Extreme Track Plus - Your New Way to Track Us!

Well its about time...I've really been lazy about posting to my blog and so I figured its about time.  We've been extremely busy with sailing, adventures, and boat projects.  But the boat projects that we accomplished in Palmas Del Mar Marina have made huge improvements aboard Catchin' Rays. We got new bad-ass Bushnell binoculars, a voltage regulator for our Nexgen generator (it was acting up), two hand held Cobra VHF's, and a mighty MidNite Classic MPPT solar controller - in fact, its so awesome, I might even blog about it next - it has completely taken our solar array to new levels making at times, a whopping 64 amps per hour during the day off of 840 watts - but that's for another day.  

But what I am wanting to talk about today is the other goody we got in our care package - our new IridiumGo satellite phone/wifi hotspot.  It allows us to use our current cell phones to make calls all over the world.  But not only that, it also allows us to text all month without limits.  But wait, that's not all, it also enables us to download GRIB files anywhere in the world - its how we see the weather, and more specifically, the wind for up to 14 days of forecast.  We download the files to our laptop or smart phone and now we don't have to worry about being close to land in order to get cell phone reception....and getting the wind forecast is something that is a must when traveling the world by sailboat.  

But the reason I'm blogging about it today, is because the IridiumGo also comes with a feature that allows anybody in the world to be able to track us.  We set it up to send the coordinates about every 10 minutes when we're traveling, and about every 4 hours while we're anchored or docked.  I've added this feature to the toolbar at the top of my webpage under the heading titled "Where in the World Are We - Click Here" and although I am still tweaking the link, you'll be able to track us anywhere we go.  If you'd like to adjust the dates seen, click the arrow in the upper left corner here:

To bring out a menu tab, and put in whatever date that you want to see, but I have defaulted it to the day when we first installed the IridiumGO into our boat.  Also, you can click the Map Tab in the upper right corner to overlay a Satellite image if you want to see that instead of a map.

So now, you'll be able to find us anywhere we are and I can stop worrying about if we change our minds mid-sail and decide to go to another island....we'll also be able to send text messages along the way anyway, so its was perfect for what we needed in order to be able to cross big oceans whenever that time arrives.