Communications
by Kate and Hamish Laird

	Jason and Hamish check the internet via wi-fi during a fueling stop in Annapolis. (The radar is off!)

Aboard Seal this season, we've been relying on Internet cafes to communicate. They've worked very well so far - low expense and relatively easy. The best part of that system has been a computer with wireless Internet - while on the East Coast of the US, we have used it while visiting coffee shops, sitting on park benches under office buildings, and once sitting on top of the gantry.

If we were going to spend more time on the East Coast, we would add a remote antenna - Seal is aluminum, so the signal doesn't penetrate the hull. Friends of ours on a fiberglass boat have no problem picking up a signal down below, but we have to take the computer into the salt air on deck.

We have just finished our sea trial around the Caribbean to the Bahamas, Belize, and back to the US East Coast. Ironically, we had less communications equipment than either Hamish or I have ever had on an ocean passage. We had an EPIRB, that was it.

Our reasons for not having an SSB were:

1. Cost of the unit and installation (don't forget insulated backstays, tuners, etc.).

2. Paranoia about installing a counterpoise on an isolated ground aluminum boat. We didn't research this fully, and I know many have done it without any problems, but it added to our con list nonetheless.

3. We never used it in the past, and don't really like keeping up with nets (we did sometimes miss not being able to, however, in the Caribbean).

4. Not having one meant having a considerably simpler 12 volt system (our main power is 24 volts).

5. SailMail, etc. don't seem to work well in the high latitudes.

6. There are no regular nets anyway in the high latitudes.

So, we bought a Furuno Fax 30 weatherfax receiver (which we love, apart from its lack of memory, but that's another topic) and scrapped the SSB. For roughly the same money as an SSB, we plan to put in a Thrane and Thrane Inmarsat C this spring.

Annoyingly for us, Thrane and Thrane have come out with a Mini C transmitter that will work as well for most cruisers as their standard unit, but they don't believe it will work in high latitudes (anyone tried it? please email us if you have any experiences good or bad with the Mini C). The standard C Fisheries unit that we're looking for consequently jumped $1000 in price, while for everyone else, the C unit has dropped to be more competitive with Iridium phones.

We love Sat C:

1. Email correspondence - no long expensive calls on the phone, which inevitably spend five minutes discussing comparative weather. No need to leave a phone on - the Sat C lights up when mail is waiting; you read and answer it at your leisure.

2. Expensive to install, but cheap to run. $3000 will get you a Mini Unit, $4000 a Fisheries, or twice what you'd pay for a handheld phone. But, the messages, particularly if you have someone onshore to filter messages, are cheap. When I was pregnant with Helen, I stayed home for the second Antarctic expedition that season (I didn't know anything about being pregnant; I should have skipped the first and gone for the second!). Hamish and I emailed each other once or twice a day; my bill at the end of the month was $30. It is relatively simple for family members to set up their own accounts to email; people you trust enough not to send signature files and subject headings can be added to your account. We do a lot in code, wh nds vwls nywy? since the billing is just under one cent/character.

3. It also contains a GPS, which we can use as a backup for our ship's one - we can take a NMEA out from the unit and tape it to the inside of the chart table. If our GPS fails, we can plug the NMEA in and carry on with basic navigation.

4. We don't like talking on the phone.

Budget considerations are pushing us towards the Iridium phone, but it's easy to see how the costs, the email subscription fees, and the inevitable compulsion to find out whether it's snowing back home in New Hampshire and hear our families' voices, would soon push it up to the Sat C price. One downfall of our system is we have no way of receiving GRIB files.

Bills

We are incredibly lucky. When Kate started wandering around the seas in 1990, she added her father Dan onto her checking account as a second name, and he has been handling the Visa bills and tax forms ever since. Hamish keeps a debit card off his accounts, so it's pretty simple. We don't really own anything major ashore, although I understand my mother has been surreptitiously taking things we left behind to the Swap Shop at the town dump.

Charter work is a bit easier than long term cruising in that we are relatively frequently near home base in order to keep tabs on things (or mess them up, if you ask my father). When we worked on Pelagic in the Antarctic, we had northern summers back home; now that we are working in the Arctic for a while, we hope to have a visit with Kate's family in the US or Hamish's family in England most years. That's very different from leaving your homeport and setting sail for seven years, or trying to manage an apartment or a business. We do find it hard to keep our charter website updated, but Dan has adding a few updates, and when I have major changes to make, I email him the html files and he uploads them. Lack of time to write the web pages, not communications, is really to blame for my lack of updates. Dan also fields all the initial charter inquiries and often handles the bookings - deposits, liability waivers, medical forms, etc. - as well.

We don't do it very much now that we have email, but Kate's parents have always been very good at getting snail mail to different parts of the world. I can't tell you how much a joy it was to arrive in Tahiti and find a letter waiting. None of the other cruisers would ever have any mail waiting. Her parents' strategy was to write a letter, print four copies, and if we were potentially visiting four islands, mail it to all of them. They always figured out the right poste restante address; whenever told them. Sometimes it meant repeat letters, but that was okay, too. At least it was a letter! These days, they do the same with email - they keep writing, even when we haven't been in port for days, and when we do arrive, there are usually four or five emails waiting, filled with all the news and gossip. In South America, they used to mail us their old New Yorkers. Quite a few of the packages never reached me (even though we had a regular address), so they never sent anything crucial, but a well-thumbed New Yorker was always welcomed. Hamish's family faithfully forwards his Skywings magazines a couple at a time, so he can dream of a day when he's back in good paragliding country.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.