To be honest, I’m not much a swimmer. And since I’m in a state of near-panic whenever I find myself flopping around in the water, I probably need some soothing music to help keep me relaxed. Ocean sounds, maybe. Well, maybe not ocean sounds.

Whatever soundtrack you choose, you can listen to it while you swim with the Finis SwiMP3. Here’s what the press release tells us:

The unique and patented bone conduction technology utilized in the FINIS SwiMP3 takes enjoying music to another level by transmitting high-fidelity sound underneath the water. As FINIS holds the international patent on bone conduction technology, standard players rely on the transmission of sound through air or water which causes the swimmer to hear only muffled noise. Because the SwiMP3 uses bone conduction, the sound vibrations are able to be directly transferred from the cheek bone to the inner ear, giving the swimmer the ultimate sensory experience whether engaged in training workouts or recreational activities. The sleek design attaches to any swim goggle or snorkeling mask and features a 10-hour rechargeable lithium-ion battery that charges directly from a USB port. The SwiMP3 is compatible with MP3 or WMA files, and is available for $149.99.

Actually, I just thought of a really great swimming soundtrack…something to get me super-motivated for swimming. Ah, here it is…

Boat Bits points us to this valuable and important recipe by Rachel Rappaport, over at a food blog called Coconut and Lime:

Ingredients:
3/4 cup tomato paste
1/2 cup prepared horseradish
1/4 cup white vinegar
2 cloves garlic
1/4 small onion
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
juice of 1 lemon

Directions:
Place the tomato paste, vinegar, garlic, Worcestershire sauce, onion, salt, pepper and lemon juice into a food processor, blender or Vitamix. Pulse until mostly smooth. Add the horseradish and pulse until evenly distributed. Refrigerate leftovers.

If any of you Navageeks try it out, please tell us what you thought of it!

I’ve mentioned before: I get a LOT of press releases. I don’t publish every single one, by any means. It’s called “editorial judgement”. I only publish the ones I find compelling in some way.

Maybe I learn something new. Maybe something impresses me. Maybe the press release reminds me of something noteworthy.

Or maybe…just maybe…the press release causes me to utter the words corresponding to the military jargon “whiskey tango foxtrot“. It happens from time to time. Case in point:

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I love Google Analytics. It provides a lot of information about website performance. It’s fun to see a graph of Navagear’s growth since we relaunched the site about two years ago, for instance:

Besides those big numbers (visits, pageviews, etc.), though, one of my favorite Analytics feature is the Content Overview. I especially like to see the top content. What pages are people looking at?

As you would expect, the Navagear home page gets the most traffic. Surprisingly, though, it only constitutes 17.8% of page views for the period from New Years to today. A lot of Navagear traffic is generated by search engines. As a result, a lot of site visitors never bother with the home page; they just jump right to the page they want.

Apparently, almost 10% of Navagear visitors are absolutely nutty about refilling disposable propane cylinders!

We receive a lot of press releases. They’re extremely helpful to folks covering “gear and gadgets”, because they announce new products, demonstration events, and changes in the industry. Crucial information that we would not be aware of, otherwise.

But once in a while, I receive a press release that just confuses me.

Case in point: Why is there a press release in my Inbox this morning for the Davis Instruments Windex? Isn’t this product already installed on every single sailboat in the entire world?

OK, I’m only joking, it isn’t on every sailboat. But seriously, this product is so useful, especially for racing, that what’s exceptional and noteworthy is when you climb aboard a racing sailboat that does not have one of these installed!

On boats I’ve raced aboard, I’ve often heard it said that the fancy, expensive electronic instruments provide historical information about the wind. The Windex provides information about what’s happening right now. It sounds silly…how long could it possibly take for the electronic signals to run the cables and be processed and displayed on the cockpit instruments?

Too long, sometimes. In shifty conditions or especially tight races, helmsmen stop watching the instruments and stare up at the masthead, where the Windex is. It can be hard on the neck after a while, but the speed-of-light Windex-to-eyeball networking protocol is difficult to beat, and it does make a difference.

So I decided to run this press release. The product ain’t new, it isn’t NMEA 2000 compliant, and it doesn’t require a 100-page owner’s guide. In spite of, or perhaps because of, these attributes, it’s an essential piece of gear for sailors. Here’s the press release:

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Jump over to MadMariner to see what I learned about installing Maritech’s Virtual Lifeline man-overboard alarm/engine kill switch. Plus my preliminary test results with the system.

[This article appeared at MadMariner two weeks ago. Tomorrow morning a new Navagear item will appear on the front page of MadMariner. —Tim]

I haven’t yet had a chance to take the boat out with the newly released Rose Point Coastal Explorer 2009. But I did get down to the boat to determine if my current AIS installation would work with the new software.

Good news: It works! It’s actually “plug-n-play,” which is amazing. So many things are touted as plug and play, but I’ve found the reality far from satisfying with most marine technology.

But this time, I literally plugged my Shine Micro RadarPlus AIS-BX Class B AIS transceiver into my laptop (via a Keyspan USB-to-Serial Adapter) and asked Coastal Explorer to auto-detect ports. It found the port with the NMEA traffic, and from then on everything worked fine. I’m probably a little bit luckier than most, because my Class B AIS unit already has its own GPS, so I didn’t need two ports (one for GPS data and another for AIS data). All the data I need comes in over one pair of wires, and the 9-pin connectors were compatible.

Since I wasn’t going anywhere, I devoted today’s session to Coastal Explorer’s handling of AIS targets. I love AIS. With Coastal Explorer, AIS is really cool. I know, I’m a geek; but hey, at least I can admit it.

Take this chunk of screenshot, which shows the Ship Canal between the Ballard Locks (upper left) and Foss headquarters. Notice how most of the AIS targets (the blue triangles) are all the same size. Well, almost all. Any targets for which overall dimensions are known and which are actually larger than the default blue triangle (at any particular zoom/scale setting) are depicted with the target’s actual (scaled) dimensions. See the long thin one tied up just outside Fisherman’s Terminal, right in the middle?

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You know that rule about running the blower for five minutes before you start the engine? That’s an especially good idea when you’ve just refueled.

[Photo by Steve Sullivan from Seattle 911 Blog]

Puget Sound Maritime covered this story a couple weeks ago, but I just spotted another photo from that incident. This one is of the boat that did not catch on fire. I wonder if that black stuff just wipes off with a damp cloth? I kinda doubt it.

[Photo courtesy of Fremont Tugboat Co.]

Anyway, run the blower. Please?

[Steve Roberts added a comment on my recent press release posting about the Nav-Tracker service from Paradox and EMS Satamatics. With Steve's permission, Navagear will publish his comments in full here, as a stand-alone blog post.

See, if anybody is qualified to argue for a "home-brewed" alternative to commercial vehicle security, tracking, and monitoring services, it would be Steve Roberts. He was doing this with his bicycle back when LoJack was a pretty neat idea that might or might not catch on. Read on to see what he had to say about Nav-Tracker.  —Tim]

Cool tracker tech there, though it is worth appending the fact that there is a free amateur-radio alternative that works well when cruising within range of shore stations (it is not satellite-based, although there is some HF capability that is fiddly but useful in a pinch).

It is called APRS, and is a flavor of packet radio that transmits position reports at any specified interval (with minimal provision for added telemetry). Three or four sites now exist to display the resulting track in real-time on Google maps… here is a piece of the track from my cruise last fall, with the red dots indicating actual reports that made it and were forwarded on to a server in Finland:

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Hot on the heals of last week’s “Here come the Mirage Hackers!” post, small-boat enthusiast Mack Horton informed us of his Strider project. Wow!

Mirage Hacking is a good term. I’ve built one hull specifically for the Mirage drive, and I’m building the next one which has a more refined hull shape.

Keep us updated, Mack!