Well, perhaps you should carry TWO iPads... (grin)

This story is so sad, on so many levels... Although, I suppose the outcome might have been different, if the skipper wasn't totally blind...

The explanation of what went wrong portrays a truly 21st-century dilemma. Berg and Peters left Hilo last week, had a "great sail around the south end of the island," and found a nice little anchorage where they swam with spinner dolphins. The next day, they were heading up the Kona coast well offshore, when the breeze died, forcing them to motorsail. Because they hadn't refueled after making landfall from Mexico at Hilo, they had only about six or seven gallons of fuel, which concerned them. But they soon had bigger problems.

They'd been navigating for weeks without a problem using iNavX software on Berg's iPad, which was interfaced with the vessel's GPS. That night they were headed for a waypoint offshore of Honokohau Harbor, north of Kialua Kona town. All of a sudden the screen was taken over by a system request to log in to FaceTime, an Apple resource, then another request to log in to the iCloud. No matter what Berg and Peters did, they couldn't clear the screen and log back in to iNavX. Berg also had that software on his iPhone, but he hadn't entered the waypoint there. The built-in chartplotter had a system that displayed NOAA charts, but Berg says that proved inadequate.

"I should have just said, 'Hang a hard left', until we sorted things out, but I didn't. It was totally my screw-up." Before they could find a software solution, they heard the sound of surf crashing and they knew they were in trouble.

http://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/lectronicday.lasso?date=2014-05-21#.U4ErSS_T87A

http://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/lectronicday.lasso?date=2014-05-23#.U4ErAi_T87A