When I first began cruising the wild central coast of British Columbia in the early 1980s boaters went empty-handed when it came to communicating with the rest of the world.
We did carry the necessary VHF radio system for emergencies at sea and communication with nearby boaters. But there were no cell phones, no internet service and no satellites serving pleasure boaters. As far as my family was concerned, we had dropped from the face of the earth. We used postcards to let them know we were okay.
There was one link with home – the marine radio-telephone operator. One channel was working in B.C. those days and it offered a tenuous link to the rest of the world and a lot of evening entertainment. Even if we didn’t need to call home, we would dial the proper channel and listen to folks at sea talk to those left behind. Lonely women would chew out their fishing husbands for never calling home and others would gossip wildly, forgetting they were in a very public place. Without TV or CDs, it was a form of entertainment that helped pass the time.
If I needed to make a call I would wait until one set of talkers was finished and then I would quickly call the operator to stake out a place in line. “Quadra,” she would say, “You are number 17 in line.” Or something like that.
I was reminded of all this again today after we hooked Quadra to a buoy in Montague Harbor, off Trincomali Channel. I opened my laptop to do some work for PassageMaker Magazine and out of curiosity I checked the availability of wifi service – not expecting to find any.
Surprise. There were four systems operating, with three of them being secure. The other was a public system offered by HotSpotSystems, a business based in Saskatoon, Saskatchawan. It took only a few minutes to log on and to buy 24 hours of service. And, pleasing me, it worked well. Despite that, it reinforced my general displeasure with mobile internet service for mariners.
Many of the public systems in northern waters are inadequate. Some are using routers like the one I have at home, and it barely has the energy needed to reach upstairs in my house. Service is as spotty and uncertain as it was when we used VHF frequencies decades ago.
In some cases on this cruise, I found the only way to make a system work was to look for the router and, if possible, plug my laptop directly into it with an Ethernet cable.
BroadbandXpress provides public service in many harbors and marinas in Northwest Washington and along the British Columbia coast. I’ve tried them several times over the years and always was disappointed. Once, at a GB rendezvous n 2006, BBX representatives worked on my fairly new laptop for hours and finally said it would work with BBX signals, but not with others. They were half right. It didn’t work with any.
Things are better now. I’ve used BBX several times on this cruise – it tends to be found only in the busiest harbors – and it has worked fairly well, most of the time. BBX continues to insist that for best performance one needs to buy its custom antennas and other hardware. On the other hand, HotSpotSystems works fine with the basics in my Dell.
I’ve been reading The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s a history of the digital revolution of the 21st Century, a story of how computers and the internet have changed business and society. He writes about instant, world-wide communications and how the world has changed – far more than most of us would suspect.
I read a chapter and wish some of that superior communications would spill over into the boating world. It’s apparent that improvements are needed in every sector – with companies like BBX and HotSpotSystems and in the hardware and software they use, with the manufacturers of computers and in our skills in using their equipment.
It’s the stupid little things that kill me. With several public wifi systems I found that I could receive but not send email. My computer simply said my computer was not recognized by the server, or something like that. For weeks, no one could tell me what was wrong. Finally, I learned by accident that I needed to dig into the system and change the name of the outgoing email server from Comcast to a local Canadian telephone company. If computers are so damned smart, why couldn’t mine have made that connection?
Assuming all goes well, I will post this blog item from this remote harbor a little later today. This system does work – more or less and with huge mental stress – but I hope to be a boater long enough to enjoy the use of digital communications as effective and widespread and as instantly available as Friedman describes.
In the meantime, postcards do work, too.