Wired On The Water

Boat/US Magazine, Sept, 2000 by Elaine Dickinson

Imagine the infamous Capt. Bligh set adrift by Bounty mutineers in a lifeboat, lost amidst thousands of miles of empty Pacific Ocean. In 1789, he was facing Davey Jones' locker armed with only a sextant. Today he'd say, "If only I had my laptop interfaced with my GPS and could pull up my chart program!"

Today's navigators are discovering quicker than you can say megabyte that your basic home computer has some valuable applications on a boat. Better durability, selection and prices in both laptops and desktop computers -- combined with advances in navigation software and electronic charts -- are making the personal computer a routine bring-along item on cruises.

For the first time ever in the marine marketplace, sales of electronic charts -- those on diskettes or CD-ROMs to be used with charting software -- are outselling paper charts by eight to five. The convenience alone is part of this sea change, as a little CD-ROM that fits in your hand contains 55 charts, plus Coast Pilots, tides and currents, and other information which, on paper, would fill up all the storage space in an average nav station.

With half of all U.S. households now owning a personal computer, the leap from home to boat is, perhaps, inevitable. And beyond cruising and racing, some boaters have set up fully functioning offices on board their boats with a full array of office electronics. "Workaboards" may soon be as common as liveaboards in the boating lexicon.

Point, Click, Navigate

For many, the laptop has become the nav station, not just an instrument in it, and it can not only take the guesswork out of trip planning but add a measure of safety. Of course carrying paper charts, published cruising guides and traditional methods of navigation are still essential. After all, batteries fail and hard drives can crash.

The head of the BoatU.S. data processing systems put a PC to a sea trial recently and reported that "it's the future." On a recent 300-mile trip to see the tall ships in Hampton Roads, VA, BoatU.S. CLO Bob DeFilippo brought along his laptop PC. It was connected to his GPS receiver and, utilizing the Chartview Pro program, he could see his 42-foot sailboat's position as a moving icon on the computer screen on the most current electronic chart every step of the way.

Before leaving home, the entire trip was plotted and printed copies were provided to his BoatU.S. co-workers joining him on the cruise and also e-mailed to friends and relatives so they had a detailed float plan with lat/lon positions. The software integrated the tide and current tables for the Chesapeake Bay so that it calculated more accurately the time to each waypoint of the trip. The amount of detail alone and the time it would take to manually check paper references would preclude most boaters from handwriting a report as comprehensive. The PC did it in minutes.

"The peace of mind alone was worth it," DeFilippo said. "Just to be able to quickly look at the screen and know where you are on the chart was amazing. We could zoom in and out and see what was coming up. When the wind changed, we could even calculate whether it was faster to start tacking than motoring; within five minutes I uploaded three more waypoints and headings to each one."

A major development recently announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the official U.S. charting agency, is that weekly corrections to its full suite of 1,000 raster charts are now available on the Internet. (Raster charts are high-quality, full-color digital images of paper charts.) As all mariners know, keeping charts updated is a major headache, either requiring constant checks of Local Notices to Mariners and pen or pencil corrections by hand on paper charts, or the investment in a costly new CD-ROM. Now, those with raster charts can update their charts electronically through a newly developed digital "patch" technology.

Navigational software selection and whether to use electronic charts -- or dedicated chartplotters, which are GPS receivers with displays built in -- depend on personal preferences and the type of boating one does. Descriptions of chart CDs and computer software appear on pages 57-65 of the BoatU S. Annual Equipment Catalog, and chartplotters are on pages 1-12, or check the on-line store at BoatUS.com. Also see the NOAA Web site at www.noaa.gov and go to the charting section for the latest news. One advantage of raster charts is that, on the computer screen, they look the same as paper charts.

Swimming in Functions

For those distance cruisers who find e-mail a much cheaper way to keep i11 touch than long-distance telephone calls, and for those dedicated enough to check messages while relaxing on the boat, reading e-mail on board is quite possible. The biggest variable, according to those who do it all the time, is a reliable communications system. Boaters with cellular phones can get a cell phone-modem connector and access the Internet via cell phone service. There are limits, of course, as variations in coverage and signal strength can knock you off-line. Web-surfing suffers as well since the longer one is on-line via cell phone, the more likely the connection may be disrupted. Attachments to e-mail files cause problems as well because, some users say, they are too slow to download via cell phone connections.