Internet Woes – The Search for the Holy Grail (Wireless on the Boat)

Getting on the internet whilst aboard is turning into a standing joke.

It started in St Augustine, FL and continues to be a Kafkaesque experience no matter what country\city Severance goes to.

Our latest attempt to get WiFi were thwarted by my ever alert credit card company, which refused to authorize my attempt to purchase minutes.

In L'Aber W'rach, the marina had free WiFi, all you needed to do was to provide your cell phone number and the code\password would be provided! Simple, unless you don't have a cell phone.

In Brest, free WiFi, unless you were on the furthest dock (guess where we were!). If we stood up and held the laptop over our heads, we could sometime initiate a connection, which would be lost once you sat down to type. Of course, the service had to be “up” and couldn't be fixed on a weekend (which seemed to include Fridays). If it was down, you could get on-line by going to the city center, which was only 5 miles (or so) away)

In the Azores, WiFi was always just up the hill (everything there is up the hill)...I could never find the right hill.

In one Azores island, the WiFi for the marina was provide by a restaurant and was going to be fixed soon. It was available at the library, except that someone had shut down the computer and the librarian was on a different island. The cyber cafe offered connections, but wasn't open on weekends, or weekdays as far as we could tell.

My Sat phone email stopped working the day after we left St Augustine and took several hundred dollars in minutes from me until I got wise and gave up (all the other boats with Iridium had similar stories...one boat got it working again after 200 minutes, but wouldn't take any plugs out for me to test with my phone, which I thoroughly understood!).

And, Norton loves to block access to the WiFi login pages...I think I figured out how to get past that just yesterday.

Most of the marina offices do have a computer with easy access, however Portugese and French keyboards are just enough different to make answering an email tre difficult (but they do offer the key to put the weird character over the “e” in tre!).

Anyway, if I'm not getting back to anyone on an email, it might not just be my (famous)
tendency for procrastination!

P.S.
I'm actually finishing this posting from my nav station on the boat on my own computer!
Too bad we're leaving here soon...

-Scott