Each project of this kind needs people with the necessary technical and management skills, access to the necessary funds, and the drive to sell the idea. Teamsurv appears to be well-provided with all three. It’s a community-sourced project whose goal is to provide freely-available detailed depth and position information for the shallow waters frequented by yachstmen, divers, fishermen, workboat operators – in fact, any recreational or commercial user of shallow inshore waters. Volunteers use either a software application running on their onboard PC or a hardware data logger, attached to their GPS and echo sounder.

Teamsurv’s ultimate goal is to cover any location in the world where they can find volunteers. Even now, you are welcome to submit data from anywhere, but Teamsurv are testing their system for manipulating the data (correcting for the height of the tide at the time of logging, as well as a few more subtle things) on the following four trial areas:

• UK South coast, Poole to Chichester
• UK East coast, Thames Estuary to the Wash
• France: Brittany coast including Golfe du Morbihan
• Lithuania: Curonian Lagoon, Klaipeda and adjacent coastline

One consequence of this is that the associated website is in three laguages – English, French and Lithuanian – which makes it pretty unusual.

If you sail or motor (or if your rowing boat carries a GPS and echo sounder, for that matter), why not volunteer? Once you’ve set up your PC application, or borrowed one of their hardware data loggers, all you have to do is upload the data when you get home or when you next manage to access a wi-fi point.

For details, and an interesting blog, see the teamsurv website

TeamSurv’s research is being part-funded by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 247998) and aims to demonstrate that the more accurate positioning made possible by the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS) may permit community-sourced depth sounder information to be used as a low cost source of survey data, with comparable quality to traditional survey techniques.

Who is lookat-harbours.co.uk for?

Both yachtsmen and landlubbers visiting the towns and villages close to yachting harbours in the British Isles.

What will it provide?

Permanent pages will give you contact information for businesses in these locations. Boating stuff, obviously, but also pubs, restaurants, hotels, shops and anything likely to interest visitors.

Blog pages will tell you about forthcoming events as well as providing general comment.

Simple business listings are free, and there’s a form for you to tell me about your own business or one that you’d like to recommend, so that you can fill in any that I miss.

I’m starting with the Hamble River, then I’ll expand to the other Solent harbours before spreading along the south coast of England. Unless I get a lot of help, I’m unlikely to finish that before the sailing season comes to an end – but I’ll keep adding new places throughout the winter.

- you are entering an unfamiliar harbour and you have a problem that needs attention (instruments? engine? sail or awning damage?…)

- you carry a web-enabled mobile phone aboard

While you are motoring up the river, or even before you reach the harbour entrance, you will be in mobile phone territory, so wouldn’t it calm your nerves and save you time if you could identify and contact a local firm that can sort out your problem.

My goal is to give you the means to do that, and I’m hoping to cover a couple of major UK boating regions by the beginning of the 2010 season. Everyone advises me not to make a site live until it’s in working order, but Jonathan Livingstone Seagull is one of my heroes.

Tell me what you think of my plan – and if you have relevant experience, I’ll be happy to listen to your advice:

• What percentage of today’s UK yachtsmen carries a web-enabled mobile aboard?
• How many carry Blackberries, iPhones, etc., how many carry current smartphone class devices, and how many carry older mobiles that they are not so worried about accidentally dunking?
• How am I going to find and enter the details of all the yachtings service providers in the UK and southern Ireland? It will take me far too long to do it all myself. I’ll try to find ways to get the providers to submit their details, but how do I encourage them to do so?
• If  you have experience of developing sites for mobile phones, would you like to be my mentor for this project? I have registered at mobiForge, but I need all the help I can get.

I face some interesting challenges. 2010 looks like being a busy year.

First, an editorial review from Publisher’s Weekly, appearing in a fishing blog, of the book At Sea in the City – New York from the water’s edge. The writer, a professor at the City University of New York, restored a 24 foot workboat and pottered round the ‘urban archipelago’.

…  minimizes the nostalgic restoration story and takes readers right on board for refreshing views of an island city that was built on the economic foundations of great natural harbors and fertile inland waterways…

This one is now definitely on my ‘buy’ list.

The next one isn’t a blog. I found a pointer to it in a  blog that didn’t say much and didn’t link to the primary site, so I found it for myself. How would you fancy rowing round Antarctica?

I streamed out the biggest sea anchor to try and slow our drift but still we are inexorably heading the wrong way and for now there is nowt I can do

… and you can watch him going round in circles in the imbedded Google map.

And to finish off with, the gribbly-grobblies. An eco-blog highlights research at the University of York into the digestive juices of the gribble worm, in the hope that it may lead to an economical and eco-friendly way of making biofuels.

]]> http://www.newfreebooters.com/from-the-sailing-blogosphere/feed 0 http://www.newfreebooters.com/second-life-and-sailonline-two-very-different-worlds http://www.newfreebooters.com/second-life-and-sailonline-two-very-different-worlds#comments Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:52:34 +0000 admin http://www.newfreebooters.com/?p=117 Continue reading →]]> The first leg of the Volvo Ocean Race at sailonline.org was invaded by a large and chatty group of folks from virtual world Second Life’s sailing fraternity. Since then, I have had an exciting ride as a passenger on a wiz class dinghy, and several sailonline stalwarts have actually bought themselves boats and started learning to sail them.

The world of sailonline and that of  Second Life couldn’t be more different. The two don’t compete, they are complementary. You can take part in either as pure recreation, or you can take either as seriously as you would their real life equivalents.

If you are already both a dinghy sailor and an experienced player of interactive gaming machines it may not take you long to become skilled enough to take part in a race in Second Life, but it would take me at leas a week – first I’d have to get the hang of moving around and doing things in Second Life. Anyone who has sailed his own yacht can understand sailonline.org in minutes.

The biggest difference between the two is the pace and the timespan of an event. Second life sailing is a deliberately speeded-up representation of dinghy racing, which makes each race exciting and demands concentration and physical co-ordination – like any Nintendo or Playstation game, but with multiple opponents. Sailonline.org races run in real time over real-life distances, and they simulate the navigator’s desk in an expertly-crewed boat where the navigator does nothing but navigate. ‘Round-the-cans’ races take a few hours and need attention several times per hour, but a leg of the Volvo Ocean Race takes nearly a month and needs the navigator’s attention a couple of times a day – except when winds are fickle and hard to predict at the local level.

I showed you the sailonline console in an earlier post. This video shows you what a Second Life race feels like in the basic boat (the advanced wiz class is more hectic) but doesn’t give you a feel for how to play the game yourself – the best way to do that is to join Second Life, and when you’ve got the hang of the basics, go over to one of the sailing clubs and ask for a demo.