The Marine Electronics Hub
When the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Virgin Islands charged Rick Smith with “seaman’s manslaughter” last fall, it kicked off months of press coverage and online sailor chatter… But I did not feel that I understood the incident — or could glean any particular safety lessons from it — until I read “THE TRAGEDY OF DAVID PONTIOUS: Did a Scopolamine Patch Drive Him to Suicide?” by Charles Doane…
In the last six months Blue Guard Innovations’ BG-One Smart Bilge Pump Switch with Oil and Fuel Detector racked up new product awards, winning an IBEX Innovations Award, a Sail magazine Pittman Award, and a DAME design award Special Mention. So it’s great to have one now installed on Have Another Day, and so far I’m liking both its performance and the amount of information it provides.
Viking Life-Saving Equipment has designed an almost frightening number of innovations into its LifeCraft system, so it’s good to see that it apparently tested fine in North Sea waves ranging from 12 to 15 feet with 33-foot peaks. The system may soon make big cruise ships safer, and perhaps some of the technology will work its way down to recreational vessels…
That’s Shakespeare Marine Electronics manager Bill Eastwood hamming it up with their just-announced inflatable VHF antennas at METS last November, and the grin is well deserved as the product had just won the DAME Award for the Safety category. In fact, I was the DAME judge who got to pull the cord to inflate the sample — worked like a charm — and I think we were all impressed with how rigid it became…
ACR Electronics is launching its next-generation ResQLink Personal Locator Beacons (PLB) – the latest evolution of the world’s best-selling PLB. Incorporating first-hand feedback from survivors who have activated the beacons in real-life emergencies, the new ResQLink 400 and ResQLink View PLBs introduce user-friendly design innovations and add enhanced functionality to…
Cochise is certainly eye-catching, and especially so when you realize that you’re looking at the personal cruising “dream machine” of the relentless innovator Steve Dashew. So even though the navigation setup inside that huge combination flying bridge and pilot house was brand new state-of-the-art in 2016, it’s been so radically modified since then that I burst into uncontrollable giggling on first sight…
At the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show I got to take a demo cruise with SiOnyx to see their Aurora night vision camera in action. What I saw during our trip along the New River and Intracoastal Waterway was impressive, but also illustrated some limitations…
Blue Guard’s BG-One Oil and Fuel Detector with Smart Bilge Pump Switch won the IBEX innovation for electrical equipment. With this switch, Blue Guard seems to have thought through the problem of oil in the bilge and come up with a smart solution to ensure safety while minimizing the potential for environmental impact…
I often use and deeply appreciate the bundle of clever features that Vesper Marine calls SmartAIS, but darned if I didn’t miss one. While the WatchMate app screen above shows some aspects of the Vesper collision avoidance intelligence that makes this my favorite real-world AIS plotting tool (among many choices), it is actually a built-in simulation with significant benefits…
A timely first point I’d like to make is that this ClearCruise feature is not the same as the new ClearCruise Augmented Reality that Ben Stein just wrote about. While both features are exclusive to certain Raymarine MFDs, they work with different types of cameras in different ways. I think that both technologies are valuable and I strongly suspect that they will evolve together as Ray and Flir clearly blaze trail in advanced navigation imaging…
