Saturday night I was on the back porch grilling and got a text from my pal Chris at
Intrinsic Yacht - (want to fish). We keep it simple when we text. So I cooled off the grill, threw an extra t-shirt and drawers in the car and headed down to Ocean City, MD with my brother-in-law John for a midnight arrival at Sunset Marina. Just enough time to get a buzz at Teasers but not enough time to get in too much trouble. Fast forward a few hours... "Jimmy, get up, time to go" .... huh, Oh yeah, I'm in MD sleeping on Chris's 3 day old 54 Ocean, time to go fishing.
Chris gets a new boat every year (more on that later) to fish the coastal tournaments, mostly billfish stuff but he throws her into a Tuna tournament every now and again. This weekend happened to be the Ocean City Tuna Tournament. I love Tuna fishing since "food" is my #1 priority and who doesn't like fresh Tuna?
The boat we had was a 2009 Ocean Yachts 54 SS. Chris has a great eye for detail (almost as good as me :0 ) and he gets his tournament boat really tricked out. Too cool in fact. Ocean gets a lot of ideas for future boats from the ideas Chris puts out. He will have this boat at all the major Mid-Atlantic Shows, check it out. So we were styling, and the 34 knot cruise to the fishing grounds wasn't too shabby.
I'm an electronics guy right? So I better talk about electronics at some point in this story. This boat had all the new Navnet 3D black box equipment onboard with 2 17" displays and interfaced with the LCD TV in the salon..probably the master too. I really had a good chance to give the Navnet 3D some practical evaluation. As most of us know, the jury is still out on Navnet 3D, but here is my take: Radar, Radar, Radar! The radar is absolutely awesome and worthy of buying the system even if you only plan to use it for radar. Finding birds off the coast of OC is virtually useless as there are so few of them so I couldn't test that, but I was able to test some otehr features (we had a 12kW 6' array). The first thing that hit me was the zoom, while trivial, it just looks pretty damn cool the way the screen zooms in and out without blinking or redrawing. The radar picture just pans in our out like the charts do. On most units the screen will go blank for a millisecond then the new range will be visible.
The second test I put it too was for ARPA (target tracking). Oohh la la... it worked so well! We had three boats within 3 miles of us on the way back to the inlet. I was able to consistently track all three of them, and it was VERY accurate. Neat! The tracking data was visible on the radar screen and the chart screen no matter what mode we put it in (2D or 3D, panning, zooming, twisting, turning, whatever). We could pan over in 3D mode to make it look as if we were actually on one of the boats we were tracking!
The third radar test I did was to try the new double range feature. You can run this radar on two separate ranges at the same time...but it gets better...you can actually run each range at a different gain setting. This will come in handy for fisherman that want to find birds on a 8 or so mile range with the gain cranked up, but still want to keep an eye on traffic avoidance at a range of 3/4 mile. It worked perfectly (drooling on keyboard).
The final thing we messed with was the weather overlay, specifically surface temp. The unit will allow you to overlay surface temp right on your chart. You can overlay radar data at the same time. We made the surface temp image 50% transparent so we could still see the chart below it. It worked great. One thing I di d not like was the way the colors changed for no apparent reason while zooming in and out. When on a really zoomed in range the color would be red where we were, when zooming way out it would turn green. So I am not in love with that yet as there is a piece of the puzzle missing that I haven't figured out yet.
And the charts... well... lets wait to see what kind of updates Furuno has in store before further comment. Can't wait to get some Navionics data on this machine. One thing that really surprised me is how the bathymetric data stopped once you got offshore a short distance. I did not measure the exact distance but it seemed to be 20 or 30 miles. Bathymetric data is something that offshore fisherman typically demand, so its absence offshore took me by surprise. Perhaps this will be covered in an other update. The reason I think it is missing is because we had the Raster charts set to "wrap" themselves to the bottom contour. Once we got 3 miles offshore they no longer wrapped to the bottom.
Overall, Navnet 3D gets a huge thumbs up, but there is still a lot to be improved with the charting.
Back to the fishing - we ended up with a 55" Tuna, but didn't keep it as there was still plenty of time to bag a money fish. Unfortunately that 55"er was all she wrote, so all our fishbox had in it was ice....
The next time I get offshore will probably be the White Marlin Open in August, hopefully our luck will change.
- Jim @ BOE
Here is John pulling up his pants, he had just mooned the cockpit crowd.
Chris and Jim reciting the pledge of allegiance, we do this everyday at 3:30 no matter where we are.
Shelly in amazement of how straight I can keep the boat one handed.
I actually have one eye closed and am standing on one leg too, but you can't see it in this picture.
Wind, wind, wind!
So close to being tonights dinner... this one was let go...
Joe Reid from Mast and Mallet Boatworks dropped by today. Mast and Mallet is a custom boat builder in MD. They build some really cool downeast style boats (I hope I said that right!). His boats are all hand made one at a time. They combine the layout/features of a Maine Lobsterboat with a hull configuration more like a Chesapeake Bay "Deadrise" workboat. Joe is quite the character and a great friend of BOE. He buys all of the electronics for his boats from us, and inevitably stops by about once a week during the final fitout of each boat to ask a question or two about what hooks to what! If you have not checked out a Mast and Mallet boat at one of the local MD boat shows you are missing out.
