How you use Dropbox; Sailing edition

[Graham]

If there’s one thing that always puts a smile on our faces here on the Dropbox Community, it’s hearing about new and unique ways that our members have found to use their ‌Dropbox account, and this might be one of our favorites so far.

@BasseART shared how he uses Dropbox for sailing trips, both in the planning stage and while they were out on the open sea, and it’s safe to say it’s one of the most interesting customer stories we’ve heard in a long time. So, you’re probably wondering if we’re going to share how they use Dropbox with you, and I’m happy to say “we Arrr!”. 

For a recent trip from Split, Croatia to Sicily, Italy, @BasseART explained the many uses for Dropbox on his sailing trips, the first is one that we’ll all be familiar with, storage. Here’s what he had to say, “First of all, I have a lot of manuals, interesting courses, books, and reference books about sailing. I'm not reading those books underway, but from time to time I simply want to look up things. Instead of carrying my full archive, I have digital copies on my Dropbox - which are offline synchronised.”

The yacht and route taken on the voyage

Now, ye landlubbers may not have realized, but there’s a lot of paper work that comes with sailing. Here's how @BasseART keeps on top of it with Dropbox, “Keeping the logs in a table, planning a passage and drawing on a map is still important, even when having a digital plotter on board. What if the electronics fail and you have no clue where you are? So, I work with paper and pencil, after arrival I put digital scans of these papers ... in my Dropbox account.”

A checklist made during the voyage

While making the 5-day journey through the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, constantly sailing day and night, it was all hands on deck and here’s how @BaseART used Dropbox to help keep the journey on track, “We use Bracknell maps to analyze the weather conditions at sea. Those gif files are stored and updated in my Dropbox. I would love to find a quick way to draw annotations on the document directly in dropbox, adding arrows, indicating a low pressure area etc. free-hand drawing, using my iPad.” 

Sunset on the Adriatic Sea

“Another example you can see in the image is when I define the tidal depth in function of day and time on a specific location. What I did here was export from Dropbox to the iPad photo library to do some manual editing.” @BaseArt has also submitted a feature request in our Share an idea section to make it easier for him to edit these files on the iPad, you can learn more about this idea and vote for it here.

Making calculations while at sea

We’d love to hear if you’ve ever used Dropbox in a similar way to @BasseART, or if you have your own unique way of using Dropbox, leave a response here and let us know.

[Amy]

I absolutely love this! I know beyond nothing about sailing, but I love learning how the same tools I use day to day can be used for such an amazing journey. Thanks for sharing your expertise @BasseART! 

[Barry J]

This is fantastic!

[JulianAtDropbox]

This is amazing, thank you for sharing!

[Nico_MK]

I've sailed exactly once and can't imagine making this trek! Here's just one more way I'd never thought about using Dropbox. This is so cool and really shows how useful Dropbox is for folks from all walks of life. And it inspires me to consider how I might use Dropbox in my travels. 

[leesj]

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