Open Blog on Digital-Seas

Ship spotters at work in Antwerp! Our esteemed Digital Seas member Stevo kindly organized and hosted a ship spotters’ weekend and Digital Seas user meeting during the Tall Ship Race from July 9th to 10th. 24 people met on board the MONTIS 10 in Terneuzen to pursue their love for ships.

Ship spotters at work.

After a 10-hour trip from Rostock to Terneuzen and a much too warm night at the hotel Lars and I were excited about the things to come. Saturday was a pleasantly warm and sunny day. The ship spotters joining us on board came from Britain, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Cold drinks, sunscreen, good conversation and an incredible close-up view of the large and small vessels passing the MONTIS made for a relaxed and enjoyable trip where new friendships grew. In the evening we had ribs and tasted some Belgian beer specialties with Stevo and Ian. Rob joined us the next day for breakfast and we talked about future plans for Digital Seas. Lars and I returned with many good photos, new friends and a decent sunburn.

Thanks you very much Stevo! It was a great time. See you next year - at the latest!

Some photos and videos from the weekend:

Steven Oppeel
Fred Vloo (YouTube Video)

did bring 20 years of freedom in my live.
We had a big party last night to honor living in a free country almost half of our lives .
In the night of the 9th November 1989 the wall in Germany came down and we jumped into our “Trabant” car to leave Rostock (EastGermany) on the way to the “green Border” to visit the city of Lübeck (West Germany) for our first time ever. That was a really great time and tears are in my eyes watching all those historic backviews in German television. I am still very glad, that I have the right to say and to do what I think is right.
I would never had the chance in East Germany to do stuff, like this site.

Things can change really quick sometimes, keep believing and take the wave of permanent movement…,
that’s what I learned from our history at least :-)

our brave two years old server is going out of business on friday, which makes it necessary for sharers still using this server to change the IP to:
193.189.247.193 Port 33000

we have a video on this page, showing how to setup ShipPlotter with the correct sharing option, to send to the new Digital-Seas Sharing Server.
http://www.digital-seas.com/open_space/sharing_ais/sharing_howto_contributors.html

There are three sources still using the old IP, so if anybody is missing a signal from friday on, please let us know and check the settings in your SP program.

Today is a big day for us, we will bring a completely remodeled database online.
We will try to keep the site running inbetween, in the best case you want notice the switch, in the worst, the site will not be available at all :-)
So please excuse any disturbances over the day, we are still working hard.
It was already hard work over the last weeks, what will this update approve? Speed, Class-B tracking, a multi level scheme for vessel identification (no unassigned records anymore) and the ground for feautures like zone alerts, port tracking and destination lists.
We will give you another report, when today works are finsihed.

We’ve created a solution to show live traffic in the Baltic (on several big screens) for a newly opened place here in Rostock called “Pier7″. It is located right at the Port entrance of Rostock and it’s a crowded place with a shop and a restaurant and lot’s of space to hang out and have a drink during spotting. They were asking us to develop something like a “Schiffsbegrüssungsanlage” (ship welcome point) and we made some suggestions for having a live view on maritime traffic. On the big screens inside and outside the area, it is now possible to follow the action, watch AIS traffic, get to know the next days arrivals, look at live webcams and nice for us: know when to take the next shot (with a coffee on the table if you like to…)

So everybody who wants to come to Rostock-Warnemünde and spot some ships, do not miss the Pier7 spot and relax at this nice located place.

I attended the meeting of Germans famous forum-schiff.de user group Saturday, 30th of August near Rendsburg at the Kanal-Cafe. A Good place to shoot ship-images on the Kiel-Canal, even though the image background at the spot was a bit difficult to manage :)

So everybody was almost all the time outside, spotting and of course talking with each other.
I met Tomas Pinas from Oslo again and we spoke about the developments towards commercializing of shipspotting.com and the next user meeting in Rotterdam in May 2009, also had interesting talks with “hafenfreak”, Martin Leuschner (VT), Dieter Kannengießer, Martin Witte und Christian Costa about spotting and monitoring and could took images of about 15 ships during the day.

Also, beeing in the fields means a good chance, to check on live signals compared to the live situation. The monitoring of AIS signals in the canal happened in three different setups. A small Shipplotter installation with antenna, scanner -discriminator and laptop was available for comparison against AISlive, vesseltracker and Digital-Seas, which where accessed over a mobile-vodaphone connection on the internet. The big picture on the Canal has been available at all three ways, but only SP with antenna and DS showed no distinction, when looking at the live situation. Complete coverage of the area and no delays of the signal are the DS guaranty for beeing usefull and made me kind proud.

I would have liked a bit of program over the day to make efficient use of the time and talk about our niche topics as spotters. But the relaxed athmosphere and seeing everybody relishing the perfect day, was a nice impression too. I missed the night talks and the Sunday, since I had to leave in the early evening for my three hour drive back to Rostock.

Thanks to the organizers of www.forum-schiff.de for the beatyful weather, the nice place and the chance to meet and talk in the Kanal-Cafe. Hope to see everybody next year again.

The weather was our friend during this years Hanse Sail-luckily! About a million of visitors enjoyed this traditional baltic event on the quays of Warnemuende and Rostock Port. 230 sailing vessels from 13 nations proudly showed their countanance and wooden corpus. Thousands of visitors again took the chance to get a closer look at the “Gorch Fock“, “Zobel”, “Braunschweig” and other ships. The “Gorch Fock” will be back in 2009.

The results of the regattas: the “First ship home” from the big ones was the Clipper “Stad Amsterdam“, whilst you have to know that the schonerbrigg “Greif” -being second ship home- has got much less sail area that the dutch vessel. The “Greif” won a neck-and-neck race against the swedish brigantine “Baltic Beauty”. The winner of the single-masted sailing boats is “Stella Maris”. On Saturday especially the viewers in Warnemuende had an awsome picture of the fireworks, because at the same time they had the chance to watch the cruise liner “Regatta” leave the Rostock Port.

We hope that anyone who took the chance to watch all that via Fleetmon also had an great experience and enjoyed the Hanse Sail 2008!

Rostock will be crowded and there will be much to see through the eyes of nearly 20 perfectly positioned webcams.
We are looking forward to welcome all the huge sailing ships in Rostock Port. Watch them entering the harbour in real time using Fleetmon, our special vessel tracking device.
We are excited to have lots of old maidens for a visit - lets all keep our fingers crossed that the weather is our friend this year! Find out more here:

www.digital-seas.com/hansesail