There are several ways to track Evenstar’s position, links to them are below. After several problems with embedding directly, I thought to try this some more on a separate page in order to not kill the home page if a tracking site acts up. So you get the links, and at the bottom an awkward but usable map from Shiptrak.
Satellite Tracking on Predict Wind – Offshore
For the immediate future, this will be updated hourly while on passage. Not only can you see your position, you can see the weather where we are. It will be done automatically, and will be the most reliable and accurate.
AIS Tracking on Marine Traffic – Near Shore and sometimes Offshore
This is our ship detail at Marine Traffic. Click the “live position” link to see where we are.
With our new AIS transponder, we will be picked up automatically when we are near shore based AIS receiver stations. Any time we are moving coastally or making landfall after a passage we will show up with accurate information here.
In addition, if we pass any ships at sea that are repeating AIS information via their own satellite feeds, they may pick us up and show our information. This will only happen when we are within 20-30 miles of commercial vessels that have this technology though, so is not reliable.
Other Offshore Sources
While we are making passages we also periodically update our position to several free tracking services including Shiptrak. Also, our position is automatically noted by the Ham radio APRS (Automated Packet Reporting System) which appears to make a note of our location whenever we connect to e-mail via Ham Radio. This position may be slightly less precise than the others as I believe it uses our reported “Grid Square” as opposed to our exact position, but it is reasonably accurate when you are looking at a blank square of open ocean.
With the addition of the satellite data and position tracking, there is no longer a need to connect via marine SSB on a daily basis like we used to, so these will be updated with considerably less regularity.
Shiptrak.org – This takes most of our positions and loads them
APRS – Might be based off of our amateur radio “grid square”, not necessarily our reported GPS position from the ship’s instruments so may be off by a few miles.
Selecting “All Positions” is going to take a while on this map by the way, as it will plot every check-in we’ve made for the last three years. Which is kind of cool, but takes some time.