123 TD Andrea

I'm a bit weather obsessed. No it's worse that. I'm a decent amateur meteorologist, but note I do not claim by any known standards to be a professional. I do have an impressive set of weather links and through them I have access to most of the same tools meteorologists use.

On Wednesday I'm eating lunch out and convince staff to switch one of the TV's to the Weather Channel. The morning had been warm and heavily overcast, and I was trying to decide what would become of the rest of the day. Yep the low was still in the gulf, and not appearing to be doing much. The big rain blob that was stalled a bit to the south was just starting to lift northward. I think I maybe see a little more twist in the radar image than I would have expected, but off I go to a boat condo facility. Working on the inside where it's dry has become the mandate of the day.

Word play analysis

Your word is "singerie." "singerie, did I pronounce it right?" "Yes, singerie." "What is the part of speech?" "It's a noun." "May I have the definition?" "Singerie is a picture, decoration or design in which monkeys are depicted." "Would you please use it in a sentence?" "The singerie painting Bob bought for one buck at the flea market depicts monkeys in top hats and tails talking about how disgusting their species smell." "Singerie, S-I-N-G-E-R-I-E, Singerie."

One of my favorite shows to watch is the Scripp's annual spelling bee. It provides some hope that not every child is spending all of their time mindlessly drooling while watching looping six second Vine videos on smart phones.

I was surprised. "Singerie" is a real word? Why in the world did we ever need to have a word for a picture depicting monkeys aping human behavior in a painting? I don't have a single painting decorated with monkeys, and don't know anyone who does. I can't even remotely understand why someone would want to have said simian related content on their wall. Now that I'm through insulting both collectors worldwide of singerie based art, my point is don't we have enough words already?

Arduino weds Raspberry. The "Freeboard" project

"If you imagine it's possible, someone else is already trying to doing it, or has already done it." The Installer.

This was how I left my musing on the fictitious open source Celestronic M1 chart plotter system. I wasn't aware at the time how extensive the efforts were by an ever increasing cabal to build these types of systems. My screen display was photoshopped, the ones below are real.

Another aspect of the Celestronic story was to illustrate how tentative marine electronics manufacturers have been in adopting new technologies, although this has certainly improved over just the past few years. It seems with each technological advancement the buying public endorses, the rest of the herd immediately follows. Raymarine introduced the e7d with both WiFi, and blue tooth, and now who doesn't have this capability? But WiFi, and Bluetooth had been laying around for many years before its adoption into marine electronics world.

This all started with a somewhat cryptic comment left on the Celestronic post by "Practical Pirate." "Check out Freeboard at 42.co.nz." I did, and this is Robert Huitema's approach to an open source hardware/software navigation system, "The Freeboard Project".

You haven't come a long way baby.

"Frank, long time no hear, what's up?" "I need a GPS Bill, I'm maybe thinking about racing one of my boats in a new class." "Okay I guess, but's what's wrong with your Garmin 545?" "It doesn't meet the rules Bill?" "What do you mean it doesn't meet the rules, does it need to be newer?" "No, it has to be older. The rules say," The following is the SBIP APPROVED LIST OF GARMIN GPS’S 172, 172C, 178, 178C, 182, 182C, 188, 188C, 192, 192C, 198, and 198C. "Crimniy Frank, none of these are even manufactured anymore."

I have no comm port so I must scream

Six weeks ago I embarked on what should have been a fairly mundane task of getting NMEA data from a GPS and some older Simrad gear imported into a laptop running Nobletec's Odyssey Time Zero navigation software. This wasn't my first time at the NMEA data rodeo, and the results were pretty typical. Using the existing Prolific serial to USB converter I could only have one talker, and one listener, not that I didn't try to get a second talker to work. Alas, but not unsurprisingly one talker only for you, and some of the older NMEA version data was getting lost in translation. To help with these issues a Actisense NDC-4 was purchased.

Hello, my name is Bob, and I'm a battery abuser. Hi Bob!

Behold the flooded lead acid battery, unfortunately a perennial favorite of all too many boaters. Why? They cost less than better battery types such as sealed or AGM's. When I say they cost less I mean they are the cheapest battery you can buy. They do work well, if you can, and do check them on a regular basis, and the hotter the ambient temperatures become, the more often you have to check them. The words of the day are "evaporation, and accessibility."

I look at Bob shuddering, and wringing his pasty white smooth hands as he stares down into the crammed full engine room. Battery problems again Bob? You had these changed just last year didn't you? Where did you get them from, Wallymart? You did? Hum-mm  ahhh, who installed them Bob? Your skinny nephew did? When was the last time you checked the water levels in these Wallymart batteries?

Yachting on the Salton Sea

I was excited. A week in Palm Springs, a place I had never been. Looking around online I found there were lots of things to do. Go canyon hiking fending off gila monsters and tarantulas. Nope, not for me. The cable car ride, sure that's fine. Joshua Tree National Park, that sounds interesting. Are there tarantulas there? The Salton Sea? What's that all about?

It was the perfect storm. Bad engineering, greed, financial desperation, and the belief that the Colorado river could be managed, all combined at the turn of the century to create the Salton Sea. Today the Salton Sea, California's largest lake has an apocalyptic miasma about it, and a very uncertain future.

"Homeland Security" memo

MEMORANDUM FOR:  John LaPoint, chief of marine vessel tracking directorate.

FROM:  Bob Aliason, R&D manager, personnel tracking group.

SUBJECT:  New vessel tracking technology tests.

John, I can't tell you how pleased I am with the initial results we have gotten from this newly proposed vessel tracking technology we have code named "WiFiEye."

We all remember the reaming we took over the costs of installing all of those coastal AIS receivers disguised as cell phone towers. We're also still getting claims from the Department of the Interior for damage to coastal wetlands when they were installed. Complaints from all of the cell phone users grumping they weren't getting a cell signal from them didn't help things either. What made all of this worse was we never identified a single threat by collecting AIS data. I think the perps were just turning off their AIS transmitters before they offloaded their nerve gas, or suitcase nukes. I told everyone at the time that you shouldn't be able to shut them off before the legislation was passed.

Boat sale observations, the cast and crew

Being a shewed observer of human behavior I have noted some traits that seem to be common to most used boat sales. The first is that when people tell you it's not about the money, it's always about the money. The second one is the seller is going to lose money. It's all about the old tired joke" What are mixed emotions?" It's watching your mother in law driving your new car off a cliff.

Boating flare guns, or testicular terror?

Recently a Florida man, of course it's a Florida man, inadvertently or at least I hope so, shot himself in the groin with a marine flare gun. He subsequently required notable medical attention for damaged anatomy located in said region. So the question occurred to me, "What is the viability of using a marine flare gun as a weapon for self defense on a boat?"

You're kidding me right? You're not?

"Igor, I'm ready, hand me the brain, and my magnifying glasses. Give me a little space Igor, and what have you been using for mouthwash? Road kill? Good I'm done Igor. Throw the big knife switch... AND IT'S ALIVE!.... Hmmm sort of at any rate. It drools a lot, it's picking its nose, and sniffing the acetone. Igor where did you get this brain from?" "Ah that's a long story boss, but you know that bar across from the Magnifico boat factory?"

I'm perpetually flabbergasted at the inane things I find on production boats. They slap them together, and let someone else worry about the consequences. Here is today's prime example of a basic task made excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible. This sail boat came from the factory with the wind instruments and autopilot installed during construction. I'm adding a new Raymarine e7D to the starboard steering station, Ram mount for the Ipad on the port less used steering station, and a SR6 network box with a Sirius receiver for weather.

The Celestronic M3. The perfect chart plotter?

I was surprised I was even invited to see it. I met the boat at a private dock, and departed for a two hour cruise. This nav system looked sleek, but unimposing at first. It's only 1/2" thick, 14" wide and 10" high. But one should never judge a book by it's cover, and the wireless Celestronic M3 proves this.

Boats that spread their wings

Just as soon as the Wright Brothers figured out how to get an airplane off the ground, inventors were trying to get them to work on water. The first successful float plane flight was in the flimsy looking Le Canard in 1910. By 1923 short hop commercial flying boat service became available in Britain.

The pinnacle of commercial flying boat service was the iconic Pan Am Pacific Clipper (Boeing 314) starting in 1939. Service ended in 1941 with the US entry into WWII. The introduction of the Lockheed Constellation and the Douglas DC-4 rendered large commercial transoceanic and flying boat service obsolete. None of the Boeing 314 aircraft exist today. The last one was scrapped in 1950.

Here is the vocabulary. Seaplanes can take off and land on water and runways. The subclass of this genre is amphibian aircraft. They divide into floatplanes, and flying boats, with the later being defined as having a hull. What you're looking at is a sleek Seawind 3000 flying boat, and you have to build it yourself, or at least more than half of it. You can also buy one someone else built and had certified.

Slippery slope

"Okay Bob, give me about 15 minutes, and I will have the transducer installed. I will leave the wire tied up in the transom to the motor harness in a plastic bag. When you get the boat back to your house I will stop by and pull the transducer wire forward, and install the rest of the gear." "Thanks Bill, but I have been thinking. Since you're already here, could you get the GPS installed? I have been out of boating for a while, and I don't think I could find my way home without it." I look at my watch. This was supposed to be a quick give and go on a busy full schedule day.

That's when I heard the loud pop of a small vortex to the ether opening, and felt the first tug on my soul. I look at Bob, and I know he is right, so I say "Okay Bob, if the yard will give you the time I'll stick the gear in. Then I gotta go."

Playing with PuTTY and NMEA

"Welcome to "This is your life,", and please give a warm welcome to our surprise guest NMEA 1.5."

"Well NMEA 1.5, how are you feeling?" "Well I'm doing okay, I guess. I don't do much work anymore, and nobody calls me to do anything new. I mostly hang around in my ninth floor walk up apartment with my five cats and watch reruns on TV. I was important once you know, but today, not so much."

Link love? Do I look like a cheap date?

Every few years for some unknown nostalgic reason I think I like spam, and I buy some. It gets cooked with Don Ho singing Tiny Bubbles with his ukulele in the background. But like that extruded McRib thing that appears every now and then. I'm always disappointed. I too can get sucked into that "An ounce of image exceeds a pound of performance thing." But for sure I don't like the taste of comment spam.

In the beginning I just put up with it. My email tells me I have a comment. I look at it, and if it's comment spam I just dump it, until one day I saw this on the Rant.

How it's made

Today on "How It's Made", bronzing chart plotters, macrame hanging basket holders, tie dyed T shirts, and a Rant.

Lets start with the choice of Wordpress or Blogger? To be honest, I was clueless at the time, and took the option of using Blogger's no cost, over Word Press's small cost. The whole decision to do this at all was intellectual masturbation at its best.

Milling around online and looking at blogs, all I could think was "look at all these billions of megabytes of crap." In many ways it isn't. Families use it as an online equivalent of the Xmas letter. People on trips chronicle their ventures. Teenagers write about their angst, and almost all of it is of little interest to me. I was sorry to hear Aunt Em broke her hip, but Dorothy's blog tells me she would get better if she quit stealing the morphine.

VHF marine radio operators are standing by

Who would of thought just a few short years ago that your mobile phone could replace all of that expensive complicated, and bulky electronic equipment on your boat. It has a GPS, lots of marine charting apps are available, radar weather, and even a fish finder app. If you get into trouble you can also call for help, or can you?

Posted on the Flager Live website was the story I took this excerpt from.

"The drifting boat and passengers were located by Air One on the Intracoastal Waterway near the Whitney Lab in Marineland around 1:15 a.m. The Palm Coast boat owner, Danilo Gomez, 43, explained that he, three family members and the teenager were heading home from St. Augustine when they experienced engine problems. He said the cell phone they had did not work and he was unable to call for assistance."

I don't know exactly why the cell phone on the boat didn't work. It might have been broken, had a dead battery, or maybe they were just too far from a cell tower. But I think we can comfortably infer they didn't have a VHF radio. Otherwise why would they have been way over due, and drifting around in the ICW in the middle of the night?

The disclaimer, it's not our fault.

Warning!!! By pressing the enter key on this chart plotter you are acknowledging that this is merely an aid to navigation, and anything that happens to you by using this or our vendors product is absolutely all your fault. You are also agreeing to hold us harmless even if there errors and omissions in our product, if you hit something, get lost, or we just told to use obsolete information.

You know you just can't make this stuff up. This is taken from a new Navionic's chart showing the Stump Pass area on the west coast of Florida, along with some chart notes about the pass. I took the liberty of underlining the less than constructive advice the cartographers have offered the user. I suspect they will correct this quicker then sending an email to their website.

Remember, it is just an aid to navigation.

And a tip of the hat to Steve Stevens for spotting it.

The FEMA project

Thanks for coming everyone. Our beloved president of Magnifico Yachts, Mr Grunion has asked me to do an update for the engineering team on our two FEMA programs. Our first program is to find out if our yachts can be built to meet FEMA hurricane standards. This has turned out to be little more difficult than we thought due to the impact testing requirements.

We did get a good deal on the air cannon we bought in a government surplus auction, and finally got it installed in the old mold shop out back. That's the good news. The bad news is that it took a little time to learn how to use it.

Staff went out to marine salvage companies, and collected a broad range of stuff that might blow around in a marina during a hurricane. We got lots things like beer coolers, sub-woofers, flag poles, daiquiri blenders, and that sort of boaty stuff. For the first test, we set up one of our hulls about 100' in front of the cannon, and loaded it with a LORAN unit. The purchasing department had bought a lot of them on sale off Ebay before they realized the system had been shut down two years earlier.

Splitting the transducer

The Parmain top secret laboratories have been bombarding a transducer with protons trying to get it to split. The DARPA program funding was pulled when the janitor said, "Just add a wire pigtail to the transducer, it's simple." Drat, time to write another grant request to DARPA. Maybe this time we could design a talking GPS for a boat. It should be simple enough for the average boater to use. To guide you to your destination it could say "Colder" or "Warmer." If you lurch to a stop it will say "Freezing."

Of all of the electrical things that exist on a boat, your transducer is the most reliable. It's always immersed in a salty chemical soup, gets dragged through the water often at very high speeds, and yet it keeps on working year after year. When I get a call dealing with a "no depth reading" problem, the first thing I suspect is the depth finder itself. Second could be the transducer face is covered with marine life having a rave party, and or has gotten knocked up. Third is damaged wiring. Fourth, and only very rarely the transducer has failed. There is an exception here. If it is a Garmin system, it may be suffering from thermistor-itis.

Stereo land antics

Meet Seth Lopod. He is currently on his vacation, but he is employed full time by boat builders. Seth is specialist in the installation of boat gear in places that are just impossible to get to. With eight long flexible tentacles he can squeeze in to the most cramped locations. He saves boat builders a lot of money in both design costs, and access plates.

Statistics to avoid

The annual USCG Recreational Boating Statistics is somewhat dry reading to say the least. It's a graphs, tables, and runes filled dusty tome. So in the public's interest, the Parmain Top Secret Laboratory's super computer has been burning its vacuum tubes all week crunching it's 79 pages of data. This has all been carefully analysed, and summarized into a "How best to improve your chances of dying" in a boating related accident.