The sailor in me has been wanting a decent anemometer for Mossy Paws since we put up the rinky-dink Taylor instrument for our trip through the Trent Severn two years ago. It gave us some wind readings, but they weren’t accurate and they weren’t in “real time,” the wind direction was always “off,” and I lost count of the number of times some sort of alarm went off. What a pain!

A wired anemometer at the top of our mast was going to be problematic to try installing on Mossy Paws. Ron had seen a wireless anemometer advertised on a Canadian site somewhere that might work for us, but that ad seemed to disappear with the pandemic. Over this past winter, I got serious about researching devices that would meet our needs. There seemed to be just one—the Calypso ultrasonic wind instrument. Early reviews (4+ years old) weren’t stellar, but recent reviews show that they’ve worked out some of their kinks. I was ready to order in time for my Christmas gift, but it’s manufactured in Spain and the one U.S. distributor was out of stock. But I kept checking the websites, and in April it was suddenly available again to order in the U.S. I did not dawdle placing the order!

On Tuesday we installed it—easy peasy! Mossy Paws’ mast is a bit awkward at around 17 feet, but it’s not heavy. Four of us maneuvered it off the boat onto the dock, Ron installed the bracket, we added the Calypso device, and a couple of hours later we invited our helpers back and had the mast and boom back up, the app on our phone was connecting to the device (it will also connect to our iPad), and we were getting real time wind speed, accurate wind direction, even the temperature at the top of the mast!

This old sailor girl is a happy camper! — jes