Shipspotting with AIS

Shipspotting with AIS

If you are smart enough to run a smart phone, then you just can’t be dumb enough to get bored…ever again.

Take this ship for example…

Just buzz on over to marinetraffic.com, zone in on your carpark, and see the names and even missions, of all those hunks of metal cruising the horizons. Even yachts!

You may get bored after a while and have to switch on over to some other entertainment stream, but you will definitely find your self loading up all this cool ship data again and again – especially in that carpark with an afternoon onshore and a quart in your hand.

Even some some ski-boats are equipped with AIS transponders, but for the most part, its mainly large vessels travelling trade routes that use the system to obviously avoid collisions. There is the pirate drawback, but you can turn the transponder off of you like, but for the most part it AIS has become a valuable all-round source of cool data.

Wikipedia is gonna be much better at explaining it than me, this morning…

“The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is an automatic tracking system used on ships and by vessel traffic services (VTS) for identifying and locating vessels by electronically exchanging data with other nearby ships…”

Check out the full story right here…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System

Marine Traffic (http://marinetraffic.com) even have a really cool App that you can get for free from the Play Store or equivalent, on your phone. Or just access through a browser – any browser will do!

Big news today is the launch of Offshore Africa Port St. Johns’ Web 3.0 website. Rob Nettleton and co’s IN YOUR FACE photography will get you checking that your wetsuit is hanging nicely, and ready for next year.

Click on over to http://offshoreafricaportstjohns.com and look around, like and share…