Monday 30 October 2017

Navionics Is Sold To Garmin, Autonomous Ships Are Here Next Year

In sailing industry news, my most interesting events of the month are these ...

Autonomous Ships

The worlds first autonomous electric powered ship, Yara Berkland, will be in service on the Norwegian coast next year. Read all about it here. She will apparently replace 40,000 diesel truck journeys on southern Norway roads. And quite a few commercial seamen will not be required of course.

Garmin Acquires Navionics

The full release is here, but two days ago Garmin announced they had purchased Navionics. Now we may see the dangerous Sonar Chart issues finally fixed.

It will be interesting to see how Raymarine enjoy having to buy Navionics charts from their biggest hardware competitor.  Ouch, that must hurt.

Sunday 29 October 2017

Land Cruising, Chevrolet Truck Style



For us Aussies, cruising in the USA is all about the timing - timing to avoid tropical storms and timing to work within the limited 6 month visa that most of us have.  In our case, our visa "window" started when we arrived in Puerto Rico back in May, so we have to leave the country before November. The result is that Crystal Blues is resting securely on her own in Reedville, Virginia, while we have headed off on a cross country land cruise with a flight back to Australia thrown in for good measure - there is no rest for the wicked. We'll be camping in the back of the truck for the next 10 days, have tent, air mattress, camp stove and pepper spray for the bears. What could possibly go wrong!

We drove out of the northern neck of Virginia just three weeks ago, heading west into the Blue Ridge Mountains. By nightfall that first day we had gained a lot of altitude and adopted a new weather paradigm - fog, cold and torrential rain. We woke next morning to a flooded tent, with our air bed almost floating inside the tent. Ok, so we were still learning how to setup the camping rig.

After drying out (we found a coin laundry at the next town) we traveled about 450 miles southward on the Blue Ridge Parkway over 5 days, reaching the Smokey Mountains, camping each night in Park Service camp sites, mesmerised by the staggering colors of fall in this part of the world. Then, crossing into the Carolinas, we climbed and climbed to the highest point in the eastern USA, before entering western Georgia as we continued south through spectacular country.

Sunday 1 October 2017

Avoiding Hurricane Maria, Working On Electrics















Back in Reedville, Virginia, we secured ourselves to the dock just two days before Hurricane Maria was scheduled to touch the coast south of here. Fortunately she lost some of her "oomph" and stayed well to the south, so we only saw winds of 20 knots or so and little rain.

While Maria blew herself out we decided it was time for a little electrical therapy. Mastervolt had replaced a three year old inverter for us, under warranty, when it started to show signs of not starting our AC refrigeration system. Excellent support from them, as usual. The new unit was delivered to us back in Rockland, Maine, and this was our first chance to swap the old unit out for the new. While working in that (difficult to access) part of the boat I also wanted to replace some of our battery interconnect cables - we had a good supply of size 4/0 (107sq.mm.) tinned wire and all the necessary lugs, so we spent an afternoon making up interconnect cables to measured lengths.

It took us two days to swap the inverters over, upgrade the battery interconnects and also to replace a bilge pump sensor switch. That was just long enough for hurricane Maria to bounce off the coast and head away from us.

Right now we're preparing for the boat to stay here while we head off on our road trip, so we're checking all the bilge systems, shutting down and preserving the watermaker, servicing essential equipment etc. In case another hurricane sneaks in we've doubled up on all the dock lines and removed both the furling headsails and stowed them below.

We've been warmly welcomed back into the local community, the weather has also remained warm (at least in the daytime) and the social life has been great. Importantly, we're getting a good share of "dog time", walking the neighbours dog and even graced with a visit from our favorite sailing dog, the lovely Flaco, who as you'll see below is very interested in all things "boat". 

Three Boys Looking - Image By Chris Burry