Marine Traffic - Live ships Map

[Trek]

Here's a great time waster. Check out where all the marine traffic is worldwide. Zoom into areas, mouse over a ship to see it's location and speed, click on a ship to see a photo and more info about it. Lots of other goodies as well!

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions

[Ronstar]

Very cool - Thanks!

[FinallyRetired]

That's very handy for coastal sailors. One boat I saill on in the Chesapeake has a laptop on which we can call up this site and check for tankers running up and down the Bay from Baltimore. Those tankers can be on us before we know it, they are big and fast, and we are small and slow.

[hankster]

Quote:

Originally Posted by FinallyRetired That's very handy for coastal sailors. One boat I saill on in the Chesapeake has a laptop on which we can call up this site and check for tankers running up and down the Bay from Baltimore. Those tankers can be on us before we know it, they are big and fast, and we are small and slow.

Very handy for pirates too

[ls99]

And folks were wondering how the Somali pirates knew where to find targets in the big ocean.



Tried quoting a post of mine from 11/24/08 re: Somalis finding ships. The quote attempt failed. Oh well. I'll need to learn how to quote posts from other threads.

[brewer12345]

Fascinating. Thanks.

[FinallyRetired]

Quote:

Originally Posted by hankster Very handy for pirates too

Yes, it would be. But, if I were in a pirate-prone region, I would turn the sucker off, and use it receive only. I assume that's what the tanker operators do.

The equipment to do this is called Automatic Identification System (AIS) and it's carried on board the ship. It's not very expensive, depending on the system configuration. The cheapest is receive only, to allow monitoring of nearby ship traffic via VHF signal, a few hundred $. More expensive is the type that transmits your position as well, around $1000 plus the cost of wiring it to your onboard ship nav systems. Then there are the systems that transmit over satellite, and these can run into a few thousand or over.