Regular readers would have seen some posts here recently about some of my experiences as crew on Belage, sailing from Sydney (Pittwater) to Hobart. With the help of some friends (thanks, Steve) and Google maps, we "hacked" a website together to track Belage on its journey south. Friends and family seemed to enjoy following along and over he past month I spent some time making the site more robust and capable of being used by other boats without any hand-holding on my part.
Nancy Knudsen, Sailworld's cruising editor, let the news out recently that I was looking for some other sailors to try out the system and I got a few takers. One of them, Mark Duffy is sailing Snark VII from the Med back to the U.K. and is using Skipr.net to let anyone follow along. I've been a bit careful about opening the site up to lots of boats initially, but if anyone else would like to try the system out, you can register here. Fill out a simple form to report your position at whatever interval suits circumstances and the site does the rest.
More information can be found on the Skipr weblog.