Farewell to Cape Town, GE style

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Man, that’s a long time in planes! I’m back in Maine, briefly, and experimenting with Google Earth to scrap book my trip. Here’s the full screen image, but it would be far better to open Google Earth and zoom around with me. 1 marks the touristy V&A waterfront, said to be the most visited spot in all Africa, and still worth visiting. Naturally that’s the hang out of the hot daysailing cats—Fuji and GQ—as well as visiting yachts. If you zoom in close you can see the canal that leads to the big hall (2) where the Boat Show was held and I met the Whisper builders. Pan further west to the commissioning docks (3), where the Magnum 32’ was parked. You’ll also see a line of cats getting ready for their long delivery trips. It’s said that in the wee hours of almost every night another big multihull is trailered through the streets of Cape Town. Finally, just for fun, the 4’s show where an elevated highway was once going to bypass down town, but one property owner held out, and now it will never be finished. “This is Africa!” my hosts explained.
  Speaking of GE, MacENC can now neatly export tracks, waypoints and routes to it, as shown below and bigger here. And recall that Vessel Tracker can plot live AIS targets on it, and Just Magic has created all sorts of interesting mashups. Now we just need a reasonable way to get broadband underway. That’s the sort of surprise I’m hoping for at NMEA (Thursday) or Ft. Lauderdale.

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Ben Ellison

Ben Ellison

Panbo editor, publisher & chief bottlewasher from 4/2005 until 8/2018, and now pleased to have Ben Stein as a very able publisher, webmaster, and editing colleague. Please don't regard him as an "expert"; he's getting quite old and thinks that "fadiddling fumble-putz" is a more accurate description.

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