Mail to the ship

So I’ve been shipping out for the last 4 years (almost). Three and a half of those years were with Military Sealift Command so I was always moving and gone from home for long periods.

The benefit about living with family members was that they could send mail to you and such. I am hoping to finally get my own place this year by myself (at the moment) and I’m trying to figure out the mail situation.

I would say this question is pointed more towards people who have been shipping for a while and live by themselves, but how can I have mail sent to me whenever I’m on a ship and I have no one at my residence to do it? I’m talking like the usual BS like bills, jury duty notices, etc.

There are plenty of inexpensive mail forwarding services that can handle that for you. Google will turn up many results.

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Its been about 15 years but I used to rent a mail box at a local MailBox Etc. & they would forward the contents of the box wherever in the world I asked them for no additional charge. I just paid for the box & shipping. It turned into a Kinkos then to a UPS store. It was a mom-&-pop franchise owned location that needed the business & were happy to do business with me. They had my credit card number on file & if I called between 9-5, M-F either mom or pop would answer & an explanation wasn’t necessary. It was real easy. I highly recommend this method but just make sure you find a mail box place with very little turn over so you won’t have to explain yourself to some new idiot, ex-con or teenager every time you call.

I’ve had a mailbox service for going on 12 years now. I’ve used the big ones like Mailbox Etc, UPS store and the like. My personal favorite was Postal Depot in Reno.

http://www.thepostaldepot.com/

You have the option of an actual box like a PO box which you can access any time with a key, or a less expensive behind the counter service where you have to either come in to pick it up or have them forward it to you. They would forward my mail for the cost of shipping out of a small deposit that I’d top up before going back to work.

I used them for quite a few years and thought they did a great job. I switched to a different mailbox service in the town that I bought a house in now. They’ve been great as well. I still use mailbox services because they can accept and hold packages from UPS and FedEx (US Post office won’t as a policy). I don’t have to worry about something sitting on the porch and they’re close enough to home that it’s no big deal to swing by and pick things up when it’s convenient for me.

I used Traveling Mailbox and was very happy with my service. All communications are done on an online dashboard, you log in and tell them what you want done with your mail. You can open and view, discard, shred, or forward to your ship any piece of mail that you receive, including packages. Honestly it’s such a neat service I wanted to keep it but I just don’t need it anymore. I highly recommend them for mariners. You can keep track of your mail as if you were at home while being thousands of miles away.

https://travelingmailbox.com

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