The ocean is huge and when on passage it is unusual to see another vessel; however, as we got closer to the coast of South America, we started to see our AIS equipment light up with approaching cargo vessels. The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is amazing technology. It will tell us how far away the vessel is; what is its current position, speed, and even if it is changing course by how many degrees of its rudder! For many of the large vessels it will tell us what the ship's destination and ETA is. One of the ships we saw was headed to Singapore for arrival in 4 weeks time! That is a long way from the coast of Brazil. The most important aspect of the AIS is telling us CPA (closest point of approach) and time to CPA. If the CPA is less than one mile, we get nervous and sometimes we use the special calling feature of our AIS enabled VHF radio to call the ship directly. Of course we know the vessel's name from the AIS and the VHF radio actually "dials" their radio, ringing it like a telephone so they pick it up and we speak directly to them. Because we also transmit our AIS data to the ship, they usually have seen us and it is only a matter of confirming whether which vessel will pass ahead or behind. The attached photo show how large and relatively close this cargo ship came to Frisky