Trip Records

This season I have acquired a Spot Messenger and paid for tracking services. What does that mean? Well, it is a GPS device with communications capabilities. It is meant to be used primarily as a safety device: it will send requests for help when activated. In that sense it is kind of a less-urgent, poor-man's EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon). It will also send a pre-set email message to people of your choice, for instance to let people know where you are and that you are all right. Finally, it can be set to send a position report every ten minutes to the company's website. Since I have a (paid) account there, it will store those and then I can add them to a Google Maps representation to show where I have been.

I am trying to remember to activate the system with every sail that I take, so that I can come back and see where I went. If I could figure out how, I might be able to gather the same info (in more detail, I think) from my regular GPS after the trips. I would probably need a cable and maybe software to do so, though.

Anyway, I'm going to post three of them here. They are the trips that I remembered to activate the device to report my position every ten minutes. Note that the ten minute resolution means that it doesn't record a lot of the twists and turns. It also means that on some of them it shows me sailing across land to get into or out of the marina, since it just puts straight lines between the ten-minute locations, without regard to what is in between or what makes sense as far as a route goes. Note that you might have to zoom in on the map to see the track.


Saturday, June 19, 2010, out toward the islands with Tyson. Considered circling Green Island, but the time was getting late. And the wind died on our way back anyway.

Saturday, July 3, 2010  Mostly around Port Clinton, practicing tacking, etc.

Sunday, July 4:, 2010 Up the coast to the west.

Have fun!