Where the...
09 May 2009 | Whangarei: The weather is awful. Three lows are spinning around each other vying to see which one will drown us.
The Weatherman
Where-are we?
Computing, usually laptops, has come to small boat navigation in a big way. With one notable exception, we know of no one exclusively using a sextant to find their way. Those of us with both systems on board probably haven't opened their Nautical Almanacs in years. It's just too easy to plot and follow a course accurate to a few feet. We call it following The Yellow Brick Road. We do, of course, keep a running paper plot in case the electrons go wandering off at a critical moment. Laptops are surprisingly tough, but not indestructible.
That said, I've spent part of two days (at the dock) configuring our navigation system. Navigation isn't the 'putes only function. It is tied to our SSB HF radio through a Pactor III modem as a vital part of our safety inventory - receiving Weatherfax, GRIB (gridded binary) files, offshore Buoy Weather reports, e-mails at sea as well as what most people think a radio is for! Talking! Imagine that.... When we're on a passage, we check in with the Pacific Seafarer's Net daily on 14300 MHz at 0300 Zulu. There is fifteen minutes of general B.S. followed by emergency/priority traffic and finally a roll call of vessels under way. Our position is reported to YOTREPS daily. It's really nice to know someone is going to miss you and have an idea of where to start looking if you go off the air.
Electronic Charting: NOAA and the NGA (National Geospatial Intelligence Agency) give ENC's (electronic navigation charts) away and the companies supplying the charting programs to the yachties do their best to keep your hands off them. No profit in free stuff, you know. A big aircraft manufacturer sells a world set of these charts and a charting program back to us for about fifteen grand. This has spawned a whole genre of code-crackers supplying bootleg software all over the planet... a practice which would dry up if they dropped their prices a bit. (Like suckers...We have a legit copy covering a much smaller area). Anyone who knows how to convert a .vpf file to .bsb, let me know.
When interfaced with a GPS, all of this can show which marina berth you're in - if you're in the U.S., Canada, most of Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. You can even overlay the chart with a radar image and split the screen with an actual photo or 3D depth contours of that tricky harbor entrance. It's a little less certain out here where the last survey might have been done by Captain Cook... No kidding. And there is a lot more of that than you might imagine. Unless someone's Navy drives a Warship there, no one is going to re-chart any of it anytime soon. That's one of the reasons we run RADAR and keep an EXTRA SPECIAL watch any time we're around the crunchy stuff.
Hasta luego