Ben at Panbo has this item. I’m still interested in the SPOT solution to my own “Real-Time Float Plan Management” challenges, but then I stick pretty close inshore where SPOT coverage is good. If you’re heading farther out, maybe this is the sort of solution you want:

Impatient me was beginning to wonder if the intriguing Iridium 9602 short burst data modem would ever materialize into a useful product. The Cerberus communicator and service I discussed in January is supposed "to arrive" for real in 7 days, but it’s gotten zero marketing so far, and I haven’t heard about any other 9602-based devices that might seriously appeal to boaters until yesterday. And, in fact, even the DeLorme inReach isn’t scheduled to ship until Fall. But it certainly looks neat…

As in a $250 standalone global SOS and tracking device that can also do two way messaging when connected via Bluetooth to an apps phone or tablet, or to DeLorme’s own Earthmate PN-60w.  As in the existing DeLorme/Spot system, except with longer messages, faster response, greater range, and probably more reliability. The main source of info so far — and a rather neat way to preview a product — seems to be a DeLorme inReach blog entry written by one of the designers, who is also answering questions from commenters.

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John Vigor has this item on his blog. For many Navagear readers, this will be review. But it’s still shocking that so many DSC VHF installations are incomplete or improper, I think it’s worthwhile to put out a reminder.

SOMETIMES, when I see a young family heading out for a day’s sailing with the dog barking excitedly and the kids running up and down the sidedecks, I wonder how many people on board would be capable of calling for help in an emergency.

By that, I mean specifically: if the skipper had a heart attack, who on board would be able to tell the Coast Guard where to find the boat? I presume, of course, that someone would be able to figure out how to work the VHF radio and find Channel 16. But what the Coasties want to know first and foremost is: Where are you, exactly?

That question very seldom occurs to us when we’re out sailing. We kind of know we’re out in the bay and it should be pretty easy to find us. But when the whitecaps are breaking all around, and your boat, like most, is white, it can take a long time to find you if you can’t give an exact position.

It’s the navigator’s job to keep tabs on where you are, but few family yachts have dedicated navigators, and not many of us can say with any veracity on the spur of the moment that we are 2.75 miles south-south-east of buoy E16. Mostly, the best we can do is: “Uh, I think we’re about three miles offshore and, um, I can see a horse running on the beach.”

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The UPS guy stopped by late this afternoon, and I’m in boat geek heaven. My new Vesper Marine AIS WatchMate 850 Class B transponder is here!

It may seem a bit childish, but I know I’m not the only person who, upon receiving a new gadget, immediately wants to “turn it on” and see how it works. Tough to do with 12V gadgets when you’re stuck at home.

So already, I’m thrilled with this unit. The ability to run the unit off my laptop with USB power is truly inspired. Such a minor thing, you might think, but here I am, in the comfort of my home, getting acquainted with the interface, running through options, and testing various functions.

Here’s a snapshot from my living room, which also serves as a music studio, and now also as an AIS testing laboratory.

The unit won’t transmit while running off USB, which is just as well as most users won’t happen to have a VHF antenna attached to it when it isn’t installed on the boat. Transmitting without an antenna connected can do Very Bad Things to a radio! (Think “Smoke Test”.)

And discovering, along the way, that the internal GPS antenna is PLENTY sensitive is nice, as well. I’ve got eight or more strong satellite signals consistently, from inside my house, a few feet in from the windows. In the image above, there are ten solid bars with it sitting near the fireplace. I wasn’t expecting it to receive more than a couple satellites, all through the window, and here I’ve got a 3D position fix! I tell ya, I’m loving this thing already, and it ain’t even installed.

With a GPS fix, I’m able to test the anchor alarm functionality I wrote about a few months ago. So far my house does not appear to be dragging. That’s a relief.

I’ll post again once the unit is installed aboard Two Lucky Fish. Looking at the supplied power-and-data cable and the configuration options, I’m wondering if I might be able to…[wait for it]…dispense with the NMEA multiplexer I finally acquired. See, the AIS WatchMate already has a USB port onboard, so I can get the AIS data out to both my installed chartplotter and my take-along laptop running Rose Point Coastal Explorer. But what about getting DCS vessel-in-distress target data from the VHF into the laptop? Hmmm…This will require further analysis. Stay tuned!

Another perfect day in paradise…

And dang, but that’s a lot of C-Brats!

I finally met BitterEnd’s Captain Richard Rodriguez in person. More later!

We took a cruise up to Port Townsend last weekend, and it was decided that my younger daughter and I would stay out at Fort Worden State Park, tied up to one of the mooring buoys. These mooring buoys have a reputation for being less than comfortable due to their exposed location just inside Point Wilson.  See, Point Wilson is one of the pinch-points of the Admiralty Inlet bottleneck that all shipping traffic to or from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia must negotiate, so you can get some nasty vessel wakes through here. Plus the weather and tide can kick up the water something fierce, in addition to whatever residual swell is coming in off the Pacific and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

But the weather report was favorable, and there was a big fishing derby going on, which was going to make the wharf near the boat ramp a madhouse at about sunrise, so we decided to tie up to a mooring buoy and stay out of the way. Specifically, we decided to tie up to the buoy farthest from the wharf.

We made up to the mooring buoy just fine at about 21:30 Saturday evening. Low tide, a -1.1, had been at 18:15. This is important, because at 02:30 Sunday morning, when I awoke to take a look around, the mooring buoy was gone!

Except that we weren’t drifting. We were still securely tied to something, just off the beach, in line with the other mooring buoys, which were visible in the moonlight.

In my half-asleep mental fog, I finally figured it out. We were still tied to the buoy, but it had been submerged by the tide. Its chain is probably fouled on something on the seabed, making it too short to accommodate the full tidal range.

After satisfying myself, in the midst of the general nocturnal spookiness and vaguely sinister visual image of my mooring line leading down below the dark surface of the water, that the tide was NOT going to continue to rise and just suck my whole boat into the abyss, I went back to sleep.

Well, I went back to my bunk, anyway, at least until high tide had passed at 03:10. THEN I went to sleep.

The 06:59 low tide was pretty high, a 7.5, and the buoy was still submerged. I was not able to untie my mooring line, which I had made up directly to the mooring buoy with a round turn and two half-hitches, secured with an additional stopper.

Why? Because I wanted to leave more line between the boat and the buoy, and I was using a 25-foot dock line. OK, so lesson learned, and I don’t mind making a fool of myself telling the whole world about it here. Loop your line through the ring on the mooring buoy and bring the line back to a cleat on the boat. Got it?

Anyhoo, it came time to leave, and in the daylight I could SEE the knot tied to the ring on the mooring buoy, about 18 inches beneath the surface. I just couldn’t REACH it without taking a swim. That is not a reasonable option in Admiralty Inlet in February. It’s probably not a good option in August, either. It’s just too risky for a $25 dock line. So I cut it, as far down the line into the water as I could reach. I lost about three feet of line.

The point of this whole story is that this is EXACTLY the sort of thing a cruising wiki could assist with. This fouled mooring buoy is a genuine hazard, and of course it isn’t documented anywhere. If you approach while the buoy is submerged, you might drive right over it and damaged your prop. Potentially, this could put you on the beach. Worst case, you could lose your boat because of this thing.

By the time it is documented in any of the conventional ways (such as in a cruising guide or on a NOAA chart), it will probably have been fixed. The two best ways for skippers to help each other in this kind of situation are to (1) report it to the park authorities so it gets fixed (which I’ve done), and (2) report it to fellow boaters.

If only there existed some sort of maintained-by-boaters, edited-in-realtime "bulletin board" where we could all exchange reports of this kind. You know, like maybe a WIKI.

So this morning, I tried to report it on the four cruising wikis of which I’m aware. Here are my results:

• ActiveCaptain: success. Currently, ActiveCaptain remains the best of the bunch. They’ve got some momentum with the content, but I think they could really pull ahead with some interface tweaks.
• MyCruisingLog.com: success. This was the easiest to edit, because it uses the familiar Wikipedia wiki engine. Actually, all but ActiveCaptain use this software, but MyCruisingLog was the only one that both had a place appropriate for my warning, and allowed me to edit and save it.
• CaptainWiki: failure. I found an entry for Port Townsend, I made my change, and I saved it. Only it didn’t save, because "A database query syntax error has occurred."
• CruiserLog.com: failure. There wasn’t any entry on Port Townsend or even Admiralty Inlet or the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and I didn’t feel like writing a whole article from scratch. I just wanted to add a quick note about a temporary hazard to navigation.
• And what about Rose Point’s CoastalExplorer.net? I was unable to test it, because I’m not participating in the beta. Yet!

So there you have it. What have we learned? Nothing definitive, really. I expect the cruising wiki landscape to change a lot over the next couple of years. In months to come, we’ll continue to test and report on the available cruising wikis.

Although in many parts of the northern hemisphere it’s what we call the “off-season”, now’s a good time to renew whatever annual moorage passes or permits you normally pay for. You never know…you might end up staying overnight at one of these facilities this winter or early spring, and without your permit you’ll have to pay full price!

For me, this means it’s time to renew my Washington State Parks Annual Moorage Permit. At $3.50 per foot per year, the break-even point is just seven nights tied up to a float at any Washington State Park.

Will I stay a minimum of seven nights? Almost certainly. I did last season, and I was out of the state entirely for all of August.

See, there are plenty of Washington State Parks with floats or mooring buoys. I tend to stay at the ones with floats, since my children like to disembark and run around ashore.

Many such facilities are located in the San Juan Islands, of course, but there are also plenty to be found further south.

For the Washington State Permit, I can order online, and it arrives in the mail several days later. The hardest part is figuring out where to put the sticker when it arrives!

Actually, I’m serious about this. The instructions provided are a little unclear, but I followed them as closely as possible last year. I put my sticker on the cabin at the forward end of the port side. This seemed like what they wanted.

But when I tie up to a float, I almost always tie up starboard-side-to, and every park ranger had to ask where my permit sticker was. A few of them suggested that I put it on the side that faces the dock. “But the instructions said…”

“Yeah, I know.”

This year, I’m putting it on the starboard side. If you’re getting one, I recommend that you put it on the side that normally faces the dock, and disregard the guidelines you’ll get with your sticker. Tell ‘em Navagear said it was OK.

So consider this a friendly reminder…renew your passes and permits before the season…or the pre-season…is upon you!