MIBS, the madness

Dear readers, sorry for the dead air! I intended to post at least a few times during MIBS (Miami International Boat Show), but your boy way over booked himself, and sometimes had a little too much fun. For starters, I got pretty consumed with the two-day NMMA Innovation Awards judging process, which turned out to be impressively serious and well organized. There were lots of worthy entries into the Consumer Electronics category, which was won by Furuno’s NavNet 3D with Honorable Mentions for Standard Horizon’s HX850S combo VHF/GPS and Globalstar’s SPOT. The full Awards press release is here. Then there were the rounds of press conferences and booth visits, and this year no less than six on-the-water electronics demos. That “Miami madness” shot above was taken during the FLIR thermal imaging cruise, which was blogged by MadMariner’s Tom Tripp. Embarrassingly, Tom also managed to cover lots of other MIBS highlights, electronic and otherwise, and my mates from PMY produced a really neat set of show videos.

I did output something, though, which was a presentation about Panbo to my colleagues at the Boating Writers International annual breakfast. That was fun, but the surprise highlight of the event was picking up my first ever First Place in the Electronics category of the BWI writing contest. I got it for a Feb. 2007 Sail feature titled “The Future of NMEA 2000” (that just went online). I got to see some of that N2K future actually happening at MIBS and I’ll be reporting on that and many other highlights soon. I also gratefully accepted a lot of Panbo plaudits from both electronics professionals and consumers, and explored a few angles that might make Big Gizmo an even better, and more possible, dream. In fact, I was feeling so good—perhaps even swell-headed—that yesterday’s return trip seemed almost just. Major bumps near the Chesapeake, unscheduled fuel stop in Boston, Portland landing through maybe a 100’ ceiling, then a drive home through fog with sometimes zero ceiling. Once truly settled, I will have more MIBS.