Supplemental – meeting the ActiveCaptain founders

When we arrived at the Beaufort marina, who should be there getting ready to depart but Jeff and Karen Siegel, the founders of ActiveCaptain. They have a gorgeous 53 foot DeFever and are traveling back to Maine for the season with their two dogs. We had a short chat and they offered for us to visit them up in Maine, which we fully intend to do.

For those not familiar, ActiveCaptain is what Jeff likes to call “social navigation.” The site has NOAA charts that you can scale and pan easily, and then you can view the satellite imagery to see how it looks in real life, not to mention shoal areas, mooring fields, etc. Best of all, there is up-to-date descriptive info about important items such as bridges, locks, tricky spots, marinas, and cruiser-recommended anchorages. It is active in the sense that cruisers are continually adding their reviews and comments about everything, so the information is not stale.

We use ActiveCaptain and Claiborne Young’s Cruiser’s Net a lot to help make our passages easier and safer.