Any eHarbor in a Storm

With thousands of yachts plying the Chesapeake Bay and Intracoastal Waterway, entrepreneur Dennis Mitchell is hoping to create wireless Internet access for boaters, using Annapolis as his headquarters.

Dennis Mitchell is hoping his little company, just seven months old and still in search of its first round of serious venture capital, will someday become the America Online for Americans offshore.

Sensing a demand for wireless Internet access by boaters, thousands of whom live in their boats while traveling the Intracoastal Waterway along the Eastern Seaboard, he’s attempting to create a service offering just that — starting with the Chesapeake Bay.

Mitchell’s eHarbor, launched informally last year at the Annapolis Boat Show and operating in beta form ever since, will soon move its tiny headquarters from Mitchell’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., to the Maryland capital.

“It’s sort of like cable without the cable,” Mitchell, a self-described “tech nerd,” says of the service.

The idea is to provide Web access to boaters using strategically placed, land-based transceivers, in a fashion similar to the way motorists gain access to their cell phones. The transceivers would have a range of about 10 miles.

“The model is to build the Chesapeake Bay region first,” said Greg Whipp, a consultant working with eHarbor. “It’s an ISP model aimed at boaters.”

Which makes Annapolis the perfect spot for a corporate headquarters. eHarbor already has found office space and will be moving in soon, Mitchell said — perhaps by next week.

Annapolis is also one of the few places where eHarbor already has transceivers up and running and customers online. The challenge for the company is to find marinas willing to allow the company to locate additional devices and to find the money to pay infrastructure costs.

Still, with about $300,000 in seed money, including at least $100,000 from former UUNet Technologies vice president-turned-successful-venture-capitalist-and-boating enthusiast Jeffrey Osborn, eHarbor has been able to set up a few transceivers and is negotiating to build more in the Bahamas and California.

Nevertheless, Mitchell said the company is looking for another $5 million to $10 million in first-round financing. eHarbor hopes to build the devices all along the Eastern Seaboard, down into the Caribbean, out to the West Coast and eventually in other foreign markets.

The service isn’t meant to be contiguous, he said, but rather to offer boaters a series of harbors where they can log into the system. Marinas typically offer telephone service to docked boats, through which boaters can gain Web access, but only as long as they remain docked.

“We’ve proven we can deploy this thing anywhere now,” Mitchell said. “As the site numbers grow, the customers will grow.”

Mitchell said the demand for Web access on the high seas is tremendous, as many recreational boaters don’t like feeling cut off from the world when they take their boats out. The problem is acute for people who spend months on their boat cruising the coastline from Maine to Florida and beyond, he said.

“Twenty thousand people go up and down the East Coast” annually in that fashion, he said. “Their destination is either Florida or the Bahamas. They do this every year. And there are hundreds of thousands of boats 26 feet or longer that can accommodate a laptop. ... So there’s this huge, high-income group that can’t get access to the Internet while they’re boating.”