I made the decision to buy a handheld computer reluctantly. Life in a two-earner family with an active five-year-old got so complicated that a better organizer was a must, so my wife and I both got Palm Pilot organizers. The Palm Pilots have worked very well to ensure that someone picks our daughter up from school—however, had I known how useful the Palm would be for kayaking, I would have bought one years ago.
A handheld computer for kayaking? Have you ever forgotten your tide table? Wanted to go for a moonlight paddle, but didn’t know when the moon would be full or what time it would rise? Have you ever needed to know when the sun sets to ensure making landfall before dark? Needed an alarm clock to wake up early to beat the wind? How about books to read or games to play or a word processor to write with when stuck in a tent waiting for a break in the weather? How about getting all of these things in a six-ounce package?
Although the Palm was developed to provide a calendar, a notebook, and an address and phone book, its success is due to its tiny, shirt-pocket form, elegant interface, and the thousands of applications written for it. Although most of us go kayaking to avoid our calendars, notebooks, and address and phone books, many applications are wonderfully useful for the kayak adventurer.
Tide Tool is undoubtedly the most useful application for the paddler, and it is freeware—you can download it from the Web at no charge. You install the application onto the Palm by placing the unit in its cradle, which is attached to your computer, and “HotSyncing.” This procedure keeps your calendar and contact information synchronized between your desktop and your Palm; it can also load new applications. When you install Tide Tool, you can choose to load the areas you need. I have the East Coast from Canada to Venezuela, plus the Caribbean on my Palm. I keep the West Coast, Europe, Australia and other locations stored on my desktop, available for future adventures. To use Tide Tool, you pick a location and date, then it calculates the present tide height (if today’s date is selected) and times and heights for high and low tides. The program will also calculate times and speeds for maximum flood and ebb currents, as well as times for slack current, and the speed at any given moment. To add icing to the cake, you can also get times for sunrise and sunset. Tide Tool can calculate all of this for the next 33 years, so the stack of printed tide tables replaced is impressive: My East Coast tide and current tables for only one year weigh 32/2 pounds; my Palm weighs only six ounces.
The current tide height can be especially useful. While my family was camped on Campbell Island on the Maine Island Trail last summer, my five-year-old daughter had to get up in the middle of the night. My wife went with her and called out that the water was lapping at the hull of our triple kayak. We had little room to move the 22-foot boat higher up on the pocket beach, so I grabbed my Palm, turned on the back light, and found that the current tide height was about six inches below maximum. We were just able to fit the boat against the trees on a patch of grass above the predicted high-tide line. Although we had tied the kayak to a nearby tree, we were glad to know we had now placed our kayak at a safe height, so that our pride and joy wouldn’t be bounced around on Maine’s abundant rocks.
Moon Info calculates rise and set times, as well as transit—the time when the moon is directly overhead—for any chosen date, based on location. Location (latitude and longitude) is easily obtained from Tide Tool for a nearby tide or current location, or from your GPS or nautical chart. Moon Info is shareware: You can download and try it for free, but you must pay a nominal fee unless you don’t mind the annoying reminders. If you find the application useful, you will be eager to reward the author.
If you enjoy star gazing when camping, you may have wondered, “What star or planet is that?” Star Pilot has the answer. After you enter your approximate location by selecting a nearby city, Star Pilot plots a real-time (or any selected date and time) star chart. Hold the unit over your head, turn on the back light, and glowing stars are shown just as they appear in the sky. (To obtain this effect on early-model Palms that do not back light with glowing text and objects on a dark screen, as the new models do, you can install Lighthack to reverse the polarity so that the stars glow, rather than appear as black dots on the screen.) Tap on a star and that area is enlarged. Tap again and a box pops up that names the object and provides information. Stars, planets, deep-sky objects and constellations are all easily identified. Star Pilot is shareware. It can be purchased in a very nice bundle with Moon Info, Sun, and J-Moons. Sun provides similar information as Moon Info, while J-Moons shows the position of Jupiter’s moons—handy if you brought your telescope! Although the phase of the moon is crudely shown in Tide Tool with a small image, Moonphase (freeware) shows a large display of the current or future phase of the moon, and is integrated with Moon Info.
Navigator consists of a two-ounce module that plugs into the base of the Palm with software that turns the Palm into a magnetic compass and allows downloading map images from the Web onto the Palm. This provides the kayaker not only with maps and a backup compass for navigation, but also with a portable, handheld compass useful, for example, for bushwhacking through the jungle on one of the Everglades’ Ten Thousand Islands.
The manufacturer of Navigator (which also provides electronic compasses to the major auto makers) also makes Weatherguide, another plug-in module that provides recorded temperature, humidity and barometric pressure data for analysis, graphic display and prediction on the Palm. Even if you never lose your VHF weather radio, at least you can answer the question, “How hot—or cold—was it in the tent last night?” The Weatherguide module records weather information even when it is disconnected from the Palm and, as a result, consumes its two AAA batteries in about three weeks, so you may want to remove them when you are not using the unit. The unit needs to be powered for one day to collect data before making weather forecasts.
Big Clock is freeware that functions as a large display clock, timer (up and down with alarms), and that much-needed alarm clock. Just remember to set the alarm sound to number four—out of four increasingly obnoxious choices—if you are a heavy sleeper.
ER-CPR is a great new application that leads you through real-time emergency CPR procedures. The program asks for the characteristics of the victim (whether unconscious, age, breathing status, etc.) and guides you through the CPR process step by step with timing beeps and other cues. If you are not familiar with a particular action you are directed to take, you can get detailed instructions or definitions by tapping “help.” The software comes with an extensive tutorial for your PC. Upon completion of the tutorial, you can gain CPR certification, if you desire. This is a must-have application if you travel to remote locations. It has both official sanction and rave reviews from the medical community.
A variety of readers are available to view documents formatted for the Palm Pilot (in DOC format). These range from minimalist freeware (CSpotRun), to shareware (Aportisdoc), some of which come with features such as the ability to view images (Tealdoc). A wide variety of free documents are available from the MemoWare Website. These include indispensable references such as First Aid Information, poems such as “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (to be read by the campfire), and classics such as Slocum’s Sailing Around the World Alone, The Wizard of Oz (for the kids), or the works of Mark Twain. Several vendors sell current best-sellers in DOC or proprietary formats. Newer models of the Palm have enough memory for ten or more full-length novels—a real space and weight saver on a long expedition.
This article is being written on my Palm using Fitaly, an on-screen tap keyboard developed for handheld computers. The most-used letters and the space bar are placed in the center of the keyboard, which reduces the distance between taps. This can result in a speed of 50 words per minute. The keyboard also moves itself or can be dragged to avoid the cursor. The other options for entry are Graffiti, a modified handwriting optimized for computer recognition that comes with the Palm, or use of an accessory keyboard. The GoType keyboard weighs just 11 ounces and is ten inches long, so it fits nicely in a dry bag, but is big enough to allow touch typing. The Palm itself weighs about six ounces so, together, your portable word processor weighs just over one pound. My hands are large, so I am a bit cramped on the GoType keyboard, but my wife loves it. A new, full-sized keyboard, the Stowaway, that folds into a 7.9 ounce package not much bigger than the Palm itself, should be available by the time this article is published. However, you might get away with the Fitaly on-screen keyboard. (In a recent speed contest, the winner achieved 65 words per minute, comparable to an average touch typist.) What this means to the weather- and wind-bound kayaker who is stuck in the tent is that the novel or story you never had time for can finally get written.
To write your masterpiece, you will also need software to edit large files. Two options now exist, with more on the way. QED works fine and takes only 25K of RAM. Smartdoc has more features and doubles as an acceptable reader (e.g., saving 44K for Tealdoc), but it consumes 120K. (Newer models of the Palm have two to eight MB of RAM but, for earlier models, memory requirements can be a serious issue.)
The final challenge is to get your document onto your desktop computer so that you can format and print it. Whenever you HotSync your Palm, you automatically back up your files, including any literary masterpiece. The backup file will be in DOC format. For your word processor to open it, it that must be converted to a Text file. Fortunately, converters are free and are available for both PC and Mac. Word processing on a handheld computer, which was just a dream a year ago, is now a reality, and a real boon to the self-propelled traveler.
If you like to keep track of your paddling or other forms of exercise, Workout Tracker makes keeping, and finding, your training log easy. You can add custom exercises; each exercise allows you to record a variety of user-specified information, including distance, time, pace, heart rate, weight, etc. You can even graph your progress.
If you get bored while sitting in your tent, hundreds of games are available, presumably developed for the executive who needs a few moments of relaxation or relief from the boredom of a long meeting. Game sounds can be turned off just for this purpose! If you are by yourself, your computer can most likely beat you at chess (Pocketchess), Chinese Checkers or Scrabble (Niggle). If you have a friend along, all of these can be played against a human opponent without dragging boards and pieces along. Games such as Flytrap, Froggy, or Minehunt and Subhunt (that come with the Palm) will keep either you or your kids occupied.
For the foreign traveler, translation software is available ranging from dictionaries to a phrase book that allows the other party to point to an answer in his or her own language (Small Talk). Small Talk can be really helpful if you do not speak the language—especially on that kayak tour you have always wanted to take to Baja or Quebec.
Some excellent calculators are available that not only allow scientific calculations, but also conversion of currency or weights and measures. My favorite is Parens.
For the well-heeled geek, wireless modems allow you to check your e-mail while camped, or you can send your family and friends regular reports of your progress on your next expedition. The newPalm VII integrates wireless access by adding an antenna and about one additional ounce to let you engage in wireless web surfing and e-mail, as long as you are near a populated area in the U.S. Battery life is a real concern for these devices, so stock up if you intend to remain connected on your next trip.
How do you keep your Palm dry? A waterproof GPS case will work; mine provides additional room to fit either the compass or weather modules described above. Aquapac has just come out with a form-fitting case designed explicitly for the Palm that actually lets you use your stylus through its transparent plastic cover to write, using Graffiti. Thus, you can make notes while paddling without getting your paper notebook soggy.
The final issue is whether to stick with the Palm platform, which now holds more than a 70 percent market share, or to consider a WindowsCE device. These offer more memory, more power, and even color screens. However, at the moment, much of the most useful software for the kayaker—with the exception of word processing—is not available for WindowsCE. This is bound to change as more applications are ported to this platform every day.
At this point in time, all of these devices are power hungry, and measure battery life in days rather than the month obtainable for the Palm-based devices. Most Palm devices use two AAA batteries, but the Palm V and Vx recharge their NiCad batteries through their cradles, providing as much as a month of use. I prefer the AAA battery models because I use the backlight a lot to read books in the tent at night, and this use significantly reduces battery life. I carry extras.
Price is another reason to favor the Palm platform, since Windows CE devices typically run over $300. Several new Palm devices are priced at less than $200. In particular, both the Palm IIIe and the Visor—made by Handspring, a new company started by the original inventors of the Palm Pilot, who have licensed the Palm OS—are available for $179. These models have the newer, easy-to-read touch screens of the much more expensive Palm V family. In addition, the Visor has a plug in the back for a module that can add a variety of functions. Modules are under development to add a wireless modem, cell phone, and even a mapping GPS (HandyGPS). Palm is actively licensing their operating system.
IBM has had its own version of the Palm for several years, and another device aimed at the business user has just arrived from TRG. Several cell phone manufacturers, including the largest, Nokia, are working on integrating a Palm device, which means that you soon will be able to check out Tide Tool on your cell phone as well as to send wireless e-mail or browse the Web.
My guess is that many readers who have Palms have not thought about their usefulness for kayaking, and use them only for work. I find mine indispensable for both.