Sailing Vessel Karma

“You can just work from anywhere?!”

….is a question often asked. This whole yachting thing is, well, expensive as frig and unless some bank glitch helps us out, we are going to be paying as we go for a while. Currently, I am working remotely aboard full time and for the most part, the answer is “yes, I sorta can just work from anywhere” but that isn’t without its caveats.

First we start with power, something every cruising yacht needs. We have solar charging up 400ah of LiFePO4 batteries onboard with a small but functional 600 watt inverter. This charges our laptops, including my work one, along with our phones and other devices without issue. We also have running lights, cabin lights, yada yada but this is about work.

The next thing necessary to work is, well, a connection to work. Currently we are accomplishing this in a myriad of ways. I have a T-Mobile plan on my phone with 10GBs of hotspot a month. Heather has a Verizon plan with 10 or 10GBs of hotspot a month. We also added an apparently roaming capable hotspot device on Verizon with a 15GBs a month bump-able to 50 if we pay another 20$. Okay great, in the San Juans this is perfect. When one has service the other doesn’t and vice versa. This, in combo with marina wifi, for which we get the password from friends, or going to the occasional cafe or library if we are near a town makes this almost as if we were working just from an apartment. Zoom meetings and long presentations often times use up our limits, though, so I try and limit these by changing all the meeting resolutions to as low as possible and one video at a time.

This hasn’t worked as well since we crossed the imaginary line to our northern brother’s and sister’s land, good ole Canada. My phone is supposed to have unlimited roaming, and it does! At glacial speeds. This actually works fine for my job as long as there are no meetings at all, it won’t even load the Google Meets page or allow me to launch Zoom. No worries as 95% of the job is all text based and it works without a hitch. Heather’s phone actually does roam with a whole 0.5GBs a day…. So that works for the mandatory meetings, for about 12 minutes and, of course, they’re all 15 minutes long so it always comes off as if I’m slacking off. Now things all comes to a head with our Hotspot device, which we literally got for and confirmed would work in the land of the Maple. This thing hasn’t worked once, just a big “NO SERVICE” on the front no matter how well our phones have service. The Verizon reps respond with just a “well, that’s interesting, it should be working” all while I fumble more meetings.

We now have an actual date where we are required to be back at Friday Harbor, WA at the port where we will be slipped up for the winter. They have quite quick internet, which we know works, and I will be doing a lot of trial and error with that as a fall back so by next spring this will hopefully be a smooth and seamless process. More posts to come in regards to this as it will be an ongoing learning experience finding the best way to balance not sinking with syncing successfully.