Here’s a tragic but fascinating fact. Car anoraks importing vehicles can now track ships almost anywhere, as long as there is a ship anorak nearby with a VHF radio picking up their AIS signals. AIS stands for Automatic Identification System, and works by transmitting travel information over VHF from a GPS-enabled transponder on board the vessel (the full explanation is here).
Anyway, there are LOADS of sites around to do this and Google is very definitely your friend. I have been using some of the AIS enthusiast sites covering the Channel to watch when Sormiou comes in from its rocky North Atlantic crossing and see how far ahead of schedule it is. It arrived in La Manche today, much earlier than I was expecting. Must have something to do with a Force 10 tailwind.
Hapag Lloyd expected it to hit Rotterdam on Friday evening at 11PM:
Clearly it is going to make port in The Netherlands before then. How do I know? Thanks to AIS. Here’s the plot from SailWX.info, showing the Sormiou as it heads through the Channel, making great time.
I’ve also been using the Guernsey Digimap site, which shows detailed AIS views through the entire English Channel and beyond. It is totally fascinating. Here’s the map view from Guernsey (in conjunction with MarineTraffic.com) just now (1818hrs GMT on 25/09):
Sormiou is the middle one of those three cargo ships in the bottom centre of the picture, just off Boulogne.
Sitting here, waiting and knowing nothing would be dull, so it’s great that the Internet is keeping me entertained and up to date. OK, it doesn’t tell me if my container is still on board, but it’s at least a comfort to have slightly more information than the medieval merchants had when their wooden boats were trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope. What a relief that must have been when you finally saw your ship coming into the harbour. Maybe I’ll get to feel a bit of that myself over the next few days.
