The Marine Electronics Hub
NavPod, the leading manufacturer of waterproof housings for marine electronics, announced today there is a NavPod for every chartplotter and fishfinder available in the industry. The company now offers over 1000 precuts to fit multifunction displays from all major marine electronic manufacturers…
Ben Stein’s cabling frustrations reminded me about the value of good cable glands, like the selection from PYI Seaview. They are designed so that you can pass a cable with a fair-sized connector, or several such cables, through a deck or superstructure, but end up with a tight waterproof seal around the cables…
Though multifunction displays have been steadily gaining new functions, the Seakeeper and Lumishore buttons above represent a new era. Garmin calls it OneHelm, but the underlying HTML5 app technology is an important innovation that all the major MFD manufacturers are embracing. It significantly simplifies the process of creating MFD control…
As I sat down to write this article I flashed back to an eye-opening technology experience at the 2015 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show. My wife and I found ourselves on the Seakeeper roll stabilization demo boat in the mouth of the Port Everglades inlet with a Viking 60-foot sportfish doing circles around us throwing as big a wake as possible. Our demo ride led to a major install on our Carver motor yacht, which I can recall in vivid detail, but which also significantly improved our subsequent family voyage around the Great Loop…
It seems appropiate to kick off 2018 with a discussion of heating technology, specifically the diesel-fired hydronic system I installed on Gizmo last year. It was a significant purchase and a major install, but the 66 degree pilothouse temperature seen above certainly made my early December ICW trip a lot more pleasant. I’ll explain why I chose hydronic, detail how the system went together, and profusely praise Sure Marine Service, a marine heating equipment distributor par excellence…
The jury is still out. Brian Lind may have written a blushingly laudatory profile of Panbo and me for PassageMaker magazine — and you can now check out “Who is Ben Ellison?” online — but I agree with regular readers who may rightfully doubt my ‘authoritative’ ‘expertise’! This site is not the “arbitrator of marine electronics” — no such thing exists — and evidence is building that I’ve become a bumbling old boat guy barely in command of all the gear he’s installed, plus very darn slow to write about it…
While I do think that Gizmo offers a bountiful spread of delicious marine electronics these days, a more serious title for this entry might read: “Guilt: All the darn gear I’ve borrowed but haven’t...
This LED beanie has gotten a lot of use since a knowing Secret Santa gifted it to me at our family Chrismakah celebration, and I think it would make an excellent Father’s Day gift for many dads I know. Or maybe you just need to buy one for yourself, in which case the magic words apply: “I need it for the boat”…
The Miami Boat Show was loaded with marine electronics news, but first let’s visit the Navico writers event held at Hawks Cay, Florida, earlier this month. Deeper still – Mercury engine integration, B&G Zeus PredictWind weather routing, the Halo radar VelocityTrack Doppler upgrade, Navionics SonarChart Live everywhere, Simrad’s new 3kW 3-channel S5100 super sonar, and Lowrance Carbon (Gen3) MFDs are some of the goodies that were demonstrated and/or discussed. But I was especially taken with CEO Leif Ottosson’s opening “big picture” presentation and think it’s valuable to anyone interested in the future of boating…
Folding bikes seem great for cruising boats. You can extend your sightseeing, fetch supplies, or simply get some rolling excercise. But I’ve wondered if a compactable electric bike could be even better and more fun. While that manly beast above is certainly unfit for stowing on even a mid-sized trawler, it’s led me to love the ebike concept and taught me what a good one may look like for my cruising situation…
