How to Stay in Touch While Cruising

After a two-week road trip visiting family and attending a cruising event with Dave, I again thought about the perennial questions. How do you stay in touch with friends and family while cruising?

Options to Stay in Touch

Good internet sure makes a difference! It’s out of the scope of this article to discuss the details, but options abound – from using a phone as a hotspot, to a hotspot router, to Starlink.  

Calling

Dave’s #1 choice is the good old phone. When we’re out of the US, we set up wifi calling so that people can contact us at the same phone numbers we have when we’re in the US. In fact, they don’t even know we’re out of the country until we tell them (bonus is being able to get all those two-factor authentication codes!).  

Wifi calling requires that you have an active account with a cell phone company that offers it. Most of the big carriers do; not all of the discount ones do. If you’re giving up your cell phone coverage “back home” whether to save money or because you don’t plan to return for quite a while, it won’t work. 

In that case, you can make voice calls through apps such as Facebook Messenger, What’s App, Signal and others. And there’s no cost, other than having internet access! You just have to make sure that whoever you’re calling has the same app. 

Video Calls

The next option, which became so popular during the pandemic, is video calls: Facetime, Zoom, Google Meet and others. These take a pretty good internet connection – at least 4G speed and 5G will be more stable, or Starlink. A good webcam also makes for a much better experience and need not be expensive; Amazon has many that get good ratings in the $25 range.  

We’ve found that we greatly prefer using my laptop and a decent webcam for video calls over either an iPad or phone. That may be a generational thing, though – I’m just not good at holding a mobile device steady while talking at it. That said, I still do prefer to use the phone if we’re in a particularly pretty place and I want to share it while on a call. 

Texting

While Dave’s primary communication is voice calls, mine is texting. With wifi calling, I can send texts anywhere but I use texting apps far more. WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger are all popular. WhatsApp, in particular, is a popular choice as many cell data plans will include free WhatsApp messages.  

With texting you don’t have to both be available at the same time: you can send a message when convenient, and the other person replies when it works for them. It’s a double-edged sword as you sacrifice a bit of the immediate connection in favor of convenience. 

I have two friends in a group chat where we all play the same NYTimes games each morning – Wordle, Connections, and their new Strands – and post our results. Some days, we’ll also have long chats about whatever is going on in our lives but even when we don’t, that little bit of sharing our games is a treasured way of staying in touch.  

With other friends, it’s a random photo during the day or maybe even a video clip.  

Other Options

For broader staying in touch, there’s Facebook and Instagram, although they don’t feel quite as personal. Nonetheless, they’re a great way to share highlights with a broad group of family and friends. If you want to go into more detail than those allow, starting a blog or YouTube channel offers a lot of options. 

I know that being able to stay in touch with family and friends is a reason that many people are reluctant to cruise fulltime. The items above may help as can the four ways to celebrate milestones from afar that I discuss in this article. Another option is to budget for frequent trips home, or simply plan to cruise only part of the year. Or why not invite loved ones to visit you on the boat? 

Above all, savor the connections, however you make them! 

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