The Marine Electronics Hub
This morning Garmin purchased ActiveCaptain and I have no idea if that will turn out to be good news or otherwise. Will this large and growing database of crowdsourced cruising information change now that it belongs to a major electronics brand? I have no bold opinions but I do have lots of questions I hope to discuss…
Pardon my photography, but the point is that many detailed, up-to-date, and well-crafted official paper charts of Cuba do exist. Unfortunately, they’re not easy to own and the good work of the Cuban hydrographic service is also not yet fully available in any electronic form. In fact, many “current” electronic Cuba charts are based on shockingly old data with substantial chunks of critical cruising detail missing. But visiting boaters do have at least one good current chart choice – GeoCuba is moving into the modern world, and the back story reveals chart issues every navigator should understand, with a Cuban twist…
The identities of the yacht and its operators are irrelevant. But how did they go hard aground in a highly used harbor during a clear summer day? Was it just a dumb mistake or was a lack of chart detail partially to blame? Should the USCG or the town of Camden better mark the danger? Did marine electronics somehow contribute to what was at least an embarrassing incident? Can crowdsourced data help? I’m not sure about the answers but I have assembled a lot of information for discussion…
Yikes! Did you know that some areas of the U.S. coastal chart you’re using may only show land and bottom features accurate in position to +/- 1,600 feet, and you shouldn’t be confident about the depth soundings either? NOAA has a new way to show boaters how old and inaccurate much of its survey data is, and it will surely give pause to those who pay attention. The concept is called Zones of Confidence and it’s slowly rolling out as diagrams on paper-style raster charts like the one above, but the ZOC accuracy info is coming much faster to NOAA’s ENC vector charts, and apparently it could be made easily accessible on the commercial vector charts you’re probably using.
When Raymarine’s significant LightHouse software Release 17 became public last Thursday, I’d already had a chance to test a beta R17 version on the water and was able to discuss the new global weather...
(Bits are back, if you know what I mean.) I skim a lot of email newsletters but this recent Stephens Waring Yacht Design creation brought the process to a quiet halt. I clicked up this image as big as possible and became mesmerized, and it later turned out that even the newsletter text is only a sketch of the bigger story. Before we get into that, I suggest you get mesmerized, and I snagged even higher resolution images. Clicking them big may be slow, but you should be getting yourself stilled and ready to simpy wonder…
At long last an ACR Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) with a 10 year user replaceable battery! Moreover, the new GlobalFIX V4 is exceptionally compact and handsomely designed — which also may relate to its 2015 acquisition of Ocean Signal — and of course it includes standard EPIRB features. The $150 batteries aren’t cheap, but it may beat tossing a working GlobalFIX V4 that retails for $400 (manual activation, with automatic at $500).
Here’s some big news in the small world of marine electronics. Boeing company Jeppesen just sold its marine cartography division to a formerly unknown entity named Digital Marine Solutions (DMS) and it “will trade under the C-Map brand name” (as it did before Jeppesen came along and as many of us could never stop calling it). DMS belongs to the Nordic based Altor “family of private equity funds” which also owns the Navico family of Lowrance, B&G, Simrad, and GoFree brands. Interesting?
Let’s end 2015 with some new technology that will really make a difference, I think. It’s Navionics’ new Dock-to-dock autorouting system, and it may not be getting the recognition it deserves because Navionics already offered autorouting that was only marginally useful (like the others I’ve tried). Dock-to-dock is not perfect, but it still strikes me as a quantum leap improvement that many boaters are going to appreciate…
Garmin put up a Marine 2016 site this morning and one thing many current Garmin owners will be excited about is the Quickdraw Contours sonar charting that will come to many current Garmin displays in January. Yup, you’re going to be able to easily collect soundings as you cruise, sail or fish and, if you want, you can watch the resulting high def sonar chart materialize in your wake, as suggested above. Quickdraw is no surprise given the tussle over Navionics SonarCharts for Garmin, but naturally Garmin added some special sauce…
