particular situations and to cover different needs. Radio may not be able to give you the Internet, but WiFi, cellular and satphones can’t give you your cruising community.

An unexpected outcome of all this technology is that communication can become a burdensome obligation. Emails need replies, websites have to be updated, and, most importantly, radio skeds – where someone keeps track of your position on passage –must be kept. You may find you are spending more time than you want “online” instead of “out experiencing”.

Plus, there is one more caveat to all this hi-tech stuff; any or all of it can break. “People get used to hearing from you,” says Jane of Cormorant, a Corbin 39 currently heading for Indonesia and Singapore, “and if the communication stops, they panic and think you sank! We sometimes regret the loss of some of the freedom we used to have. There was something quite nice and liberating about really being out of touch.”

Contributing Admirals: Jean Service, Jean Marie; Mary Verlaque, Iwanda; Donna Abbott, Exit Only; Jane Lothrop, Cormorant; Marti Brown, HF Radio for Idiyachts, plus others. (And thanks very much to my webmaster, Sherry McCampbell on Soggy Paws)

This article was published in the September 2007 issue of Latitudes and Attitudes.