I don’t know much about Erica’s electronics, but ain’t she ‘purty’ (bigger photo here). Yesterday I went out on the Bay to watch some of the annual Castine to Camden classic yacht race (also covered here last year). The poor boats were struggling to maintain headway in almost whiffless conditions, but it was great to see this just launched classic, especially with builder Todd French (French & Webb) driving and designer Chuck Paine as ‘afterguard’. From the closeup I’m guessing B&G instruments and a Northstar 6000i multifunction display. And, yes, that’s a URL on the transom of the spiff cold-molded tender, but so far there’s not much to see at www.artisanboatworks.com.
What with a holiday trip and the stolen boat drama, Panbo suffered recently. I will definitely get back to business next week, but in the meantime how about a peek at the all-business helm I got to see aboard Spirit of Zopilote last Friday. You really must open the larger shot (link fixed!) to appreciate how well the electronics are laid out—all within reach of the comfy double helm seat—and what good sight lines are retained (here looking out along the west side of Camden’s inner harbor).
SoZ, as it’s sometimes called, is the very first Northern Marine 64’, in fact the first Northern Marine anything, built in 1997. Trust me, she feels at least as hunky as she looks. The helm is in the “best of breed” style popular then, and still popular with many salts like captain Bruce Kessler. Note Furuno CRT fishfinder and radar, Northstar GPS, and PC running Nobeltec Admiral, all separate. Note too the lack of a steering wheel! In fact there is one—down at knee level, for emergencies only—plus the power steering jog stick can run either of the two entirely independent Simrad Robertson autopilots. It feels like everything’s been thoroughly thought through on SoZ, as you will gather in this Trawler World feature on bringing her around from San Diego. I also found this nice speech apparently penned by Georgs Kolesnikovs when Kessler (seen below in SoZ’s very squared away engine room) was awarded Passagemaker of the Year.
I hear it’s a little foggy in Newport today, but I doubt it’s dampening the excitement about tomorrow’s 100th Bermuda Race. A couple of weeks ago I visited Alex Merrill aboard his dad’s J42 Finesse, above, just before they sailed from her winter berth in Maine (the phenomenal Lyman Morse yard) to Newport. The compact electronics system, much upgraded last winter, features a Raymarine E80 networked with a built-in VEI Marci computer running RayTech 5.0 and displaying on a Big Bay 10.4” monitor. Note the little WiFi antenna at top left in the photo, bigger here. Finesse actually shifted berths while I was visiting to get a better WiFi connection so Alex could download all the weather he wanted for crossing the Gulf of Maine. I’m sure he’s doing something similar in Newport right now, but during the race he’ll be limited to the ultra narrow bandwidth data available via the fixed Iridium and the SGC SSB (no, I hadn’t heard of the SGC brand either, but the Lyman Morse electronics guy is fan). Alex will be updating Panbo during the race, and we’ll be looking at Finesse’s system in a little more depth.
This is the first wheelhouse photo I’ve seen of Jim Clark’s Athena, and it sure looks like the thoroughly PC followup on Hyperion we expected.I wish I had more detail on the electronics, but neither Seascape nor Royal Huisman is giving much away. In some respects, the most interesting aspect of the photo above is that I saw it at beautiful resolution (shown here) in the latest (June/July) online edition of Professional Boatbuilder. PB, or ProBoat, or whatever, is one of the best marine publications out there, I think, but it used to be damn hard to qualify for a subscription. Now the whole magazine is available online to everyone, and in a format that I find very readable on my various PCs. ProBoat has actually been doing this for a year, which means that Nigel Calder’s interesting three part article on “Networking: The three-cable boat” is completely available, starting with the Oct/Nov 05 edition (and also means, by the way, that I was wrong when I first mentioned the series here).
Would you be surprised to learn that Audacity's electronics are minimal? Actually just a venerable Garmin 48 at the chart table and this fabulous Aqua Meter Super Cheater Tournament depth flasher in the aft companionway (bigger here). I had a flasher like this in the 70’s and they work darn well. Like an analog watch, it only takes a few brain cycles to keep track of depth on that big round dial (15 feet in this case). Plus it’s simple as pie; left button switches between the two ranges, right button controls gain and on/off. But it’s hard to see fish on these things and darn funny to think of one as a fisherman’s “Tournament Super Cheater”, but then again the similar Lowrance’s famous Fish-Lo-K-Tor was a million seller. Actually, there’s at least one company, Vexilar, still making flashers, though they look a little more sophisticated than this.
* Almost as expensive as the Raymarine C120 is the Simrad Taiyo TD-L1550 VHF direction finder. I’ve seen these on highliner sport fishing boats—for figuring out where the other guys are angling, especially the braggarts—but this was the first time I’d seen one in action. It’s impressively accurate, but Capt. Winkler and his team have to deal with the fact that oft times the VHF signals they get in the Harbor got to them on a bounce off the tall buildings on the waterfront. The Taiyo doesn’t know better, and points at the building.
* Notice the Raymarine Alphanumeric Keypad, a nice SeaTalk accessory that you don’t see that often. For Sea Tow the keypad is real help for quickly inputting a lat/long waypoint for someone needing help.
* With the keypad, the DF, and two Icom 502 VHF’s, not to mention Nextel push-to-talk cell phones, these guys are clearly equipped to find folks in distress, even if the folks can’t describe where they are very well. So wouldn’t you think they’d have the Icoms set up for DSC calls? Not yet, which surprised me. And I saw all sorts of signs—like the great Web cam and weather instruments—that Winkler runs a technically astute and customer responsive operation. I guess that there simply hasn’t been any demand for DSC. Will that change?
Above is a 42’ Maxum that Brunswick, specifically the Cummins MerCruiser division, was using as a special demo boat at the Miami Boat Show. Obviously (bigger here ) it’s loaded with Northstar’s new 8000i multifunction displays (and, yes, that lower one seemed a bit odd as you could kick it if you were being ‘casual’ like this model). Now I’d love to test the 8000i on the water (especially once the finished system ships in June), but this demo was much more about that fat joystick, and the engines, drives, and electronics it’s attached to, all called Project Zeus. I got to experience it myself and, by golly, it’s a very big deal indeed. The drives are similar to the IPS system that Volvo introduced last year, except that the props face aft (which I, from the bays of rocks and lobster traps, strongly favor). I won’t go into Zeus’s claims of efficiency, low noise, etc., though you might want to check out the press release. What I want to tell you about is how I watched a guy joystick this boat’s bow within a few feet of a day marker and then do a 360 around the mark with the bow always within those few feet. I also saw how you could push the “hold station” button on the Navman pilot and boat would sit exactly in place despite wind and current, and without thrusters. This is really revolutionary stuff, and important, I think, to the future of boating and marine electronics. More tomorrow.
Sharing my err…eclectic boat tastes is becoming an irregular Panbo weekend tradition. This one-of-a-kind wooden boat, bigger here, lives in Thomaston, Maine, and I understand the builder/owner is a crackerjack shipwright at Lyman Morse, one of whose shops is in the background. I’ve not been aboard, but judging from the total absence of antennas, I’d guess Asylum is way off the grid, with an ambiance distinctly different from, say, Friday’s Gunboat.
How about a 62’ sailing cat with an interior like a sleek apartment and the performance of a carbon racer? Sailing Anarchy has the story here, including a larger version of the picture above, in which you can better see all the Raymarine electronics. I’ll bet those big displays are E-120s, which have XVGA out ports, and thus that 42” LCD TV may be be set up to repeat one of the E screens. I’ve seen a Gunboat 42’ in a stiff breeze on Chesapeake Bay and she was flying. Check out the video at the company site.
This is the pilot house of a Nordic Tug 37 belonging to a Panbo reader in the state of Washington. It’s his very first boat! But he did spent an unusual amount of time learning navigation and analyzing all his electronics choices. It was the “locked-in” nature of dedicated electronics versus the flexibility of computers that ultimately drove his decision, plus a high comfort level with PCs. He did not, however, put all his eggs in one basket. Two matching Shuttle XPC computers (Athlon, for lower heat/power) drive the two 20” Viewsonic monitors, and all NMEA 0183 inputs/outputs are split and switched so that the chart table PC can do everything the helm PC can, and vice versa. Dual Raymarine active GPS antennas each split to one of the Standard Horizon GX3500 DSC VHFs and one of the Shuttles. (And, yes, I do think that NMEA 2000 could make most of this small data networking far simpler and more robust).
At any rate, besides being quite the contrast to yesterday’s helm, the photo above (bigger here) shows normal operating mode, with Nobeltec Admiral on radar duty to port, and Coastal Explorer at the helm as primary plotter. The owner seems to have mixed feelings about both packages, favoring CE a bit for its interface, "familiar, modern and easy to use". Apparently there’s a chance that CE will one day support the Nobeltec/Koden radar scanner that’s plugged into his Ethernet hub, but no guarantee. The boat also tracks AIS targets (with a SeaLinks receiver), which the owner says they “really, really like” in Puget Sound. Check out the key strips on both monitors; more on those tomorrow.
I don’t know much about Erica’s electronics, but ain’t she ‘purty’ (bigger photo here). Yesterday I went out on the Bay to watch some of the annual Castine to Camden classic yacht race (also covered here last year). The poor boats were struggling to maintain headway in almost whiffless conditions, but it was great to see this just launched classic, especially with builder Todd French (French & Webb) driving and designer Chuck Paine as ‘afterguard’. From the closeup I’m guessing B&G instruments and a Northstar 6000i multifunction display. And, yes, that’s a URL on the transom of the spiff cold-molded tender, but so far there’s not much to see at www.artisanboatworks.com. 
good sight lines are retained (here looking out along the west side of Camden’s inner harbor). 
I won’t go into Zeus’s claims of efficiency, low noise, etc., though you might want to check out the 
