Sailing at the end of summer is always the best. The weather has cooled a bit yet is still warm enough for shorts and t-shirts. The wind is generally pretty good. Most importantly, the hectic summer schedule draws to a close and ski season hasn't started yet.
About five years ago this month, I was sailing a 37-foot race boat from Hawaii to Los Angeles. It was a 21-day trip. Cell phones stopped working about 5 miles from shore and so communication required different technologies. Even though I was out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it was still important to stay in contact with family and friends.
Sailboats doing trans-oceanic voyages are generally equipped with single-side-band radios (SSB). They are very similar to HAM radios and bounce the radio signal off the ionosphere to communicate with people half way around the world. The only problem with SSB is that very few people have them. Not to fear, there is SailMail which allows you to connect your laptop computer to a special MODEM that works with SSB. That allowed me to send and receive daily e-mails to and from the family. My wife would then update everyone with my position and how things were going on the boat.
It was great to have e-mail for the trip. However it is also nice to be able to talk to someone directly. For that you need a satellite phone. There are three companies that you can use: Inmarsat, Iridium, and Globalstar. Globalstar generally only works 200-miles offshore and so that was not an option. We opted to rent an Iridium phone which worked flawlessly all the way from Hawaii to Los Angeles. The only problem was that talk time is about a dollar a minute. You really want to keep calls to a minimum at those rates. However it was good to talk to the family on Sundays and Thursdays.
Communication is very important and it is nice to know that with today's technology it is possible to stay in contact even when crossing an ocean. Luckily for me, my cell phone will work just fine when I am out sailing this weekend.
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