Video: Keep Track Of Your PWC Fleet With OtoTrak

Listen, if the government wants to know where you are, or what you’re doing, they already know. Even with your smartphone’s geo-services features deactivated, you’re still emitting a traceable signal. And our penchant to over-disclose on our own social media pages is enough to indite many criminals stupid enough to take selfies at the scene of the crime. Orwell’s “big brother” is very much a reality and is, for the most part, self-inflicted. So here are your choices: 1. smash your phone, cancel your social accounts, quit your job, learn to hunt and grow your own fruits and veggies, move out to a wilderness preserve and drop off the face of the earth; or 2. embrace being part of the Matrix, and enjoy all the conveniences provided by modern living.

The Watercraft Journal recently caught wind of a very interesting geo-tracking system – OtoTrak – for track an unlimited number of watercraft from any location in the world via smartphone/tablet. The world’s first cloud-based remote system for personal watercraft (PWC), OtoTrak is a “complete turn-key solutions for real-time tracking and remote controlling of any number of personal watercrafts, providing the best possible management and security for our customers’ personal watercraft fleets.” Now, before you start to panic over the words “remote controlling,” let’s explain what exactly the OtoTrak is.

Once the OtoTrak module is installed (on any post-2009 Sea-Doo or Yamaha WaveRunner with electronic “fly-by-wire” throttle control) it starts collecting data (GPS position, throttle, speed, fuel, running time) and transmits it to server. Besides gathering precise running time and fuel economy, it tracks how close two OtoTrak-equipped skis are getting to each other, the shoreline or land masses, and can lower engine rpms to avoid a possible collision. This safety feature can also be applied to avoiding PWC theft, as the craft simply won’t run at all. At first blush, this looks to be an ideal application for rental fleets, but can be applied in a larger array of applications.