I read this article in today’s New York Timestalking about Virgin Mobile’s new MiFi card, which provides you with a personal wireless hotspot, and immediately thought, how great for your boat?
It’s about the size of a credit card so you can take it with you, and not worry about a separate internet connection for your boat at the marina.
The Virgin Mobile MiFi
It has its limitations (the range of the Sprint network), and most cell phone networks lose a signal a few miles offshore, unless you pay for and install a signal booster. Satellite is still the best bet for long distance cruising, but as far as logging on at the dock, it looks to be a cool little device.
Name this dive boat for Dive Bimini at the new Bimini Big Game Club.
The reopened Bimini Big Game Club needs a name for its new dive boat, and is holding a naming contest: Winner gets a free dive trip.
The Big Game Club, opened this spring as a Guy Harvey Outpost Resort, features eco-friendly fishing and diving packages. The diving part comes through a collaboration between Harvey and Neal Watson, and will be operated under the name Neal Watson’s Dive Bimini.
Here’s the gist of it:
First, send your suggested names by posting it to Biggameclubbimini.com (deadline is October 1, 2010). Send as many as you can think of. There are no rules on the names submitted, although the Guy Harvey Outpost team is going to favor ones that are clever, entertaining, easy to pronounce and not too long.
Then a group of at Guy Harvey Outpost, including Guy and Neal, will rally up and review the “keepers”, from which they will create a shortlist of four names. These four names will then be posted to our Guy Harvey and Outpost Facebook pages and be put to a vote by our fans.
The name with the most votes wins and becomes the new name of our dive boat. And in addition to receiving a personal “high five” letter of thanks from Guy and Neal, the winner will receive a complimentary 2 night stay at the resort and include a two tank dive on “their” dive boat.
We spent the day chasing striped bass and bluefish with Rich Armstrong of Boston Fishtix charters, and asked him about running his McKee Craft Freedom 22.
Armstrong’s been running the boat for three seasons, and got it for several reasons.
“It was mostly the beam, it’s got one of the widest beams for its size,” he said. “When you’re taking people out you don’t want to be rocking around, and the stability of the boat is great.” Also, ”With the high gunwales, no one’s going to be falling out of this thing.”
The boat has a full 8’6″ beam and a 22 degree deadrise, similar in its dimensions to the Whaler 220 Outrage (which has a 21 degree deadrise.) Fishing on the boat, we noticed the wide walkway access on either side of the console, and the wide gunwales with molded nonslip.
Armstrong also likes its versatility: It floats in 2′ of water with the Suzuki DF250 trimmed up, so he takes it into shallow back bays and runs out to Stellwagen Bank and fish for tuna in 2-4′ seas.
“It’s got more fishing mojo,” said Armstrong of his boat. But the guide might have something to do with that.
The dude posing in the picture above doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into. I try to avoid drinking coffee before heading out, for obvious reasons. Particularly when I’m on small, open boats. Problem: Being on the water on the margins of the day, especially over consecutive days, can make a person bone tired. Something’s got to give.
I’ve tried Vivarin. It’s like mainlining espresso straight into your veins. You’re uber-edgy and the same issues with coffee arise. An anecdotal aside: I tried a few to stay up on New Year’s one time. It worked but the next day I temporarily lost the ability to sweat. Verdict: Avoid on boats.
I’ve tried Mountain Dew. It has less caffeine than coffee, but the pure sugar content usually provides a quick boost, without the edginess. But, for me anyhow, the weaker caffeine crash is partially offset by the sugar crash. Plus, a 12-ounce can has 170 empty calories. The 20-ounce diet Code Red is pretty awesome, but I found it only once in a gas station mini-mart in South Carolina. Verdict: Maybe.
I bring energy bars. I eat them and like them and want them aboard, but that early in the morning I’m trying to stave off delirium, not run an exercise circuit. Not enough juice. Verdict: Maybe.
Lately, Five-hour Energy’s have been getting it done. I’ve taken them on fishing trips and felt alert and sharp, but usually for only around three hours. For me, at least, it starts to fade at that point but there’s no crash as with coffee, and none of coffee’s unwanted side effects, even though it contains caffeine. I’m not convinced taking 8,000 percent of your recommended B12 is a healthy thing in the long haul, but until someone tells me otherwise, I’m sticking with it. Just not every day.
This report from CNN puts my footwear of choice in a bad light. But I am going to ignore all evidence to the contrary and continue to believe the flop is the perfect shoe.
Takemefishing.org has put out a free Boat Ramps iPhone app. Notice the “free” is not capitalized. The app itself is free, rather than an app that lists where there are “free boat ramps.”
I downloaded the app and checked it out. You can search for nearby ramps based on your current location, by zip code, or by city. There’s a “marina” setting where you can look for marinas as well.
The flaw in the app, if I were in charge of future updates, is that it doesn’t tell you if the ramp in question is a public ramp, if you need a town permit, or if there is a launch fee. It just tells you it’s there.
Most of the time you have a plan where you are launching well before you hitch up the trailer, but it could be a good aid in travel planning to new locations and cities, or if there’s a better ramp in your normal boating area you just haven’t heard about.
To download it, search for “Boat Ramps” in your iTunes account.
You can file your own “citizen scientist” reports on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster and contribute information about what’s really happening down there. All you have to do is download the free iPhone app called “MoGo,” short for Mobile Gulf Observatory, from scientists at UMass Amherst.
If you live in or are visiting the Gulf region and see affected wildlife or habitat, or any of the oil slick or tarballs, open the App and snap a picture in the appropriate category.
According to the Mogo website:
“Once you upload your photo, the locations of oiled and injured wildlife are pin-pointed with a GPS code generated by your iPhone™. You are then immediately connected to the Wildlife Hotline to report your observations so trained responders can be deployed to rescue oiled and injured animals, and to mobilize efforts to protect and restore vital habitats for fish and wildlife.”
