Cruising is awesome! It takes you to new places that you never even dreamed of experiencing. You wake up in a new land every time you set sail, and you get to choose where you want to go next. This feeling of complete freedom is quite nice, until you decide you want to communicate with your family and friends from places you have long since left.
The moment you travel to a new country, every call to your homeland will be a long distance call. When you begin making friends in all the countries you visit, calling each of them will also be long distance. Long distance calls, especially when you are roaming is insanely expensive! What if you could do this all for free?
WhatsApp is a free app that uses data to do a voice call and texting. Is data free? Sometimes.
If you are on roaming data, it will be very expensive to use WhatsApp. If you get on a free WiFi, then all your interactions on WhatsApp will be free!
The calls can be long and the text messages numerous, but you won’t have to pay a cent!
When we head out to sea, we put our phones on Airplane mode and leave them there until we are back in our homeland. While out, we simply get free WiFi from cafes and restaurants. When we get online, all our messages come in and we can make calls as needed. When we leave the WiFi spot, our phones go silent once again (which is actually a very nice thing). There are no random calls in the middle of the night that could wake you from your sleep, or someone texting you early in the morning.
You are in a different country and nothing could happen that needs your immediate attention. But what if one of your new local friends wants to hang out? Well, they can always knock on the hull and talk to us like normal people would. The dinghy tied to the boat is a great clue to anyone wondering if we are on the boat or on shore. If the dinghy is with the boat, come on over because we are home, if the dinghy is not at the boat, give us a call, we might have WiFi.
WhatsApp is one of those great features of a smartphone, allowing you the connectivity to your friends and family without all the cost of these conveniences. Next time you travel overseas (by plane or boat) give this app a try and enjoy the freedom of communication!
