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FleetMon is supporting the sailing ship SANTA BARBARA ANNA in an innovative project to enhance the onboard experience of participants in its sailing trips. The 44-meter-long three-masted topsail schooner was originally built in England and, in its colorful history, has been used for fishing around Iceland, tourist trips in Barbados, and social youth work. Today it is based in Rostock, Germany, where it is operated by a group of volunteers with various seafaring backgrounds to practice and promote maritime traditions and traditional seamanship.

FleetMon is currently supporting the research project of Dr. Alexandra Muscalus from the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) in Atlanta, Georgia. She uses AIS data from FleetMon to investigate the impact of low-frequency ship wake on shorelines in the far-field.

Exciting news: Kpler, the leading provider of commodities data and analysis, has acquired FleetMon and MarineTraffic. Together, we are meeting the challenges of the maritime data market by uniting two AIS networks and combining our expertise with Kpler to create a maritime data stack.

We are proud beyond belief: Our latest FleetMon Imagefilm is ready!

Transparency and greener shipping are two of our most important goals at FleetMon. Therefore we support students, universities and institutions in their maritime research projects with AIS data. More than 120 universities are part of our cooperation partners – one is Oxford University. In 2022, Daniel Bundred, a MEng student from the Department of Engineering, contacted us and requested AIS data for his project on decarbonizing global shipping.

FleetMon has a network of over 5,000 AIS receivers to guarantee the best coverage for our customers and partners. Our stations are installed at ports, ships, private buildings, and institutions. The group of AIS partners actively setting up stations worldwide has been built up over the last 15 years at FleetMon.

A new major project from FleetMon’s AIS team is a collaboration with Emily Hague, Ph.D. Researcher from the Marine Spatial Analysis Group at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. She studies the impact of underwater noise of shipping traffic on marine mammals in UK waters.

FleetMon supports Emily in her project with AIS data, covering the urbanized waterway Firth of Forth over a 5 year period. In return, she helped us to set up more AIS stations around the coast of Scotland.

In 2021, we started to put the spotlight on our passionate ship spotters. Each month, we showcase a different photographer of FleetMon.com. In March 2022, you’ll meet a maritime enthusiast from Poland (User name: U-kasz) who joined FleetMon in 2009 and has been very active ever since.

Every month, we would like to introduce a new team member working at FleetMon. This month, we present Stephanie of the Marketing Team.

The atmosphere here is very open and warm.

Old sailor saying:

“Below the 40th parallel, there is no law. Below the 50th parallel, there is no God.”

Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago is located at 56 degrees south latitude, making a circumnavigation of Cape Horn particularly difficult. At Cape Horn, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet – and that’s what made the circumnavigation such a challenge. Extreme low-pressure systems swirl across the sea, creating the dreaded williwaw winds. These gusts come suddenly, frequently, and are unpredictable – and with bigger winds come bigger waves. To sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the only sea route was around Cape Horn. The Strait of Magellan was difficult to pass because of the wind and current conditions.

There are plenty of phrases we have integrated into our daily use of language so that we no longer even know where they actually come from and what meaning they originally had. We would like to introduce to you seven sayings of maritime origin and explain their meaning.

Sailing under a false flag

This refers to deceptive maneuvers or covert operations conducted by another third party to conceal identity. The action is thus actively attributed to an uninvolved third party for appearances. The actual actor is thereby acting “under a false flag.” In English, the much-publicized deceptive maneuver is also called “sailing under false colors,” while a courageous flagger is sailing with true colors.