ActiveCaptain.com, the crowd-sourced database of local navigation and cruising knowledge, has been expanding its offerings over the last couple of months with some significant new capabilities. The two most important, in my view, involve route-sharing and an allied site devoted to captain reviews of boating-related services. Here’s a quick rundown on some of the new developments. [...]
I know that’s a bold statement, but when I can have access to a library that will eventually likely hold many thousands of already planned (by me AND other boaters) routes, and then someday soon use those routes with more ActiveCaptain technology to tell me what’s up ahead, I will be in a different place [...]
Apple has just approved the latest update of the Navimatics Charts & Tides app so that iPhone and iPad users can update ActiveCaptain data from their devices. The update allows markets to be edited and reviews and comments to be added. The single license works on both an iPHone and IPad at the same time, [...]
This post is the result of an item on Jeffrey Siegel’s personal blog, Taking Paws, on which he and his wife Karen document their travels aboard aCappella, a 53′ RPH DeFever trawler. The subject of marking your anchor chain is a popular one on forums and discussion boards around the boating world, and one of the [...]
I’ve been looking for a reason to have to get an iPad and I think now I’ve found it. In his latest on-the-road blog entry, Jeff Siegel of ActiveCaptain demonstrates how well the software works on the new tablet platform from Apple. Regular readers know I’m a big fan of ActiveCaptain — I use it [...]
Passing through Miami or Fort Lauderdale and need fuel? How about having it delivered to you at anchor by Peterson Fuel Delivery. They’ve been doing it for almost ten years but I didn’t know about it until Jeff and Karen Siegel took advantage of the service and wrote it up in their cruise blog, TakingPaws. [...]
Our recent piece by Jeff Siegel of ActiveCaptain about a novel dinghy anchoring technique stimulated quite a bit of discussion from readers and we even heard about another, possibly even better, technique from John Marshall, owner of the Nordhavn 55 Serendipity. Marshall discovered a particular product that makes the process of anchoring the dinghy off [...]
By Jeffrey Siegel (ActiveCaptain); Videography by Karen Siegel Here’s a great technique for anchoring the dinghy off the beach. Our dinghy weighs about 800 pounds. She’s a rigid inflatable with a 40 HP engine. It’s our family car when we’re cruising and we put a lot of demands on her. So I was telling Larry [...]
Jeffrey Siegel said this week that the ActiveCaptain “X” beta website, under development for the past year, is now fully launched and live, providing everything from a new user interface to NOAA charts and Microsoft Virtual Earth cartography. The website benefits greatly from having been available in beta form for the last several months and [...]
Jeff Siegal of ActiveCaptain recently notified users of the fabulous online cruising database that the information from ActiveCaptain will shortly be available inside MaxSea’s Time Zero charting software. The MaxSea folks were demonstrating a beta version of the software and Jeff did a short video of the demo, which is below. An impromptu demonstration at [...]
I saw a great example recently of why you need to be diligent about the hourly (or whatever regular schedule you set) engine room check while cruising offshore. As you know from some earlier posts, Jeffrey and Karen Siegel, owners of ActiveCaptain, aboard their DeFever 53 aCappella, are headed south for the winter and recently made an [...]
I recently talked with Jeff Siegel about some of the issues related to mobile phone service for coastal cruisers. I asked Jeff whether the data rates for the iPhone and others were really good enough to rely on for a typical coastal cruise such as theirs. I think you’ll find his reply, as usual, not only informative, but definitive.
Telling you that ActiveCaptain “could” be the wave of the future is probably a little bit like saying the Internet will “probably be a big thing.” The truth is, ActiveCaptain already is a fantastic resource for cruisers and passagemakers, but it might actually become something huge — a source of real-time, up-to-the-minute information that your [...]
