Day 6

Our new Starlink installation has been working great and has greatly improved crew morale by enabling free video phone calls to friends and family. Starlink coverage is now global and we even have a separate system/account for our home in New Zealand that was too far down our private road to install fiber.

If any of you want to call us (using WhatApp), the best time is when we are running the generator which is around noon our time. We will start giving our noon time in PDT (UTC-7) & NZST (UTC+12) as well as local in the noon position report.

We have the antenna engineered for boats with the Mobile Priority 50 GB plan for $250/mo that can be paused when not in use. Additional data is $2/GB auto set to kick in if required. The antenna is about the size of an extra-large pizza box and came with a wedge mounting bracket. We relocated and updated our primary GPS antenna to make room for a custom welded aluminum plate on the aft arm of the antenna mast. The location is not ideal due to partial obstruction by the RADAR and other antennas but the Starlink antenna is very smart, will be moving around anyway and so far has not had any dropouts even with the RADAR on. The hardest part of the installation was running the 80 ft powered data cable halfway thru the boat to where the WiFi and power supply are located. The Wifi signal can be picked up anywhere on the boat and probably throughout an anchorage if the WAP is placed on deck.

A video call is a far cry from the Ham radio phone patches we did when we first started sailing Interlude back in 2000 (and 1983 with Harry). Instead of getting weather by SW broadcast and plotting coordinates by hand with pressure isobars, we can now download any weather product available on the internet. We also download our favorite podcasts for listening on those long night watches.

On May 20, 2024, our position at

1200 local

1200 PDT

0700 NZST (May 21)

was:

24d47.5m N, 134d09.3m W

24 hr noon to noon:  190 nm