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.

Chesapeake Bay to New York City - Just Cruising

The Lady Maryland, Sunrise Off New York City

We departed the city mooring field in beautiful Annapolis on Monday morning, heading north up Chesapeake Bay. The bay narrowed as we moved north, and we found ourselves surrounded by beautiful wooded countryside and rolling farmland, a sea of green.

Bridges On The C&D Canal

 At the top of the bay we turned to starboard, running east through the C&D Canal. As required, we lowered our sails for that section, concentrating on the (truly) beautiful scenery along the canal shoreline.

This canal carries quite large ships, car carriers, tugs and barges, traffic of all types, but we had a quiet passage and exited just in time to anchor in the Delaware River before dinner.

Where the canal exits, the Delaware River is a massive tidal estuary, at times miles across.  We set out at 5:00am with a run-out tide, seeing 9.4 knots SOG at times, and traveled over 50 nautical miles before reaching the Atlantic Ocean once again, right at Cape May.

The Delaware River - Tankers, Container Ships, Tugs & Barges, plus Nuclear Power Plants

Beautiful Cape May

Cape May has a fierce reputation as somewhere to keep well clear of, however we found calm conditions, sunshine and blue skies, and were able to cut across the (very shallow) inshore shoals at Cape May to hug the shoreline as we turned north towards New Jersey and New York City.

Charting Caution - Cruisers should note that the Navionics chart data card we purchased for our Raymarine chart plotter, only weeks ago here in the USA, was woefully incorrect through that area of shoals - clearly that sand moves around a lot. However the Navionics Sonar Chart data on our iPads was absolutely spot-on accurate. I really do need to update the chart plotter card with the latest data from the iPads ..... it seems that Navionics crowd sourced depth data, known as Sonar Charts, is paying dividends. It also seems that buying a new data card at West Marine, or any chandlery, doesn't mean the chart data will be "fresh".

Update, September 7, 2017 - check the story here for our updated (disastrous) experiences with Navionics Sonar Charts - we won't ever use them again!

From Cape May we continued north west along the New Jersey shoreline, passing Atlantic City and its network of high rise towers just before dinner time. Over night we motor sailed on, in company with the schooner Lady Maryland, arriving off the entrance to New York Harbour just after sunrise - it was a fine welcome to New York. After breakfast we motored in to the Sandy Hook Channel and found a very sheltered anchorage in the Shrewsbury River.

Compass Installation Made Easy

Recently I came across a cruising sailboat with a beautiful new compass installation - problem was, it just didn't work. The compass had been installed in a location where the local magnetic interference was very strong, consequently the compass readings were sadly inaccurate.

A boat's compass uses the earth's magnetic flux to drive the floating card - any local magnetic forces can distort or even dominate at the compass, ruining the compass accuracy. Loudspeakers, engine blocks, electric motors, electric cables and the like can all distort the reading and in the case of steel boats the hull also has an effect.

We faced similar challenges when positioning our Raymarine EV-1 Sensor Core. This unit contains a fluxgate electronic compass, a multi axis solid state gyro and a GPS receiver.

The Sensor Core is the real intelligence that drives our autopilot system - it was important that we found a satisfactory location for the unit - the same goes for any magnetic compass. Raymarine's installation guides said it should work fine where our previous electronic compass was mounted, but we wanted to check alternate sites. In the end we measured the lowest magnetic flux field right where the old compass was mounted - out on the stainless davits mounted on the stern. Unfortunately this meant running the STng network cables another 10 meters through the boat and out onto the davits, but that's another story...

Multi Measures App

To test possible compass installation locations we used two software tools that run on the iPhone / iPad operating system. Multi Measures, by Skypaw, is an app that includes a basic Tesla meter - it graphs the field strength and gives x/y/z orientation for the magnetic flux field.

Incidentally, Tesla is the name for a measured unit of magnetic flux density, named after Nikola Tesla, a Serbian - American physicist and engineer.

What makes a good Sensor Core or electronic compass location ?  It should ideally close to the vessel center line, with access for the required network cabling and with a decent view of the sky so the internal GPS can operate. However the real driver here is lack of magnetic interference - that's the fundamental requirement.

Using the Multi Measures app we were able to wander around the boat, watching the display in real time and testing all the possible installation locations. When testing each location its a good idea to operate all the boats electrical systems, to make sure that no interference is generated when say the genset is started or when the water heater is switched on. The Multi Measures app also includes a tilt measuring function, truly useful for mounting things horizontally or vertically on boats that often have no useful reference lines.

Gemeco Marine Installers App

We also used the very capable Tesla meter included in the iNstall marine installers app by Gemeco. The Gemeco company distributes a wide range of marine electronics and NMEA network products in the USA, so this app is clearly aimed at marine electronics technicians.

iNstall includes a generous number of tools, references and calculators to make marine electronics installation a little easier - transducer details, cable sizing tools, tilt measurement and a "mix'n'match" guide for sorting out product compatibility.

The Tesla meter within the app allows you to zero the meter scale once a background level is established, then see the differences as electrical systems or machinery are activated.

Sadly for us, these handy Tesla meters proved that our inspired "alternate location" choices were not so good after all, and the Sensor Core ended up installed back out on the davits, where it works just fine.

Boat Shopping In Grenada

Loading The Important Things In Grenada - Italian Wine By The Box Load

Two weeks ago we sailed overnight from Tobago to Grenada, an overnight down-wind romp for 80 nautical miles that had us approaching the south coast of Grenada just after dawn. By 07:30am we were anchored in Prickly Bay and by 10:00am we had completed the friendly Immigration and Customs formalities - which then let us get down to the nitty gritty of this voyage - the shopping ! We had pre-ordered a range of spares and equipment from Budget Marine in Grenada, as they were around 25% cheaper than here than in Trinidad.

New Walbro Fuel Pump Installation

It took some days to gather all the parts, and we were able to farewell our good friends on Ceilydh, who are heading for the Panama canal and the west coast of Mexico As our parts trickled in to the dealer we started work, installing what had been delivered.

So, a new Walbro FRB-13 electric diesel fuel lift pump was fitted, the old unit had done 3500 hours and was starting to fail. With associated plumbing changes, this took a couple of days to complete. The pump is used for priming the fuel system on the Cummins main engine, and for transferring fuel to an aft tank that serves  the Northern Lights AC generator.

Another two days disappeared installing a new Raymarine digital radar cable in the mast, not an easy job, but essential since the old cable had become intermittent. Note to Raymarine - your original analog cable lasted over 13 years, the new digital cable served for only 20 months. Not good enough !

We also continued another project that had started back in Tobago, which was refinishing and painting the front of the mast where the spinnaker pole track is fastened. Corrosion had set in around the pop-rivet fastenings, so we had removed the track and sanded back where necessary to bright metal, then epoxy primed the surfaces.

In Grenada I started on the high build and finishing priming, a tricky task as most of it had to be done sitting in a bosuns chair, hanging on a halyard from the top of the mast. Of course the anchorage was quite rolly, so bruises and strained muscles were the order of the day, every day.

Ley is getting plenty of shoulder exercise winching me up and down the mast.

We found Grenada to be quite sophisticated, certainly compared to Tobago, yet it remains friendly and quite laid back. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of cruising boats anchored around the island, and probably several thousand more stored for the season in the many boat yards around the coast, packed in like sardines with only inches between them. I honestly have never seen so many boats in one place in all my life.

Things That Work For Us # 6 - Raymarine Autopilot

Way way back in 1990, when Crystal Blues was first launched, the new owners installed a 12 volt electric autopilot system, the Autohelm 4000.  It was made by Nautech in the UK, a company started in 1974 by mechanical engineer Derek Fawcett, a keen sailor and talented inventor.  For more history click here.

Taken over by Raytheon USA in 1990, it quickly became the Raymarine brand.  That business has since split off from Raytheon, gone through a management buy-out, failed financially and then was eventually acquired by FLIR Systems, who now have the business running fast again, with greatly improved innovation, product quality and service.  Fortunately, many of the truly experienced engineers are still with the company.

But this story is about the autopilot side of Raymarine, and the fantastic reliability and service these systems have delivered.  Lets face it - a good autopilot is worth about three crew - it never goes off watch, you don't have to feed it and it doesn't care if the beer is warm.

Most of the original gear on Crystal Blues had been upgraded over the years, but until just weeks ago the original Autohelm Rudder Position Indicator was still in active service, working just fine with the latest series autopilot electronics.  When it failed on the way to Mozambique, we swapped it out with the onboard spare, delighted to find that the physical mounting holes and even the wire color coding were the same, 25 years later !  That sort of consistency is rare, and it sure makes for ease of upgrade and happy customers.  I'm fairly certain that the failed unit had more than 50,000 nautical miles under its belt, over 25 years - a great effort.

Jamie Leads Me Through The Ram Service Procedure

How many marine electronic items last that long ?

Another important autopilot component is the linear ram - in our case a Raymarine electric Type 2 long arm version.  We installed a new ram before we departed Australia, that has now done over 30,000 nautical miles in 10 years.  Last week (with great guidance provided by Jamie Gifford from SV Totem) I stripped it down, checked, cleaned and serviced the unit.

Frankly, it looked like new inside, no powdery deposits from brushes of moving parts, no crusty debris, everything looked pristine.  I gratefully cleaned and lubricated all the gears and thrust races, and re-assembled it with a big internal thank you to the guys that designed and engineered that part.

So credit where credit is due - to Derek Fawcett, I say a very BIG thank you.

Too Many Networks - NMEA 2000, STng & More

Turck Devicenet Hub - For NMEA 2000

As you may have seen from our earlier story, we're progressively updating to newer navigation systems on board Crystal Blues, with our first update being the autopilot system. 

It is getting crazy folks - upgrading the systems in stages means that presently we have both the old and the new networks running, which means (count them) seven data networks on board :  NMEA0183 / NMEA2000 / ST1 / ST2 / STNg / HSB / Ethernet.

The NMEA 2000 networking standard is clearly the preferred network for the future, and fortunately has been adopted by our preferred vendor Raymarine, even if they insist on using non-standard connectors for their own version called STNg (those extra pins and wires in the Raymarine cables are there to carry legacy Seatalk 1 data). 

Our new autopilot uses only STNg, the older unit uses ST1.  Our sailing instruments use ST1 and ST2, plus NMEA0183.  And of course the older radar and sonar use Seatalk HSB to share graphics.  What a nightmare.  Unless we put a completely new system on board, we needed a way to integrate now,  provide a logical upgrade path in the future and to monitor what was happening on the network.