I never thought the day would come when I would say “Your jet ski needs an iPhone”. But it makes sense when you start to think about it.
With a Smartphone in your jet ski, you’ll have…
- A phone for emergencies.
- Don’t have to worry about damaging your new phone or losing it on the water.
- Smartphones have GPS and apps that allow you to find your way back home when on the lake.
- You can use the find friends app to find where your kids or friends are when they’re on the jet ski. This is HUGE if your kids always come home late when riding or if your friends get lost easily.
The best perk is that we live in a world now where you can get smartphones for cheap along with pre-paid plans that are cheap too. It has gotten to the point now where it only makes sense to have an extra smartphone in a good strong case in your jet ski.
There are other little details about this idea that I want to go over here in this post and show you how important it is for your jet ski, yes an inanimate object, to have its own smartphone.
The 2 Biggest Reasons
Let’s talk about the 2 biggest reasons why you need to carry an extra smartphone in your Jet Ski.
The top reason has to be that you see where your jet ski is when your kids or friends ride it. You can set up apps that will show you where on a map your jet ski is like you’re looking for a friend. Now you’ll know where the ski is incase of an emergency or if you need to track them down because they’re somewhere there not suppose to be.
If the kids are late coming home, you can know exactly where they’re at. No more worrying!
But why not let the kids or friends carry their phones when on the jet ski? They can and probably should, but many people lose their phones to the water. So why not have both? Or maybe you bought a new phone and didn’t want to worry about losing it or it getting damaged while you’re out having fun on your watercraft so you leave it at home. Having a spare smartphone would be better than nothing and better than damaging your new phone.
The next reason is all about getting lost. Everyone does it. They make GPS for jet skis and we talk about that here but ultimately you can just use the GPS app on your phone. The Google Maps app will work fine, just enter the address of the home or the ramp and move your dot toward that other dot. You won’t get turn-by-turn directions but it’s pretty simple to move towards another dot to get to where you want to go.
I had someone look at me like I was stupid when I told them to use Google Maps on their smartphone to get them home if they got lost on the lake. They thought you needed to be on a road for it to work. The goal is not to get road directions but to know where you are and where you want to go and move towards that dot on the screen. Trust me, it works wonders if you’re completely lost on the lake. The ocean not so much.
But you might be thinking – “how do you keep the phone charged?”. Let’s answer that.
What You Need
To make this work the best you’ll need to keep the smartphone charged. A lot of wave runners are coming with 12-volt plugs in them so you can keep your phone charged and ready to go.
The skis without plugs can get them installed. You can get a standard 12-volt plug like this one here (Amazon Link Ad), or Sea-Doo makes a 12-Volt Plug Kit here (Amazon Link Ad) for their watercraft.
A dealership or shop can install one for you, but honestly, it’s not too hard to do.
You’ll want to avoid keeping the Smartphone in places where it can get really hot. It might be best not to leave the phone in the ski as it could get too hot and phone batteries don’t like that.
I recommend keeping the smartphone in the case we talked about below and attached with the keys. So wherever the keys go the phone goes with it. If you do it this way, you can avoid getting the 12-volt plug on your jet ski and just charged the phone after every ride.
What Phone
If you have an old smartphone that you’re not using anymore, then use that. The only thing I recommend is getting a Floatable Waterproof Case Dry Bag like this one here (Amazon Link Ad). These case-dry-bags allow you to use them through the case and many of them float too.
If you don’t have an old smartphone, then you can get super affordable smartphones these days on Amazon.
These phones would be useless if they don’t have service. What I recommend doing is getting a pre-paid service like Mint Mobile. You can pay for a whole year or a few months and get an attractive price too. If Mint doesn’t have good service where you ride you can find many other MVNO cell phone plans that will work.
Emergencies
After you get the phone, service, 12-volt plug, and case you’re all good to go.
With this setup, you don’t have to worry about the kids or friends taking too long to get home. You also don’t have to worry about the kids losing their pricey new phone on the water again. You can know where they are if there is a true emergency and get help to them quickly!
This would have been unheard of 5 years ago, but nowadays it seems almost crazy to not have a phone for your jet ski.
Don’t forget to check out the must-have PWC Accessories Here!