Snail Mail

[Harbor_Pilot]

How do you deal with it?

I have a mailbox right in front of my house, with regular delivery 6 days a week. Other than regular Netflix DVD and magazine subsriptions, and the occasional books I order, most everything else in the mail box is junk, and a severe waste of resources. I have been paying bills and have had on-line banking since late last century. The movies I can easily do without and most of the magazines and some of the books are available on the net.

As a cruiser, how do you deal with those occasional items that you really want or need?

E.g. Need a packing gland, a special filter, want a good referance book, threw the last winch handle overboard by mistake.... (as if the first 3 were intentional)

How do you meet up with the item?

Have it shipped ahead; to your destination; to what address or service location?

Are there services that cater to this need?

[Lighthouse]

There are a number of mail forwarding agents available - St Brendan's Isle comes highly recommended.

[Harbor_Pilot]

Thanks Bob,

That answers that.

Jeff

[Lynx]

I use Voyager Mail Forwading Service vmfs.com and it does well for me. Better than relying on family.

[JeanneP]

We use St. Brendan's Isle, and have been very satisfied with them.

In addition to forwarding mail, you can instruct them to discard junk mail, hold or send on catalogs (and even which ones); and order various boat gear and forward them on. We tell them when we need something to arrive (or that we have a week or more of leeway), and they choose the best method. It's worked for us for many years.

The advantage of a mail forwarding service is their experience with sending mail overseas, and with their understanding of the way cruising people travel. Sometimes short stays in various places, sometimes long stays in one place. They never assume that just because you were in Venezuela last week that you will be there this week.

We had a friend forwarding our mail, and he was a wonderful friend and exuberant supporter of our lifestyle. But several times he sent packages without our instructing him to do so, once to a country we were not planning to return to. One disappeared. One was returned to him about 6 months after he sent it. And one we were lucky to receive - by chance - and it was our alternator, an expensive piece of gear to lose. I often thought that his local post office had never seen any overseas mail except for ours (yes, I know that wasn't true, but.....), they gave him terrible advice regarding sending our mail out, and any of our instructions to the contrary always sounded a bit petty........

I do get some magazines to one or two NJ addresses - family - to hold and sometimes forward to us magazines. But they get the reading of the magazines until they come to us, and I get to read a large pile of mags. in one fell swoop!

Stick with the professionals.