Ships' positions

Since February 2007 I have been following the message boards on Cruise Critic
I have mostly been reading, but from time to time I have posted questions of my own. The whole experience has enriched my voyage already. I have gotten to know several people (virtually) and look forward to meeting the rest of the group at the gatherings planned on board. The people on the message board, CCers, come from all over the world. There are people from Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and all over the US. It has been fun to "hear" the differences in our English language. One I really like is that in Australia, slang for a gossip is stickybeak. As in, "She is such a stickybeak!"

One thing I just discovered today is a site that tracks ships just like some of the flight trackers. It is actually more than that and provides ship positions and weather. Sail WX will show you once or twice on most days the location of the QE2. If you really know your latitude and longitude, you can just look at the map and see where the ship is. If you are like the rest of us, you will want to zoom out until you see a familiar looking landmass to use to orient yourself.

Right now you can see that the QE2 is in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on the way from Southampton to New York City. The stop after NYC will of course be in Fort Lauderdale at Port Everglades for us. Actually, it is a port of call for the cruise and there will be other people boarding. Nevertheless, I still think of it as the ship making a stop to pick us up.

There are other interesting pages on the SailWX website but so far I haven't been able to bring up any maps showing wave heights. I won't need to do that on board of course, I will just see how difficult it is to walk on deck.

One other way to keep track of people on a cruise are the webcams on ships. For the QE2, go to the Cunard website, click on our ships, then Queen Elizabeth 2, then bridge web cams. On the newer ships they have some webcams pointed toward public areas and it is possible to arrange a time and wave. But as you can see when you look at the QE2 webcam, if you see me waving, I am in BIG trouble.