Okay everyone, stand back… Evenstar now has hourly position updates on our whereabouts during passages.
For now anyway, because it’s a side effect of a bunch of other expensive stuff we’ve paid for for other purposes.
With out new and increased satellite communication with an Iridium Go, we have better access to weather data, e-mail, etc. at sea. But one thing this recent experience with Tropical Cyclone Oma taught us, was that our weather information was sometimes…incomplete.
There are two major sources of large scale weather modeling available – the “GFS” model, produced by the U.S. based NOAA, and the “Euro” model (or “ECMWF”), produced by a consortium of meteorologists and scientists in Europe.
A lot of people like the GFS model because well, it’s free. But in some parts of the world it does not do as well as the European model. This is one of them. But the European model is not free and readily available. It’s really nice to have both of them, and you can see some sources when you are land with a good internet connection. But to get the GRIB files (weather information files) of the Euro model takes some spending.
We decided that we’re sailing enough in the next year that the weather data from PredictWind was worth buying, since it included the ECMWF and the GFS, as well as PredictWind’s own take on those models, and some nice routing and planning tools. And it also plays nice with getting this information via the Iridium Go. PredictWind sells the Iridium Go; we purchased ours through them because we liked their pricing plans for unlimited data and texts.
As an added feature, when you subscribe to the “Standard” PredictWind plan or higher, AND you have an Iridium Go purchased from PredictWind, they will create a dedicated link for you to track your position in near real time using hourly updates from the go.
So…since we’re paying a hefty sum for satellite data offshore, and a tidy amount for weather data, as a side effect we can share our position with the world hourly.
So bookmark this link, and stay glued to your screens!
https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Evenstar
