Category: What’s on board…
There’s much to report about my three day visit with the Raymarine product development team, but the impromptu kicker was a visit to HDML (Harbour Defense Motor Launch) #1387, and the vessel’s key story couldn’t be more timely. 70 years ago yesterday, well before D-Day H-Hour, 1387 headed toward Normandy loaded with electronics that helped her crew precisely mark the planned final channel to Omaha Beach, first for the minesweepers and then for the vast fleet of landing craft that left Portsmouth behind her. And today she’s headed for France again, this time with an all volunteer crew led by Alan Watson, the gentleman who so kindly showed me around last evening.
If you browse to the bottom of the Panbo monthly archives, you’ll see that the very first entry went up on February 4, 2004. So Panbo is 10 years old today, which may be a century in Internet years? In fact, one motivation for founder Yme Bosma was an interest in what was then the new-fangled “blog” content management format. While he soon had to focus back on his high tech work and I took over Panbo in 2005, but the boating geek bug is often incurable as many of us know. It seems more than coincidental — and very cool — that Panbo’s 120th month is also the debut of Yme’s all electric, solar powered, and iPad instrumented cruiser design, the Arviro 10.
The Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show was bigger than ever this year and while FLIBS exhibits really do appeal to almost every boating persuasion, who doesn’t enjoy gawking at the very high end? Click, for instance, on the photo above and check out the remarkable farm of Furuno radars, Sea Tel satellite domes, FLIR cameras, and much more at left. The 162-foot Remember When is equipped to the max and I was not surprised to learn that proud owner John Rosatti started working on boats with his dad at age 13. Meanwhile, yours truly was higher than a megayacht on the sky deck of the odd but accessible 3,200-ton vessel doing business as SEAFAIR. Simrad was celebrating the NSO evo2 debut up here, and we all enjoyed watching the young couple on paddle boards (Remember When crew perhaps?) head off with their cooler to locations unknown. There was lots of marine electronics news in Lauderdale, but this entry will be an eclectic tour of other sights that drew my attention…
“Pretty cool…ESPN says one of the greatest upsets in sports history!” my brother-in-law emailed me last night, and he’s a guy who knows who pitched World Series games decades ago, and how well, but bupkis about the America’s Cup. Yes indeed, AC34 was incredibly unpredictable, and exciting, but I’ll argue that the winners all along were the teams who made the race management, umpiring, and broadcasting so innovative and so effective…
Best ticket ever? I’m so excited about getting slightly behind the Americas Cup 34 scene — and out on San Francisco Bay for races 6 and 7! — that I’m dreaming up things might go wrong. Could there be too much wind to race? In race 4 both boats averaged 31 knots — with bursts to 45 — in winds that averaged 19 with peak gusts at 23. Obviously things can really wrong when a catamaran is going that fast while delicately balanced on relatively tiny lifting foils. Or might Oracle Team USA find some way to delay further as crew and/or boat changes are hotly rumored?…
I was blown away, partially due to the timing. Just after writing about how apps can make fascinating historical cartogrphy easily accessible, I learned about a fascinating advance in 21st century mapping. I’d guess that most every Panbo reader has marveled at the seamless panoramic photography found in Google Street Maps; well, now it’s possible to use very similar technology to tour inside a ship, and the vessel Google chose for the first demonstration is a corker…
A handsome addittion to Camden Harbor recently has been the latest launch of the power catamaran design that was almost Gizmo, and darned if it doesn’t have a certain gizmological flare. Check the high-low combination of solid state and magnetron radars, for instance. In fact, the gadget-loving owner, Brian Strong, is a regular Panbo reader and he wrote up an interesting explanation of his electronics choices…
Yes, it sure looks like overkill — and this shot doesn’t even include the iPad that’s often mounted here at Gizmo’s lower helm — but I’ve definitely found ways to put all these screens to work. In this particular scene the boat is crawling out of a very shallow back creek (actually called Back Creek) where we’d hidden from the worst of a cold gusty low that had me wondering if spring would ever materialize. It was still gusting in the high 20’s and that’s only 2.8 feet under the StructureScan transducer that’s fastened to the keel forward. If you look closely you’ll see many chart types, including the C-Map Max format now well supported by Coastal Explorer. The day before I’d gotten a serious reminder about the value of multi charting…
What the heck? This morning In Myrtle Beach it was the same frosty 36 degrees as it was in Camden, Maine. I’ve got lots more install work I can do before heading north, but it’s fun to check out the odd lot of early ICW cruisers who turn into Osprey Marina’s narrow entrance channel. Particularly curious was this venerable Cape Dory 25 that came in looking like it had been knocking around at sea. In fact it had just come non-stop and single-handed from St. Augustine, Florida, and had gotten there mostly offshore from Cape May, New Jersey, just last month. Yes, in February, and the owner’s previous sailing experience was aboard a Sunfish on a lake. I had to know more!
I’ve heard it said that if you heeded all the manufacturer advice about antenna placement, you’d need a boat 100-feet long with four or five masts. I’ve been meaning to ask Panbo readers about how to best use Gizmo’s single (though beefy) antenna mast, but instead I went and rejiggered everything last week and your advice will have to wait for the next revision. What mainly drove the change is the long term loan of a FLIR M-Series camera system, which certainly deserves the premier masthead position…
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