This is "Onbekommerd"!

Monday, October 8, 2012

Navigation

The waterways we travel with 'Onbekommerd' are very varied. Sometimes we are on canals in Holland, sometimes on rivers or on lakes. Then there is bigger water: we go to the Friesian Islands to the North of the Netherlands and of Germany. And last but certainly not least there was the Baltic this year.
Everywhere, there is some form of 'navigation': where are you, where do you want to go and what is the best and safest way to get there.
On the canals and rivers, this is fairly straightforward: you use a chart (a map on a boat is called 'chart') and you can see easily from features on shore and in the water where you are. Having said that, its important that you use a chart and not a road map. The world looks quite different from the water and you would not be the first one found to be completely lost using a road map.
Open water like the IJsselmeer and the Baltic are one step up in complication. Sometimes you cant see the shore that you are going to, so you dont have a point to steer to. And there may well be shallows or shipping channels, which makes it important to know where you are and where you are heading. These days, we have GPS to help with that. Onbekommerd has two GPS systems, which can be run independently if needed. The one gives a position, heading and speed and can be programmed to give course and distance to a 'waypoint'. Its the rectangular 'box' in the top left hand corner of this picture:


Together with a good chart and some understanding of navigational principles, it is straightforward to navigate with this.

One system up is when one connects the GPS to a chart plotter. We use a laptop with electronic charts for this purpose, and a programme called WinGPS5. The signal comes from the GPS box (or from an external antenna, which looks like a mouse) and the computer shows the position, speed and heading as well as the course to the next waypoint, a trace of the route to follow and of the route already covered and some other useful information.
This can be seen in this picture:


The position is indicated by the little boat (on the border of Germany and Denmark in this case), the green line is the route we have planned. The navigation data is on the left.
This is the system we have used for our entire trip, it can also give us interesting trivia such as the most extreme Southerly, Westerly, Easterly and Northerly positions reached this year.

South: 51 deg, 36.16 mins (on the way to Burghsluis in Zeeland, in APril)
West: 3 deg, 45.31 min (Burghsluis itself)
East: 12 deg, 40.41 min (the Swedish island of Ven) and
North: 56 deg, 7.87 min (Gilelleje, on Sealland)

The most complicated navigation is on the 'Wadden', the area between the North Netherlands / German coast and the islands North of that. Here we have big tidal differences (up to 3m), causing the area to fall dry twice per day and then fill up again, which is accompanied by sometimes fierce currents. And the channels between all the dry falling 'plates' are continuously moving by the scouring action of the currents. So here you need accurate and up to date charts (electronic as well as paper) and knowledge and understanding of the tides. There is a very useful programme called 'Quicktide', which will help one tremendously to calculate when certain passages are safe.

But all these electronic gadgets can fail one day, so we also use the paper charts, the compass and the speed to give us estimated positions, especially on big and / or complicated water:



As this is the "Onbekommerd blog" and we are now back in Cape Town for the (European) winter, this is probably going to be my last post until we go back to our floating home next year. We have exiting plans, which include a 'spring trip' to the Dutch Wadden, a Friesland tour in convoy with South African friends and thereafter a 'long distance' voyage to Gotheborg in Sweden and from there through the Gotha canal to the Swedish East cost, Stockholm and along the coast back South.

We enjoyed writing the blog, we hope you enjoyed reading it!

See you next year.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Communication

My apologies, I promised a few more "Onbekommerd" posts but now that we are in London for a few days, the rythm of the past 160 days is broken and I simply have not thought enough about posting.

When we set off on our first our 'Onbekommerd' trip, in April 2010, we tried to keep in touch with family (parents, children and siblings). We used the laptop, with a GSM 'dongle' to connect to the Internet when there was no WiFi available and sent emails.

That worked, but we wondered if they really all wanted emails that often and also some friends wanted to know what we were up to. So at the start of the 2011 trip, we decided to start a blog.
That way, we can send the link to the blog to family and friends and they can decide for themselves if and when they want to look at it. We still used the laptop / dongle / WiFi combination to connect, but it was getting a bit more tricky when we left the Netherlands and went to the German 'Wadden' Islands. The problem was that the dongle only works with the Dutch SIM card and when you use this in Germany, you are 'data roaming', which is very expensive. And WiFi is not as readily available as we would like, plus it is often unreliable  and / or quite costly. So although the blog was by all accounts a good idea, but we were not quite there yet.

But later in 2011, whilst in London we had an opportunity to get better aquainted with the iPad and there was the solution! So in December we bought one of those things. We now use an iPad with 3G capabilities, and by now have no fewer than 5 SIM cards for it, one each for South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. They are relatively inexpensive and if you get the right type of data bundles the use is affordable as well.
Of course there are still frustrations, as for each card, there are different methods to get the data 'on to the card'. Even when the service providers are supposedly the same company (Vodafone in SA, UK and Netherlands), there is absolutely no commonality in loading the data. Usually you end up having to find an outlet of the specific service provider to get it done. That is not easy as there are none in the small places we go to, so we need to plan our 'entry' into each country in such a way that we hit a biggish place early on. Or you have to take the bus to the nearest town (like to Norden from Greetsiel). The only exception is Vodafone UK, where the SIM has an application which allows you to buy data 'from the comfort of your boat'.

Here is the iPad:



Of course, apart from doing the blogpost (incidentally, we use an 'app' called "Blogpress" for that, which makes it extremely easy to do), the iPad is also very useful for getting weather forecats, seeing the news and receiving and sending emails. And last but not least, it has got Skype installed which makes it possible to talk with the 'home front' from time to time, someting we always look forward to!

Apart from the iPad, we have a mobile phone with a Dutch number, which we use on a roaming basis so we can be reached in case of an emergency.

Tomorrow we fly back from London to Cape Town, I'll try to do the 'navigation' post which I also promised some time during the weekend.