Visiting The Gizmo Guru

by John April 22, 2010
Ben Ellison of Panbo

Last weekend we had a pleasant break from our re-power project while visiting some good friends in Camden, Maine and giving a slide-show to some members of the Ocean Cruising Club. While there, our friends suggested that we visit Ben Ellison, author of Panbo, the popular blog on marine electronics, on his aptly named motor [...]

Broadband Radar, A New Way Of Seeing?

by Colin September 25, 2010
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Sailing down the Atlantic coast of Spain and Portugal is generally pretty easy going– reliable northerlies make for steady downwind progress. The only concerns are the swell (which can close some ports), and the fog, which can be a real pain. Along the northern part of this coast, on most days we could see a [...]

Nexus Instruments, Great Gear And Great Culture

by John October 10, 2010
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Reasonably Priced Seven years ago, when KVH stopped supporting our previous sailing instrument system, we looked at Brooks and Gatehouse but balked at the cost and instead settled on a new NX2 system from Nexus at less than half the price.

Safe WiFi Access

by John December 4, 2010
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In the last few weeks there has been a huge brouhaha in the cruising community about the dangers of using open WiFi hotspots, and rightly so. This has never been a particularly safe practice, but the release of Firesheep—a plug in for the Firefox browser that allows literally any idiot, no matter how technically inept, [...]

Chart Plotters And Autopilots, Never The Twain Should Meet

by John December 17, 2010
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On Morgan’s Cloud we don’t hand steer much: approaching and leaving a wharf, anchoring and hauling the anchor, transiting an intricate channel, or in the presence of a lot of other boat traffic; that’s about it. We find that by using our autopilot we are left with more time and focus to navigate, keep a [...]

Priorities In Preparation—Part 2

by John March 30, 2011
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In Part 1 I asked the question: “who contributed more to a safe and seamanlike voyage over three days recently, Phyllis who rebuilt the mast winches and went through our medical kit, or me who installed a new AIS transponder and nearly lost his mind doing it?”.

Q&A Radar Reflectors and/or AIS Transponders

by John May 3, 2011
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Question [Edited for brevity]: We have been upgrading the safety equipment on board our boat and are thinking of installing radar reflectors to amplify and enhance the radar signal we create to alerting oncoming vessels of our position during offshore sailing in bad weather and heavy seas. The Echomax Active-XS-Dual Band reflector seems very good, [...]

AIS Part 2

by Colin July 17, 2011
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I’ve written before on the potential benefits of AIS for small craft, and having used it far more since then, it’s time for an update. After being initially impressed with it, and the capabilities it offers beyond radar, has it lived up to that first impression? A good test was when we recently crossed to [...]

Gear Test—Electronic Navigation

by John February 18, 2012
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As most of our regular readers know, we just completed a 10,000 mile, eight month voyage to the Arctic and back on Morgan’s Cloud, our 56-foot McCurdy and Rhodes aluminum cutter. A voyage that constituted a grueling test of all the gear on the boat. Here is our report on how the electronics and navigation [...]

Gear Test—Radar

by John April 14, 2012
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As most of our regular readers know, we just completed a 10,000 mile, eight month voyage to the Arctic and back on Morgan’s Cloud, our 56-foot McCurdy and Rhodes aluminum cutter. A voyage that constituted a gruelling test of all the gear on the boat. In the last post of this series we covered our [...]

Gear Test, Autopilot

by John April 27, 2012
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A reliable autopilot comes right after radar on our priority scale. A short handed crew that steers all the time, or even much of the time, is a tired crew, and a tired crew is a dangerous crew.

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