April 22, 2005--Staying in Touch
by Scott and Wendy Bannerot

	You can sail blissfully off the wind for thousands of miles, but we can't reasonably escape the need to communicate with some form of land base.

When people take off cruising for extended periods of time, they divorce themselves to some extent from their prior life ashore. Advances in communication have made the degree of separation more optional than in the past, to the point of facilitating those who wish to live virtually dual lives: enjoying the peace, beauty, and freedom of life afloat while monitoring business and maintaining close contact with friends and relatives on land. The previous difficulty of staying in touch represented a barrier to the sailing life for many, one which these newly developed technologies have largely broken down, making it possible for more people to feel comfortable about taking the plunge.

That's the good news. The bad news is, when you clicked on us, you got a fairly archaic sailing couple when it comes to staying in touch. We get it done, but it's often not particularly high-tech or eloquent. For what it's worth, here's the history of where we came from, what we do now, and what we plan to do in the near future.

The final throes of the "big trip" preparation process occurred for us between 1987 and 1994. INMARSAT C was too expensive for our budget then (about $7,000). I completed a general license ham ticket to go along with the ICOM 735 I'd installed, and we were away. Any long distance contact we made while at sea, and much of the time in port after getting a reciprocal license, was via ham radio phone patch. The most spectacular success was nearly halfway between the Galapagos and the Marquesas, well over 1,000 nautical miles from the nearest land, when an old ham operator in Ohio patched me through to Sailrite ten minutes before they closed and a technician dispensed the advice I needed to goad my machine into completing a sail repair before dark. Generally speaking, however, with due credit and heartfelt thanks to all of those dedicated hams out there, the phone patch routine was in the best of circumstances time-consuming and not very efficient.

Three years of wandering later found us preparing for a departure from New Zealand back to Tonga. It was 1998, and the Internet now existed. We'd pondered better ways to communicate, but our observation of the results of using modem-facilitated ham/SSB messaging was that it seemed to cause as many headaches as it solved. On the other hand INMARSAT C had come down to half the price it was when we'd departed the U.S.A. in 1995, so we purchased a unit in concert with our friends Hal and Ellen Farley aboard Airborne and installed it prior to taking off for the winter sailing season. We reveled in the simplicity, efficiency, and success rate of this messaging mode, not to mention the automated position reporting, weather and safety bulletins, and distress-signaling capabilities of the unit. We did spend some time screwing up and cutting our teeth on the system, we had some initial confusion with service providers, and the installation and initialization process was more arduous than necessary, but once we got it all going, it was magnificent. At this point we grossly curtailed the amount of time we spent on ham and SSB (which wasn't very much to begin with), a process which would evolve to the point of using the radio almost solely for downloading weatherfaxes and very little for communication. We'd get an occasional INMARSAT C message to come up at a certain frequency and time on the radio and do it then. We kept the INMARSAT C emails and messages very short, and after splurging a little early on, got the cost down to a reasonable level. Of course, by that time we had land-based email, and any time we were in port we would access this at the nearest available facility. We also took advantage of cheap call-back and phone cards and made extensive use of public phones, a practice we continue today when in port abroad.

The first time we began to get enthusiastic reports about hassle-free SSB packet communications was in Pago Pago, American Samoa in 2002. The word on the sailor's grapevine was that SailMail finally had all of the bugs out, all one needed to do was download the software, purchase a modem, establish an account, and you were away. The cost was reasonable, and the ability to communicate fully as opposed to vowel-less code was extremely attractive. We had our hands full with other repairs, and had already experienced some long delays in parts shipments, so we wrapped things up in Pago and made an extended voyage to Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, and Australia using the same combination of ham/SSB and INMARSAT C that had served us well since 1998. When we got to each port, we'd hit the Internet cafes and cheap phone cards. And that system continues today. We will definitely install SailMail capability prior to our next departure from Australia, keep the INMARSAT C going, and of course we'll look around at all the other options, starting right here at www.SetSail.com !

When you travel with small children, the ability to keep in touch with family is especially important, not to mention the possible need for critical advice from afar.

Aside from the fundamentals of communicating with family, friends, and doing minor business management (like if you retained possession of a house on land, "Have the renters paid this month yet?" "Is the house still standing?")...what about paying bills? That's one thing virtually none of us can escape for very long no matter how far we sail away. Our fundamental strategy was to have a relative take care of paying bills in our absence by adding the person (for most of the bills, my father, Palmer) to our joint checking account and having him pay as we went. He could raise questions in a fairly timely manner when they arose, and in general this system worked out reasonably well. He and my mother, Betty Ann, have also regularly sent us mail packets to temporary local addresses upon request. After a few years we stumbled in to what for us has been an immensely helpful arrangement, the establishment of a Merrill Lynch CMA (cash management account) with The Hoey Group in Exton, Pennsylvania. They'll start such an account with minimal holdings, so no need to be rich. It's a one-stop shop for any kind of banking, bill-paying, investing, loans, and financial planning. We consolidated nearly everything we have into various compartments in the CMA. Our account advisor there is Jennifer Hoey (610-594-1107). As the years passed the need to bother Palmer with our bill-paying dissipated as the ability to communicate with Jenn in real time improved. We also had my uncle, Paul, deposit house rent at this account for us monthly for nine years. We operated a house expense account at a local bank in Florida jointly with Paul to take care of this business. He would simply do whatever was necessary with regard to repairs and maintenance and we would hear about it later. He is like a brother to me and I trust him implicitly. For the last three years we have been doing more and more of our banking and some bill paying online, always shutting down the server on public computers following our account access. The last issue we all face can be complicated - how to handle tax liability while away. Once more we have been extremely lucky, retaining my C.P.A. of 23 years David M. Scheinman (954-577-3944, david@dmscpa.net, www.dmscpa.net ), the most knowledgeable person I know in this field.

Staying in touch while sailing, for business and for family and friends, remains a mix of the new and old - you might zap some bills online, but you might still be walking into town, checking a small island post office for a part mailed in a padded envelope. And despite modern advances, at least one trusted family member or friend, and often at least one professional, may play an important role in facilitating and sustaining your sabbatical from "normal" society.