What are boat cards? Boat cards are a bit of a hybrid between a business card and an old fashioned calling card. They are very popular among cruisers as a way to easily share contact information with people you meet along the way. They are on my mind because I am in the process of redesigning our current cards.
Boat cards predate the modern era of email, cell phones, and Starlink but they are still very useful. They allow you to exchange contact information without the need to carry a phone or paper and pen, plus they make it very easy and convenient to share multiple means of contact.
So what information do people put on a boat card? Crew names, boat name, and email addresses are very common. Social media handles and blog/website address are also often included. Some people include a phone number but this only makes sense if you have a stable cell phone number and plan to maintain service (and cruise areas with cell coverage). In the past a paper mail address was typical, but this is probably pretty rare now. An MMSI number on the card makes it possible for people to directly “dial” your boat on the VHF via DSC, but I’m not sure how much cruisers use DSC other than for emergencies. Information for tracking a boat’s travels are another option.
Aside from means of contact, many cards include a photo of the crew (plus pets, if any) and/or the boat. Additional boat details (like manufacturer, model, length, and year) are sometimes included and I have seen a few cards with the boat’s USCG documentation number and hailing port.
We designed and printed our first boat cards when we still had ‘Imi Loa. The information we included was pretty basic: boat name, email address, our blog address, and our names & cell phone numbers:
Some things I would do differently with this card are:
- Opt to pay a couple bucks to remove the moo.com ad!
- Use a better photo for the front (though I’m pretty sure this was the best we had available at the time, and it looks worse in this photo than in real life)
- Use a larger font size on the back, there is definitely room and it would be a lot easier to read (which I appreciate more now than I did then)
After buying Casita and selling ‘Imi Loa we (of course) designed new boat cards:
I am still fond of these cards but we won’t have our cell phones once we cast off so I am designing new cards without them.
Things I plan to change for the next rendition are:
- Remove cell phone numbers
- Use a more recent photo of us (this photo is from a trip to Hawaii in 2016)
- Figure out a subtle (?) way to identify each of us in the photo, our names are not very gender specific and we’ve found that people who don’t know us well sometimes don’t know which of us is Devon and which is Rowan
- Add our noforeignland info
- Change the art on the back and possibly on the front
Stay tuned for our new and (hopefully) improved boat cards!
ps Apparently calling cards are not just relics of the past (or at least this company is hoping that’s the case):
sailing casita 
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