Xmas 2015

“If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble.” 

― E.B. White

Is this the best production power boat ever made?

A google search for "The best boat every made" yields really interesting results, but no consensus. They vary from wild west style verbal shoot outs on the Hulltruth forum, to magazines who love to do pieces built around lists. Headlines aver these are the top ten, twenty or even fifty pontoon, sport fishing, bass boats sailboats, and you get the drift.

I'm going to remove all of this ambiguity and just say that the Classic Boston Whaler 13 is the best production power boat ever built. It's an audacious statement, but I think for a variety of reasons it's very true. Timelessness, safety, durability, functionality, high resale value, maintainability, simplicity, and design are my criteria. This little boat excels in all of these.

Local boats I like, the Eco Trekker

I didn't know what to think. At a glance my first thought was it seemed to be an anorexic trimaran sailboat that was demasted. I snapped a pic with my phone took a few more steps, looked again, and went back to the truck to get my real camera. There's more than meets the eye here, and the more I learned the better I liked it.
   

Using Shakespeare's VHF cable Centerpin connectors successfully

I use a lot of these connectors, but with a caveat the connector is going to live in a dry environment. If your connections are going to be exposed to rain and saltwater even if only rarely use the the traditional solder/crimp connectors. Like all connectors there are some pluses and minuses, starting with varying db losses, the need for special tools, and so on. There is also a valid school of thought that the soldered versions are better, and I won't disagree with this. However my sense is failures are in most, but not in all cases, more driven by the level of corrosion exposure than the type of connector used. Personally I've had good luck with the crimp-on units, but you have to do it right and this is what I'm talking about.

The Splendid Galley 2015 Holiday Apps

Okay, maybe last year's Jalapeno Spam, bacon jam, and bacon bowls app was a little over the top. Dr Dave wasn't particularly happy with it and wanted nutrition information about it in the piece which was a real tedious P in the A to do. Belatedly I figured out that using adjectives that described fried Spam sticks as glistening and lubricious was most likely why Gourmet magazine sent my recipe submittal back shredded.

So this year we're going to tone it down just a skosh, while still providing two Rant galley tasty and tested apps that won't immediately cause a heart attack. Sigh. This year it's cheesy bread with a healthy twist, sort of, and bacon strips with chocolate, not quite so organic or healthy, but really good.

It's too damn hot!

I'm sure when this boat trailer spare tire exploded it was heard. That's one bodacious rupture and it happened where you see it in a dealer's lot. There is plenty of tread left, although it's clearly not a new tire. So what caused this? I know exactly what happened. It's just too damn hot in Florida.

Dealing with the ORBS and trying to follow the rules

If installing autopilots was an occasional thing for me, this wouldn't be a big deal, just a minor pain in the ass. But I'm still not very happy about Teleflex's change to ORB (O Ring Boss) fittings. I don't really have a problem with the fittings themselves excluding the difficulty of getting them, and their price. It's the overall design approach that I'm struggling with. These fittings are perfect for the boat builder. Screw them in, twist them to where you want them, tighten the nut, and you're done. No pipe thread goo, or Teflon tape and Teleflex avers they will have lower warranty costs. This is very likely true. But what about me? I have needs too!

Kickstarting NMEA to Signal K gateways

I would have never thought you would see a NMEA certified gateway product on Kickstarter, but Digital Yacht is funding a Signal K gateway, and very successfully to boot. In the first five days they are past halfway to their goal. I was the third one to pledge, and Ben Ellison was the second. You can read his really good piece about this on Panbo. Got some spare change? Support Signal K and Digital Yacht on Kickstarter.

The connected boat is coming!

NMEA 2105 conference musings on technology

The 2015 Baltimore NMEA conference was in my mind truly notable for a number of reasons. I was privileged this year to be a NMEA technology award judge along with my esteemed colleagues Ben Ellison (Panbo) and Jim Fullilove (Marine Electronics Journal). Signal K had it's NMEA debut. The two presentations by Tim Mathews were the most attended at the conference. But most of all the advancement of marine electronics took a massive surge forward. Terminology never heard at a NMEA conference before abounded. Pulse compression, gallium nitride amplifiers, mills cross phased arrays, Android OS platforms and much more. You know who is responsible for this happening? Without a doubt, you are!

The ORB's have come, are you prepared?

This boat really was never designed to have an autopilot installed despite the fact it's a twin engined hybrid pleasure bowrider and fishing boat. I visit the boat, crawl around, snap pics to aid my creaky memory and figure it's possible. Not easy, very cramped but I can do it. It has a new Teleflex helm jammed into a tiny console, no worries there other than the lack of room. What I didn't know was something was different, very different about this helm that I think even an experienced installer like myself could easily miss. I would bet that most couldn't tell from the picture what this is, but I'm going to enlighten all. From my experience the line from the movie Groundhog Day "Anything that's different is good" was not.

Turbulence City

There are a some things right with the picture below and things really wrong, at least from my perspective. I labeled the pic so there weren't any doubts about orientation. I'll speak slowly for the benefit of the more boating challenged. This is an aft bilge compartment. The arrow pointing down is the direction towards the pointy sharp end of the boat. The one pointing upward is towards the square back end of the boat. This is a boat that has a "Liner," meaning there is a layer of foam in between the hull and the top shiny fiberglass surfaces you see can see. The foam layer provides floatation and the laminated nature of the construction makes the boat structurally stiffer.

But our mystery deepens (bring in the Twilight Zone theme music here). What are the two liner cut outs about and why are they there in the first place? Are these the boating equivalent of crop circles? Is Turbulence city a real place? We're going to explore these weighty concepts and see if there are any real answers.

The Elco 48' Flat Top, Local boat's I like #3.

Elco's beginings started with an order for 55 electric launches being awarded to an upstart General Electric Launch and Navigation Company for use at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. This was a comptetive and contentious bid whose spec's just said 55 boats capable of carrying 30 passengers each. Two steam powered launches were in the bid mix along with two electric versions. You have to keep in mind that explosive petroleum fueled engines are still in their infancy. At the time of the bid only two boats in the US were known to have them.

sk tour

Read more here....

test

Engine hatch hell

It was a boat engine hatch much like the one seen below. It was open and the boat was being worked on when the hatch lifter suddenly failed sending it crashing to the deck. The problem was a person was in the way. It took two frantic and adrenaline driven men to manually lift the very heavy hatch off him. An ambulance rapidly transported the badly injured tech to the local hospital's emergency room.

The medical expenses are in excess of $100,000 dollars and still accumulating. He will be off work for at least three months or more recovering. As horrific as this accident was, the good news is his prognosis for a full recovery is likely, and had he been in a slightly different place the falling hatch could have killed him. When a hatch lift fails catastrophically while you're under it you either get crushed or the edges of the hatch act like a guillotine. This event has given me more than some cause for concern. On any given day this could easily have been me!

How to hoist a Signal K flag

This whole event comes from an internal conversation with the core Signal K group about getting people to send in pictures of Signal K flags flying on their boats. They all have boats. I don't currently have a boat, that's completed at any rate.

As a bit of a lark I suggested I could hoist the SK flag as a tattoo. I figured this would be much better than hoisting my own petard by far. Then Rob outed me on Panbo. It was now real and printed using pixelated ink on my favorite marine electronics website for all to see. Okay, no worries, I can make this happen, and did.

Radar raconteur

The radar has been elevated. Its gone from being nearly blind and has entered the world of the sighted. This was a most nuanced and detail driven job. It wasn't that it was physically hard, just every single damn aspect of this task was fiddly. Nothing was straight forward. Climb up, climb down. Go back to Ace hardware and stare into those little boxes containing a zillion parts looking for an answer. Climb back up, climb back down. 

It was a screw up I briefly touched in a earlier piece. The problem was how to undo the damage, install a elevated radar mount, and make it look as close as possible to a factory installation. This took creativity, imagineering, and some classic MacGyvering to pull off.

Boat builders installing marine electronics. Is this really a good idea?.

Like the title asks, should boat builders be in the marine electronics business? I think the answer for some is maybe yes. For some absolutely not. Then there is everything else in between. So I'm going to opine a bit on this subject and explore the pluses and minus of this approach starting with the costs to the buyer first. For the buyer the big plus of a factory electronics install is it's easier to finance the electronics on a new boat when it's folded into the mortgage.... provided it's well installed.

Pump Wasteland

All pumps are born innocent and full of hope. Swaddled in colorful four color printed boxes and clear plastics they wait on the shelf for that happy day they get adopted and go to their new forever home. They have yet to know they will end up enslaved in a chamber of horrors. Buried alive in a stifling dark, damp, moldy and nearly inaccessible compartment. This is their hellish destiny. I'm sure on a quiet night I can hear their tiny muffled pleas coming from the back of the boat. "Help us, it hurts so bad and we're afraid" quaver tiny voices. "What did we do to deserve this?"

Life isn't fair. You're born a pump, your job is to pump. End of story. It could have been worse. Think about the disposable diaper's eventual chagrin when they discover their purpose in their new forever home.

Sharknado, the review

"Hi Bob, what's your script pitch this time?" "This a real winner Joe. I've given it the working title Wolfnado. It has everything you need to make a true Blockbuster. Vicious hungry wolves fall out right out of the sky and rip apart anything they see. It's got skimpy bikini shots for the teenagers, lots of guns, chainsaws, blood, fangs and no big words. I'm telling you right now Joe, this is really high concept stuff."

"Bob, that sounds great but how are you going to get it to rain wolves?"

"Joe, this is the high concept stuff I was talking about. There will be a huge storm that develops over Florida. Tornadoes will suck up thousands of hungry raging wolves. The storm then dumps them all over Miami Beach. There's plenty of cheap stock beach footage we can buy that will keep production costs way down."

"Bob, I don't want to rain on your wolf parade, but there aren't very many wolves in Florida if any at all, and the effects people are going to scream about the costs. Those fur computer graphics stuff ain't cheap and all those hemp wearing environmentalists will be on our asses also."

"How about sharks Bob? I mean who loves man eating sharks? Florida has tons of them swimming around and biting people? I don't even go to the beach because I saw that Jaws movie as a kid. We can make them out of rubber cheap, they can be reused and we can put fins on weighted skateboards and pull them around in shallow water." I'm thinking big. Big like "Sharknado." I bet you could write a script in about a week, and we could make it for chump change. Maybe around a fat million dollars. Hmmm... who could we sell it to? The Scfy channel maybe?"

Optical delusions, it's a matter of perspective

Two things are going on here. One is the camera is failing and it took some luck to get this picture below in the first place. It was once upon a time a color camera I think, but it has become more of a faded black and white image when it's working at all.  It's also the incorrect type of kind of camera. The image is accurate but the POV is not.

The Garmin 7612 display is new, the existing camera not so much. The owner was aware the camera had been in poor health, and from my perspective it had long passed on into Kodak heaven. In truth it had no power initially, but when given power it had a severe case of the Delirium Tremens. It really doesn't matter. For these reasons it's going into a plastic body bag for transport and internment at the local paupers landfill.

Two hours afloat and too many things to say.

This radar installation confirmed my sense that radar beams can't see through aluminum pipes. This wasn't something I was so curious about that I would expend valuable energy in trying to test, but now I have some empirical evidence to back up my hunch. 

This was two hours of owner training on a shiny new boat. Like all things I do, it seems my eye has a proclivity to spot other things and events to talk about and today was no different. The radar problem was evident as I walked up to the boat. It's a FUBAR install. It's not my work and I can't do anything about it today so the training will go on anyway.

I try to beat the basics into owners. My approach is to make the owner push all of the buttons, and we are going to do some things over and over until it starts to approach second nature. Make waypoints, name waypoints and go to waypoints. Make tracks, save tracks, name tracks and follow tracks. You get the drill. Add to this autopilot 101 use, and a stern lecture that bad things can happen if you do dumb things with the autopilot at high speeds. In extreme cases you could end up precipitously leaving the boat and watching it recede into the distance while you contemplate all of the mistakes you have made in your life, this last one in particular. I cut this educational activity off at about two hours max. It's all normal mortals can absorb in one shot.

A tale of two motors

Our two motors suffered from a long and terminal case of rust-itis. It starts with a dermal complexion rash and if not promptly treated rapidly spreads, causes bloating and in the end given enough time all that will remain is a umber colored stain.

For steel to rust you need two basic things. Water and oxygen. Neither by itself causes rust, you need the collusion of both of these ingredients. Now if you add salt to the mix you can dramatically accelerate the process. But my essay isn't about rust, it's about how the water got there in the first place.

I have two recent examples. One is a winch motor in a forward anchor locker, and the other is a autopilot hydraulic pump located in the lazaret. In both cases the owner's aver the motors were working the last time they used them and I believe them. My inside voice however is mumbling the last time these motors were used Ron Popeil was selling spray on hair in a can.

A very connected boat. Part 1

The client wanted two things. The first was satellite TV and KVH TV1 fit the bill. It's small, easy to install and supports up to eight receivers. The second goody on the list was improved WiFi access. Although the home port has adequate WiFi service they have discovered many marinas do not. Based on Ben Ellison's Panbo assessment of WiFi systems I chose the Rouge Wave Pro. It works better than my most optimistic expectations. I'll talk about this a bit later.

Then it became a case of in for a penny, in for a pound. The original flat panel plasma TV was okay, but just that. Measurements are taken, and it's new TV shopping time. The end result was a Samsung 5500 32" Smart TV with WiFi. Smart is an understatement. Built in browser with some clever techniques that let you use the remote for URL and search entries. Easy short cuts to Netflicks, YouTube and the ilk. It's very thin, and looks sharp in its new home.

So now we have a big chunk of the pieces in already in place to create a truly connected boat. I've added a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B to act as an interim Signal K server and it's now connected it to the Netgear router. The two yellow boxes will turn blue in time. I have the Arduino and will install it downstream. It will be used to test some Internet Of Things control applications and the system can be used to test prototype gateways when they become available. This is one of two local systems being installed. But this is all for part two.