You say you want to be out of touch when you're on the boat, away from the hustle and bustle of daily life and in tune with only the siren sounds of the sea. But you're lying. You want that most of the time, but sometimes you want to wake up and read the highlights from your favorite sportswriter of surf the internet for a good golf course near an unfamiliar harbor.
The most cost-effective way to get online within a few miles of shore (and it's just not cost effective any further than that) will be from a wireless hotspot or through a cellular connection.
Wi-Fi is available in marinas from Annapolis to Zihuatenejo, and if it's not available in yours now, it will be soon. There are a million ways to access these services but a marine-specific solution called Networked Boat from BroadbandXpress is the complete package, easily installed and a proven winner. If you and the guy on the mooring next to you are fighting for bandwidth, the guy with the taller antenna and amplified signal will win out. This system gets the most out of the government's limited allowable power.
With a computer onboard I also want to add some navigation software. Nobeltec VNS software and the complete set of U.S. vector charts on DVD from Managing the Waterway will allow you to sit back and plot courses at your leisure. We'll take a GPS signal from one of the E-Series displays to make the laptop a completely redundant chart plotter. The whole package, including NOAA's entire catalog of U.S. charts, costs less than $500.
We have been nothing but responsible so far with our budget. Everything we've added will help insure you are a prudent mariner and a generous father. So let's just blow the rest on something cool, something that adds very little to the boating experience except the shear joy of pimping out your boat.
Two blue OceanLED underwater lights mounted in the transom will set the look of the boat off when barbecuing on the back deck or entertaining at the dock. Blue is the new white. The intense light doesn't get as refracted by the color of the water as common white lights.
A $50,000 OUTFIT
At what appears to be the top of the long real estate boom, you sold off an investment property and decided to buy a 58-foot pilothouse motoryacht. You're not made of money, but a quality new boat deserves a quality electronics package, so you set aside $50,000 to cover the cost of the gear.
FurunoFuruno's Navnet vx2 Radar/Plotter system shown here is the backbone of Jeff's premium system.Now it's time to consider alternatives to Raymarine.
Furuno's black box NavNet vx2 and an expanded computer-based navigation system fit this boat perfectly. As you've read in the previous packages, I have focused on the size of the screens and the peripheral components that could be added to make the most of those screens. We'll do the same here.
I'm using Furuno's black box components because they allow me to use any large computer displays I want. I'll assume this boat has a flying bridge and a pilothouse steering station below. The main navigation area will be in the pilothouse so the majority of the components will be protected.
We'll start with four 15-inch, daylight-viewable monitors from Seattle-based AmbientNav. There are so many good marine specific monitors available that choosing one brand will come down to a certain feature you like or even just the appearance of the monitor itself. I like AmbientNav because the price is pretty good compared to similar products and they have a dimming knob on the front that is easy to use. It's as simple as that.
