Underway - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 95

Do-It-Yourself Radio Nets for Blue Water
Passage-Making
Long blue water passages can be daunting for seasoned hands as well as for sailors ventur-
ing into their first major offshore adventure. Safety is one cause for concern, and potential
loneliness is another. But you don't have to go it alone, even on the open sea. With single
side band radio, you can reach across the ocean to communicate with sailors thousands of
miles away. It isn't necessary to join an organized sailing rally or tap into a tightly regu-
lated net: we cobbled together our very own radio net for our Pacific crossing and found
the result an unqualified success. This “home-made” radio net enhanced our ocean crossing
experience in every way - with weather information, advice on fixing gear, and a healthy
dose of comic relief during a month-long Pacific passage.
Creating your own radio net can be easy, especially if you're following the seasons along
cruising routes where sailors congregate in stepping off points such as the Chesapeake Bay,
the Canary Islands, or Panama. We found a crowded anchorage full of cruisers in the
Galapagos Islands in March, most of them equipped with SSB and, like us, looking for
“company” heading west. All it takes is an agreed-upon time and frequency. Of course,
sailors can also tap into established venues such as the Pacific Seafarer's Net, but some of
these nets are quite formal or longwinded, and require participants to hold ham radio li-
censes (unlike informal nets operating on marine frequencies). For this reason, a small yet
robust net of five to twelve boats offers the perfect combination of safety in numbers
without being overly rigid.
Our radio net was initiated by two crews, ourselves aboard Namani and our friends on
forty-two foot Astarte . Early on, there were only three boats underway, so checking in was
an easy-going, unstructured affair. As more boats set off and joined us, we moved to a more
formal structure, with Markus of Namani and Michael of Astarte alternating net control du-
ties. Some of the late-comers were crews we had recruited before setting off, but several
were sailors who just happened to stumble across our fledging net on the air. Our choice of
frequency proved fortuitous in this regard, since we used 8143 kHz on the upper side band
two hours after the fading Pan Pacific Net that was familiar to many cruisers. Soon we had
a dozen boats in our international group, all thirty-five to fifty foot monohulls that set sail
within a three-week period. Every good team needs a name; one early proposal was “The
Close Reachers,” reflecting the frustrating conditions encountered by the first to depart, but
we eventually settled on the “POST” net (an acronym for Pacific Ocean Sailing Tribe, a