We are
internet junkies. Virtually everything I know about sailing and maintaining a cruising
boat came from sources I read on line. We do all of our
gear research online. We buy our
parts online. When we have a problem, the first thing I do is go to
Google and type:
inverter **** the bed site:cruisersforum.com
We do much of our
research on the places we want to visit online. Fellow cruisers' blogs are goldmines for
anchorages and
ports we need to visit.
Keeping track of all this when we're out there sans
internet is difficult at best. We found a really great solution that I thought I'd share with y'all.
Evernote.
Evernote is an online/offline/mobile note taking
software. The basic premise is you can upload notes from several different sources:
- free-form text
- clipping part of or a whole web page
- uploading a photo or PDF
- email to your specific Evernote address which upload the contents of the email
These notes can organized into notebooks and tagged for further dissemination. The data lives both on Evernote's servers and your local hard drive. It can also be stored on your mobile
phone. We use it for all sorts of things but here's how we use it for our cruising.
Articles
When I'm taking on a
project, more frequently than not, I don't know what I'm doing. I'll do a
google search, read a few articles which then lead to a few more which spider out into 20 or 30 different articles, blog posts and forum posts. I use Evernote's Chrome extension to snap up the relevant
parts of those posts and store them in Evernote for later
consumption when we're out in the boonies and have no access to the interwebs. Recently, I ran across an article on soft shackles made of
dyneema. Sounded interesting but I don't have time right now to delve into it. However, when we're anchored somewhere in the boonies with nothing to do, I can pull up the articles I found on soft shackles and take a crack at it.
Projects
When we realized we had to replace our existing
windlass, I researched several brands. I zeroed in on the
Maxwell line and downloaded the PDF
manuals of the models I was interested in. I uploaded those
manuals into a notebook called "Potential Gear". I called
Maxwell about some questions I had (and they were really responsive, BTW) and took notes about that conversation.
Once I settled into the
project, I created a task list. Like all
boat projects, the more you hone in on a task, the more it decomposes into multiple tasks. I treat my tasks list like this, starting at the high level tasks and then breaking them out into smaller tasks. This helps me think through one piece at a time without getting bogged down in details. As a task gets done, it gets the strike through font (which is incredibly satisfying). I post-date my task lists so they always sort to the top of the list.
As part of that task list, I keep a
shopping list- because you've never done going to the
chandlery. This is especially handy having the Evernote client on my
phone so I can reference it in the store.
I also do alot of sketches for projects. Especially
wiring projects. Rather than try to keep track of all the
sheets of paper I scribble on, I take a
photo of the scribble and upload it to Evernote. Here's the cool part. In the photo captured in Evernote below, notice that the word "solenoid" is highlighted in yellow on the photo. This is because I did a search on the word "solenoid" and Evernote found this photo based on my sloppy hand written "solenoid". Cool, right?
Manuals
I'm religious about keeping manuals for
gear on our boat. PDF manuals are also an important part of how I research new gear for our boat. Whenever I run across a PDF manual for gear I have already or are interested in
buying, I upload it into Evernote into our "Hello World" notebook (if we already own it) or the "Potential Gear" notebook (if we're thinking about owning it). We keep all the paper manuals for the gear we buy and that's what I'll use when I'm laying on top of the
engine covered in
transmission oil but having the electronic copies to research prior to tackling a problem has been pretty handy.
Receipts
Whenever we buy something, we put the receipt into Evernote. If I get an
email receipt, I
email it to Evernote. If we get a PDF, I upload it. If we get a hard copy receipt, I run it through our Neat Receipts scanner into a PDF and upload it. This gives us an easy to access
purchase history of all the gear on our boat.
Destinations
We also read a ton of cruising blogs, wishing we were out there again. When we run across destinations that we really need to go see, I use Chrome's Evernote extension to create a note from the blog entry. I then tag it with "destination" and a tag on the general area. Here's our notes on
British Columbia:
We've been using Evernote for about 10 months and paying for the
service for about six months. We've been really happy with it so far. It gives us all of the information we need at our fingertips. In the very likely event a computer gives up the ghost, no worries, our data is stored online and probably sync'd to the other
laptop we have on board and our mobile phones.
One thing we don't use Evernote for is data that has to be secure (SSN, credit card numbers, passport copies, etc). They have the ability to encrypt portions of text but until they harden up their
service more, we'll keep using Truecrypt to keep that data secure.
For you crusty salts who bristle at the idea of relying on a computer to manage a sailboat, Evernote is not in any critical path on this boat. In other words, if Evernote up and disappeared tomorrow, we could still navigate safely and maintain our boat properly. However, life is a hell of a lot better with it than without.
(For what it's worth - I have no affiliation with Evernote other than being a self-proclaimed advocate.)