Salamander - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

With sincere apologies to Sir Elton John.

We've become so used to communicating easily and effortlessly with others these days. We all have a handy communication device tucked in our handbag or pocket. Ready to instantly message anyone anywhere in the world.

Except when you are on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic there is no WiFi, there's no mobile signal, there's no anything!

Except Yellow Brick and the carrier which is Iridium.

Yellow Brick are fantastic at providing boats with a tracking device that allows everyone to follow the boat or boats of their choice on the ARC and other sailing events. You may be following our progress in the race division on the YB Tracker App.

Piggybacking on this is an App called YB Connect which allows crew members to send and receive simple messages whilst on the rally. In theory this is great. In practice it's giving us a massive headache!

Andrew "the professor" has been nominated as YB guru as he seems to be the only one on board who has got the hang on how it works in practice. Not as straightforward as we might have liked. This was proved by Alan who in an attempt to send a message succeeded in jamming everything, requiring us to reset the system. We have now had to ban him as his old android phone is now opening YB Tracker not YB Connect even though he doesn't have the Tracker app on his phone. Very strange and nothing we can do about it.

I too have been unable to connect to YB Connect and we've had great fun getting this blog to you. More about this later.

Tim - Salamander Tour Manager and Guest Social Media Editor


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