Communications

To start with I bought a Garmin handheld GPS for coastal navigation. It had a "touchscreen" and was so easy to use: you can scroll to a dashboard with your speed and heading, ETA at next waypoint, time to sunset and other stuff you select for display, theres a compass, a place to store waypoints d routes and of course the charts. GPS is such amazing technology - its only been around for ten years but its impact on navigation at sea is only beaten by the invention of the clock according to Tom Cunliffe, an english yachting guru - and that was how many centuries ago? (accurate knowledge of time, and GMT enables accurate determination of longitude) For the first time ever according to Cunliffe we can say where we are now instead of where we were when we took the sight with the sextant.

Speaking of sextants, I dont own one or know how to use one though I know my father did.Ive read about using one and looked at the tables you make your calculations on and can see what a satisfying thing it must be to use such simple tools and a pencil and paper to work out where you are. But for now I havent attempted to learn celestial navigation, but maybe one day I will. It seems that people who go to the trouble of learning how to use a sextant, and buy one to take just in case, never end up needing to use it - I saw "sextant" on a yachties blog list of things they took which afterwards they decided were a waste of time along with a folding bicycle and a kayak. But others would no doubt swear by all three. So what happens if you cant use a sextaant and your GPS breaks down? Well you break out the spare! And maybe you would have a third one?

Anyhow the handheld screen is really tiny and I thought it would be good to have a bigger unit and screen mounted in the nav station. And I also wanted an AIS display. And I also wanted to have a personal computer for pictures, internet connections, and to be able to send email,and I wanted to be able to download weather faxes or GRIB files. So after looking at the chart plotters at the boat show and reading around, I realised that rather than buying all these things seperately I should be able to integrate all those things together on a PC. I wanted to replace my old VHF with a modern DSC enabled VHF, and seeing as I was going to have to get an HF radio if I was going off shore, it made sense to use it for email and GRIB (weather) files with a special modem I"d read about called a Pactor.

I got in touch with Marc Robinson, a radio man whose name kept cropping up on blogs and forums and at the radio course and safety at sea courses that I attended. By all accounts he was "the man" and indeed he was. He set me up with a beautiful new ICOM HF radio and Pactor III modem, and gave me a personal one on one tutorial explaining how to get the most out of it. The Pactor modem is a slim box that connects to the HF radio and a computer, and converts email into a form that can be sent as a radio signal. Its a slow connection and you can only send and receive text based messages - images and videos and webpages would take weeks to download. But I can get news, weatherfaxes and GRIB files - and will be able to write directly to this blog, for $250 a year (Sailmail is the ISP)-The alternative would be to have a satellite phone but I feel what Ive got will serve me well and is good value .
Marc Robinson also supplied all the cables and bits and pieces needed to have it all up and running, and gave strict instructions about where the insulator should go on the backstay: as low as possible! This is done to minimise the distance from the aerial - which is the backstay- to the tuner, thus minimising signal loss and maximising radio efficiency. I mention this because later when the insulator was being installed, the riggers wanted to put it as high as possible, saying that anyone who could reach above the insulator and touch the backstay while the radio was transmitting would receive a dangerous possibly lethal shock. When I protested saying I had clear instructions from an expert radio man that it was to be low we ended up in a real ding dong - the riggers taking - or at least feigning great offense at this insult to their profession by a mere radio ham! Marc advised that this was an exaggeration, that a small tingle was possible but in any case he advised insulating the first few feet above the insulator with shrinkwrap.I visited the rigger to personally ask that the insulator be set low, as after all I was the one paying and it was my boat. I received a 20 minute lecture on the pitfalls and dangers of wrongly installed aerials and a list of all the big name Sydney boats he personally had installed aerials on - brindabella, skandia, wild oats etc etc - and in no case was the insulator set low. So in the end I could see I was getting nowhere and was about to leave when he announced that in any case it was already done, indicating my backstay coiled up against the opposite wall of the workshop. He was a proud man and had done a lovely job - and to our amazement when the backstay was put back the insulator was nice and low, just where we wanted it!!


When it came time to get the new VHF we discovered ICOM had just released a DSC VHF with an AIS receiver integrated - so we got that and killed two birds with one stone - an upgraded VHF and an AIS receiver!

All that remained to do was find a Laptop and get a software programme that could handle all this stuff . Following the lead of the guys planning to kayak across the Tasman - James Castrission and Justin Jones (http://www.crossingtheditch.com.au/) I searched ebay and bought a secondhand Panasonic CF18 "Toughbook". These are "ruggedised " laptop computers built to withstand extremes of cold, exposure to water and dust and capable of being dropped from a height and not break! The screen folds flat and is a "Touchscreen".

As for the computer package I found it right here in an Australian package called "Software on Board" aka "SOB". You can get the software and try it out for free and then upgrade to full functionality for about $200. You then have to buy the maps you need from C-Map. These are so called "vector" charts which have masses of stuff embedded in them that you can click on to get more info - including photos of a harbour entrance or an island or marina. The other type of chart is a "Raster" chart which is just like a paper chart - there are no hidden details and scrolling in doesnt reveal new data. The SOB programme is amazing - you can do all the usual GPS things like have a live fix on where you are second by second, readouts of speed and course, you can switch to a perspective view that recreates a view you might get looking up a long harbour, you can load waypoints and routes but it also has the AIS capability with a brilliant onscreen display, and it can take other data streams as well, say from your log and compass. You can activate the lighthouses and harbour beacons in a nighttime setting and they blink and flash exactly as they do in real life. There are inbuilt tide tables for numerous coastal locations and a man overboard button that will provide a route back to the site of the incident. And its designed to work best on a Touchscreen computer so all you have to do most of the time is poke at the screen with your finger. All in all it seems quite wonderful.

So all this is now loaded onto my Toughbook . Ive used the Modem and sent email but Ive only recently loaded SOB.Ive been playing around with it for the last three months but Ive not even seen my boat for two months let alone had a chance to connect it all up and go live. Hopefully that will happen in the next two or three weeks. Watch this space!

Teen Sailors and AIS

Ive been following Jessica Watsons progress for months and made a special point of going to hear her talk at the Sydney Boat Show in July. She was a slightly built girl but she said she was heartened to discover when she met Jesse Martin that he was hardly any bigger. Jesse Martin as Australians should know is the current holder of the record for youngest solo nonstop and unassisted circumnavigation. He was 18 by the time he completed it in 1999 - just 10 years ago -on an identical yacht to Jessica Watsons, an S&S 34. His was called Lionheart (top picture)and thats also the title of his book. The tabloid media have recently been done over by the media campaigns of an American teen, Zac Sunderland, and even more recently that of an English teenager, Mike Perham who both in succession have claimed the record from Jesse, conveniently ignoring the fact that neither sailed nonstop nor unassisted, and they both avoided Cape Horn by sailing through the Panama Canal. What they both did was amazing for sure, but what Jesse did was in another league altogether, particularly as it was done before modern GPS and Satellite communications. Ive just emailed the editor of "Australian Yachting" who repeated the false claim that Jesse's record has been broken. But that is the record that Jessica Watson wants to beat. At the boat show I also met and spoke to Pete Goss a modern yachting legend who sailed solo around the world in the famous Vendee race : he thinks Jess can do it but its a massive challenge and she will become a yachting legend as well if she makes it. However....

As everyone probably knows, a couple of weeks ago Jess was lucky to survive a collision with a chinese bulk carrier on her first night at sea on her boat Ellas Pink Lady. She was leaving Queensland for Sydney from where she was planning to start her solo nonstop unassisted circumnavigation. Speculation was rife as to how it could have happened because her Team didnt release any detail of the incident, except to say she was down below when it happened. My view was there had to have been a failure of her AIS (Automatic Identification System)- or else it wasnt turned on - or else if it had warned her, she had freaked out and done something crazy like turning towards the ship instead of away from it. This latter possibility seemed the least likely to me, because having seen her she didnt seem the panicky type. I figured she must have been asleep and slept through the warning, but in todays papers theyre reporting a safety instrument (and I presume it must be her AIS) wasnt turned on, and she had dozed off! What an horrendous and terrifying wake up that must have been, waking to the thumping of a ships engines just in time to crash into the hull of the thing which would have been towering above her boat like a massive sheer steel cliff! And then to go bouncing and scraping down the side of it, her rig crashing over the side, powerless to do anything except hope like hell the boat wouldnt go under! She was unbelievably lucky! So thats what happens if you dont have your AIS turned on. On the other hand in this months Australian Cruising Helmsman - which I can never put down till Ive read it from cover to cover - theres an article written by a guy who is convinced he was saved from that same fate by his AIS, which of course WAS turned on. In his encounter with a ship, a collision was avoided because he used the information that is received by the AIS to talk directly to the bridge of the freighter using his VHF radio - he turned to port, they turned to starboard and he avoided being rammed by a few seconds!

Stories like these convinced me ages ago that an AIS receiver was an essential item of safety gear. All ships over 300 tons are required to have an AIS transponder, an electronic device which causes a VHF radio signal to be emitted from the ship as often as every 3 seconds that contains all sorts of identifying and dynamic information about the ship such as its heading and speed.

With the right sort of software this information can then be displayed on your chartplotter, along with calculations about how likely each vessel is to collide with yours. Parameters that you determine can then trigger alarms to warn you. This warning function used to be the sole domain of radar but for me AIS renders radar less than essential, so for now Ive decided not to get Radar. Next Blog I will reveal how I integrate VHF and HF Radio, GPS, AIS and email in the new nav Station on Sapphire. Its not all up and running yet but should be very soon.