I just finished teaching a class on Friday afternoons to first- through third-graders at my daughter’s school.

Fisheries Supply was kind enough to donate the rope we used for the class, so everybody had a nice ten-foot length of line to work with. Special thanks to the good folks at Fisheries.

I taught these kids how to tie a few basic knots that, really, every adult ought to know: round turn and two half-hitches, bowline, figure-eight, and double-overhand. They learned several others, as well, but since I didn’t always have the same students from week to week, I tried to make sure everybody could tie those four.

Some of these kids really picked this up quickly. Others, I think, just liked the class because they got to play with rope!

One first grader even managed an eye splice in three-strand rope. I showed her what to do, but she did all the work. Her dad was in the US Navy, so I figured I better send her home with something really impressive.

Oh, I also learned a few rope magic tricks to keep them interested. That worked pretty well. Any time the class started to get out of hand, I could just gather them all together by telling them that I was about to demonstrate the secret behind one of my tricks. Sneaky!

Rope for standing rigging, eh? Yeah, I’m familiar with the concept. It’s obsolete technology, from the era of wooden sailing ships, and it looks something like this: Apparently, my thinking is somewhat out of date. Modern materials technology is giving new life to "old-school" rigging principles.

Colligo Marine claims that synthetic rigging is cheaper and lighter than conventional wire rigging. It certainly could be easier to service and repair "in the field".

I’m re-reading Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, and once again I’m amazed at a man-of-war crew’s ability to fabricate almost anything the vessel might need from onboard stores of cordage, spars, and fittings. With Colligo’s Synthetic Systems line of rigging hardware and a quantity of raw Dynex Dux 12-strand line aboard, it’s possible to imagine the crew of a small bluewater cruising sailboat being able to replace—or at least jury-rig—virtually any piece of standing rigging without outside assistance.

I’d be interested in learning more from cruising or racing skippers who have rigged and sailed boats with this system. How does it all work out in the real world?

Heck, I didn’t even know Southern Boating HAD a swimsuit issue!

Still, I’m sure some readers will appreciate my article on Automated External Defibrillators, appearing in the April issue. After looking at the swimsuit pictures, I think I had heart palpitations myself!

This was a really interesting article to research. I learned a lot about cardiac arrest (not the same as a heart attack), and about these compact, self-contained, and in some cases waterproof devices.

PS to my regular readers: The reason things have been slow around here lately is due to a kitchen remodel that’s experiencing a fare bit of "mission creep". The result is that things are pretty disrupted at home, and it’s affecting everything else.

For over two weeks, just as an example, I’ve been cooking breakfast out in the carport on my Magma grill, which works very well EXCEPT for the unusually coarse flame control valve. It has settings I would call "high", "very high", and "nuclear meltdown". I have to shut it off and turn it on manually to keep my skillet at an appropriate temperature, but it can be done! I’ve got to research a more precise control with better low-flame control. More on this later.

I know, I know…boring techy stuff. Still, sometimes you need a boring techy gizmo to do something cool and unboring!

Like with this Rose Point Coastal Explorer 2.0 beta. I’ve been playing around with it at home, and I’m ready to take it down to the boat. Once aboard, I need to plug my laptop into my Raymarine autopilot, in order to get Coastal Explorer to drive the boat for me.

But modern laptops don’t have plain old serial ports anymore. Instead, they have USB ports. It ain’t just a different style of plug, either…USB moves data faster, and it does some fancy signal handling; fancy compared to the serial port’s RS-232 standard, anyway. Which, by the by, is pretty well compatible with NMEA.

OK, if you’re still with me, take a look at the Keyspan USA-19HS High Speed USB Serial Adapter. Long name for a simple little dongle that allows you to plug serial devices into a USB port.

Why this one in particular? Well the folks at Milltech Marine (who market the SR161 AIS receiver I’ve installed aboard Two Lucky Fish) say it works, and so do the propeller-heads at Rose Point Navigation Systems. In fact, this units seems to get good marks from a lot of boaters.

So anyhoo, I need one of these. If you need one too, please consider buying it by clicking on this link to Amazon. Amazon’s got a good price, free shipping, and Navagear gets a tiny portion of the proceeds if you use this link to start your shopping.

I’ve been having fun playing around with (sorry, "beta testing") Rose Point Navigation Systems Coastal Explorer 2.0, which is currently in beta.

Today I thought I’d discuss the Voyage Planner’s handy Timeline feature. Once you’ve created a route and set your vessel’s cruising speed, you can associate each leg of the route with the appropriate tidal current station. Yes, you have to do this by hand. The software can determine which current station is closest to your route, but if it happens to be in a completely separate body of water on the opposite side of some ribbon of land, "closest" may not be "best".

Anyway, once that’s done, you can slide your route left or right along the timeline. Here’s why this is cool:

If you need to arrive at a particular waypoint at a specific time, you can slide that waypoint left or right along the timeline to align it with the time you want to arrive. All the other waypoints along the timeline slide with it, so you can see when you need to leave, and…even better…what kind of tidal current you’re likely to encounter along each segment of the trip.

In this example, I’ve decided to leave Edmonds (waypoint 001) at 10:00 on May 16th, arriving in Friday Harbor (waypoint 030) about 13:40 for a big C-Brats gathering.

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There’s some ongoing discussion and trouble-shooting in the comments of recent posts in this series…take a look here, especially. Good stuff.

If you’re a gadget-obsessed boating geek, I mean!

Meanwhile, I wanted to report on some antenna testing I conducted. I’ve got two antennas (or antennae, if you prefer) mounted on the cabin top of my C-Dory. I was able to change them back and forth on my AIS receiver, and then wait several minutes to see how many targets appeared. Here are the results of that test, conducted while tied up inside the breakwater at Edmonds Marina. A cheap, bottom-of-the-line eight-foot antenna with 6db gain picks up target up to about 15-20 miles away.

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I just got a note from Captain Richard Rodriguez over at Bitter End. This concerns a specific model of Class A AIS transceiver…not something most recreational boaters are likely to have aboard. But this certainly is a strange phenomenon.

Remember, "The prudent mariner will not rely solely on any single aid to navigation."

Here’s the report from today’s Notice to Mariners:
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Reports have been verified that some SAAB R3-AIS Transponders, when combined with older GPS receiver, have stopped working while GPS Satellite PRN32 is in view. Vessels affected are reported being invisible to other AIS equipped in addition to some AIS equipped shore stations. It has been reported vessels equipped with the SAAB R3-AIS Transponders continue to receive AIS information from other AIS equipped vessels.

All vessels are advised to check the proper operation of their AIS and GPS equipment. GPS problems should be reported to the USCG Navigation Center at WWW.NAVCEN.USCG.GOV/GPS/USERINPUTGPS.HTM or contact the USCG Navigation Information Service at (703) 313-5900.

Remember my various issues with my Ray54 VHF radio? It’s a good radio, and I like the compact size. But it does have its idiosyncrasies. The only feature I really miss, though, is NMEA output, which would allow me to see incoming DSC calls right on my C-80 chartplotter.

At my last writing, I figured I would have to go with another manufacturer. Other Raymarine radios have NMEA output, but they were all larger, and I don’t want a big radio on my small boat. This morning, though, I noticed a new item on the Raymarine website…

The new Ray49 DSC VHF Radio is a compact VHF Radio with NMEA 0183 output for chartplotter position polling and Class D Digital Select Calling. 

Raymarine’s most compact VHF radio to date, the Ray49 does everything I want, and it’s actually smaller than my Ray54. It’s available in gray or white.

Hey, this just might be the radio for me!

Raymarine’s seminar tour may be coming to a city near you. Here’s what they’re saying about it:

Raymarine is now offering a seminar series which will help you have a better on the water experience by learning tips and techniques for maximizing your Raymarine electronics. Specifically designed for owners of Raymarine C-Series and E-Series Multifunction Displays, the Raymarine Seminar Series will be setup with actual multifunction displays for the true hands on experience.

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Comments on my earlier report, from reader Tanja Heringa in The Netherlands, have prompted this follow-up to clarify a few things.

First, here is a sampling of received NMEA messages from the AIS receiver. Looks like ! at the front and .. at the end, just as you describe. Thanks to Ben at Panbo for explaining how to grab screen-shots off Raymarine chartplotters; that’s a handy thing for boating gear bloggers to know!

Second, getting it all connected: This image shows which color wires I had to connect. The black cable is the Raymarine NMEA cable, and the tan/gray cable is the RS232 9-conductor cable supplied with my SR161 AIS receiver. I’ll be honest: it took a bit of trial-and-error to find the right pair of wires…on both sides!

Your comments indicate you’ve got it right, though: RS232 pin 2 (brown wire on the cable supplied with my SR161) is data out, and that connects to NMEA data in (+), which is the white wire on a Raymarine NMEA cable. Then you connect the SR161’s pin 5 (data ground, the yellow wire on my cable) to NMEA data in (-) on the Raymarine NMEA side, which is green.

Third, I’ve got C-series software version 4.26, so I don’t know if 4.25 is recent enough to work right. If you’ve got it all connected right, and you’ve got AIS messages in the NMEA buffer on your C-80, and you STILL don’t see AIS targets on the chart, maybe you need the newer software.

Or wait, maybe you haven’t turned on the AIS "chart layer". Make sure you’ve got these configured correctly:

Good luck, Tanja, and let us know how it turns out!