If you’d like to follow along these adventures, come to this page regularly to get the boat’s  up to date position. If we’re out sailing, anyway.

Ravenswing puts out two types of location signals: [1] Iridium Go! satellite pings. [2] AIS-B over the VHF radio waves.  When we’re underway, each system should be putting out a position report every hour or so. When we stop, and want to conserve battery power, we shut the units down and these sites will keep displaying our last reported position.

Method 1:  We ping straight up to the heavens every hour to the iridium global satellite system, and the good people at PredictWind plot our track on this fabulous map:

https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display/Ravenswing?mapMode=useGoogle&windSymbol=WindStreamlines&weatherSource=ECMWF

Sometimes the Iridium tracking will show us on land… that’s because the satellite transponder doesn’t always live on the boat – it serves for land adventures too.

This is the best way to keep up with the boat. You can see where we’ve gone each hour simply by coming back to this page.  Enjoy!

Method 2:  Ravenswing emits a commercial-style AIS signal via VHF that is usually picked up by a satellite network, then fed in to numerous world-wide databases. So you can use any of the ship-tracking websites to see where we are and what other boats/ships are nearby. Do a web search on AIS ship tracking, pick out a website, and enter the name S/V (sailing vessel) Ravenswing, and our MMSI # 368065160.

Here’s one example (but sometimes they want you to pay for their service :(

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:5986719/mmsi:368065160/imo:0/vessel:RAVENSWING

Family members of our crew – DO NOT FREAK OUT if the AIS system does not show us. It’s all based on whether the satellites can pick up our signal which is intended to go ship to ship, not towards space. So it doesn’t always work, but we’re still fine. You’ll get a call from the Coast Guard if we’re actually in trouble.