Communications

On my cell phone voice mail greeting I mention that “I may be off the grid for extended periods so please leave a message” I guess there is a bit of a “grid” here in baja but it is a bit difficult to stay connected with the world out here on the boat in the Sea of Cortez. It is a pretty remote area of the world, with sparse outposts of civilization still in development.

Cell phone service is pretty sparse, only in or near the towns, even if you do have a Mexican phone plan, and internet is scarce.

On board we have a VHF 2 way radio that lets us communicate with other boats nearby, with about a 20 mile range. We all keep it set to channel 16 which is a “hailing and distress” frequency. When you want to call someone, such as your friend over across the bay on the good ship Circe, you say”Circe, Circe, this is Harmony” and when they answer, you both agree on another channel to switch to to have your visit. Anyone can listen in on any channel so you only discuss what you don’t care that the whole community can hear. In areas populated with quite a few boats, like Escondido or San Carlos, there are morning radio sessions called “nets” where everyone tunes in to a certain channel at a certain time and everyone has a joint chat. There seems to be a pretty standard format that they tend to follow, with a “net controller” who volunteers for that day each week who leads and coordinates the discussion. First they ask if anyone is having any sort of emergency. Then it moves along with each boat checking in each day so we all know who is on the net. Then on to topics like the weather forecast, the tide forecast, who is new in the harbor, who is leaving, who needs crew or wants to crew , who is going into town and can give anyone a ride, lost and found (when we have these big wind storms there is always a lot of stuff that was blown off the boats but then found on the other side of the harbor.) , who has anything to swap or trade (gringos are not allowed to sell anything in Mexico, so we must only swap or trade, sometimes trading for “coconuts” which surprisingly enough seem to be valued closely to the dollar…..), who is heading for the states and can carry mail to deposit into a mailbox over the border, announcements about what is going on in the area (like where there were going to be superbowl parties, and a lady is teaching Spanish lessons every day at 3 in the yacht club lounge, another lady is teaching about medicinal plants of Baja each Thursday AM, and that the vote for the logo for the new yacht club tee shirt ends today to please stop by and vote.) the session wraps up with some really good jokes. Some of the folks have been in the area for years and tend to develop their own role, like Connie always reads the tides forecast, and Ed always has the weather and good joke.

There were times when we were not in the harbor but out on an island nearby and could hear some of the participants who tended to transmit stronger signals than others, so it was a bit of a disjointed session. There were times when we could hear but not transmit strong enough for them to hear us.

We also have a short wave ham radio receiver unit. This allows us to hear short wave radio transmissions from very far away. The radio waves bounce off the atmosphere of the earth so sometimes you can hear a transmission from Hong Kong very clearly , but not so well from the boat next door!. Most commercial radio stations do not broadcast on these ham frequencies and we never seem to get a good NPR station or “Jack FM” , darn it, but we do hear broadcasts such as BBC, Voice of America, certain radio stations in South America, Hong Kong, Australia, etc. It seems many evangelical organizations use this radio method to spread their message so we do get many good fire and brimstone calls to repentance, (although from so far away I guess it doesn’t seem to penetrate our soul very well, since we didn’t convert….)

Many cruising yachters have these ham radios on board that allow them to transmit as well as listen. They form daily Net sessions similar to the VHF communities, except these folks may be many thousands of miles apart and use this method to keep in touch. We could listen in on these sessions and have heard boats check in from as far away as Panama and the Galapagos islands. A key part of these sessions is a daily weather briefing which we have depended on to know what is going on in this area.. There are 2 guys, Don and Geary, on 2 different net sessions, that are amateur meteorologists and live on shore and have access to all the cool weather information and boil it all down and provide us with weather forecasts for the west coast of Mexico, Baja and the Sea of Cortez. There is not an official government weather forecasting service (at least not in English..) that we can get down here and these guys play a key role in the safely of boaters down here . We can almost always hear both forecasts each day, and we like Geary’s better. More organized, and seems more accurate.

As mentioned earlier, phone and internet service is available only in the towns, and some of the more developed marinas. Then we can make phone calls on pay phones using phone cards . Most of the phones are on street corners so it is very loud in the background with cars honking and blaring their radios from huge speakers mounted on top of their cars. When we have internet we can use Skype which is a phone call over the computer which has worked well. When we were in Escondido we had Wi-fi internet on the boat in the marina but in other places like Playa Santispac we had to go into town in Mulege to an internet café and use their computers so our options are a bit limited there.

Since I tend to type slowly I try to type up messages (such as this) while out on the boat and then when I get to an internet spot I can just paste it into an email and onto my blog site and hit go and not have to pay the internet service fee for typing so slowly.

In the ham radio world we have learned they have developed “shorthand” codes for frequently used phrases (sort of like the CB radio guys say “10-4 good buddy” for “OK”) and it appears the code for Goodbye is “73”

So hugs and 73s to you all. And we will try to stay in touch!