Logbook: Fast Forward

Looking back at the last couple decades of electronics innovation shows just how far we’ve come.

I was just a kid riding shotgun in the family Egg Harbor when I was introduced to the world of marine electronics. To me the red blobs dancing on the enormous radar looked like a Rorschach test or a bad version of Pac-Man. On my boat today, on the right side of my helm, sits a 15-year-old GPS that spits out lat/lon coordinates and little else. I keep telling myself I’m going to finally remove it, but then again it feels like it fits the boat’s vintage.

The speed at which those old GPS units have gone the way of the sextant is staggering. Just a generation ago, we were celebrating advances in Loran-C and real-time GPS coordinates that you transposed onto a chart made of paper (remember them?). Today, a single app on your smartphone has more computing power and navigational prowess than the entire suite of electronics on a new yacht just a couple decades ago. A few of the developments that have impressed me most are:

SiriusXM Weather:

This is one of those products that if you use just once, you’re hooked for life. I’ll never forget the first time slaloming between angry thunderstorms in the Bahamas on a center console using Sirius weather. Storm cells were everywhere around us and I didn’t get a single drop of rain on me. The ability to never be surprised by a summer squall again is a big win for boating.

Radar: 

Get fogged in off Block Island once and you’ll understand why no boat is complete without a reliable radar. More than most other technologies, it’s radar that has been blowing me away the last couple years. At last year’s Ft. Lauderdale show I reviewed Simrad’s new line of Halo radars. These things are actually amazing. You can use it to spot actual birds like never before, you can easily track targets (other boats); there is a function that adds a tail to all the boats moving around you so you can see which direction everyone is heading at a glance and its range capability is, well, off the charts.

Digital Switching: 

I often say that I live an interesting double life. While running boats for the magazine, I’ve become fluent in controlling a boat through a CZone touchscreen or an MFD; that’s not really a brag, they’re designed to be incredibly intuitive. But when the weekend comes and something at my helm doesn’t start up, I can be found cursing to myself as I check the countless fuses strung throughout my vintage Bertram. I also recently reviewed the Garmin Boat Switch, a product that seems to simply bring digital switching to older boats and an LED went off in my brain. I see an upgrade coming in my future.

AIS: 

This is another of those “never going back” technologies that has really come on strong in recent years. As this tech becomes ubiquitous in boating, the stronger and more beneficial it becomes. Being able to clearly make sense of the marine traffic all around and, at a glance, know which way everyone is heading on a holiday weekend allows you to make safer navigational choices. Even better than that, more boats—especially the larger ones—will see you more clearly.

Omni Sonar: 

Similar to my early experiences with radar, my first introduction to fishfinders left me thinking that technology should be called fish searchers because I simply could not decipher the hieroglyphics. Granted that was more of a “me problem” but staring at a screen deciphering one blob from another took away from the escape I was looking for in the first place. Today, man has that changed. My fish-loving friend, Anglers Journal Editor-in-Chief Charlie Levine, has done some great reporting on Omni Sonar and how many battlewagons now run multiple $100,000-plus units on board. It’s such an advantage for fisherman that there are now separate divisions in tournaments for the “have” and “have nots.”

What truly amazes me, again, is not the advances of the last few years but how the industry as a whole has progressed so much in the past couple decades. To me it’s a reminder that competition breeds innovation and that when companies compete, we all win.

View the original article to see embedded media.

This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

Source: https://www.powerandmotoryacht.com/column/logbook-fast-forward