I’m intrigued by the Left Coast Simple Stereo, which I learned about thanks to Boat Bits. This seems like a really great idea, particularly for smaller boats where space is at a premium.

If you want to avoid a typical car stereo (or “marine” car stereo) installation aboard you boat, but you’d still like to play music from time to time, play it off your iPod through the Simple Stereo.

The main unit is waterproof, but the connector panel (the part with the plugs) is not. There is no “faceplate” in the conventional sense. Just plug your iPod in and use its interface to control what you listen to, and how loud.

There’s a USB jack for standard 5V charging of your iPod, or indeed your cell phone or any other mobile device that charges off USB.

The wiring is dead simple, with color-coded wires from the connector panel. Wire it up to 12V from your boat’s electrical distribution panel, and a pair of speakers capable of handling 50 watts output (conventional car-stereo speakers will work), and fill your boat with oceans of beautiful music.

I like it! What I don’t like, however, is the price. $186 plus shipping seems a little expensive, when the big marine discounters offer plain old car-stereo-style “marine” stereos with auxiliary inputs and USB charging jacks for around $100, speakers included. And they play CDs and receive AM & FM, to boot!

I like the Left Coast concept, and I understand that they’re a small operation without the economies of scale and overseas fabrication facilities other manufacturers enjoy. I’m sure there is a market for this product, and I hope they find it.

Be sure to check out the rest of the Left Coast website, while you’re there. Very interesting project!

These are kind of spacey-looking, like something from War of the Worlds or Star Trek. Therefore, I approve.

On with the press release!

Bringing marine lighting into the 21st century, Perko introduces its new Stealth line of state-of-the-art LED Navigation Lamps. Providing a contemporary look, the attractive Stealth Series includes the lowest profile surface-mounted lights on the market.

At just 1/2″ high, the sleek Stealth LED Bi-Color and Side Lamps feature a bright, polished stainless steel housing, which can be black or white-powder coated. They are USCG certified for use on power-driven vessels under 12m (39′). The Bi-Color Light is also available in a removable pole version.

To complement the deck mount lights, the Stealth Series white, All-Around LED Lamps are approved for use on power-driven vessels under 20m (65′). Available with fixed or articulating heads, they are also USCG certified. An advanced, reduced-glare design helps preserve night vision by limiting the amount of light outside the visibility zone. Plus, it doesn’t attract as many bugs.

The suggested retail prices of the new Stealth Series line of LED navigation lights from Perko range from $100 to $200. For over 100 years, Perko has manufactured superior marine lights, hardware and other accessories.

Time for another Navagear feature at MadMariner! It discusses how the “round peg” of Navionics’ top-of-the-line Platinum chart card fits in the “square hole” of a five-year-old Raymarine C-series chartplotter.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: June 24, 2009

I get a lot of press releases, as you might imagine. Some evoke fascination, some excitement, and some are…well…kind of confusing. Particularly when the technology isn’t familiar to me in the first place!

That would have been the case with this press release from Intellian. First off, I wasn’t familiar with the company or its products, and second, I didn’t know a lot about satellite television.

But I got a chance to talk with Intellian’s Aaron Friedman recently. We spent some time discussing satellite TV technology, the market, and how Intellian intends to set itself apart. I learned a lot.

So let’s read the press release, and I’ll chime in periodically as we go.

Marine Satellite Technology Leader Delivers All DIRECTV Programming in One Dome

Right off the bat, it could be confusing. What’s this about “one dome”? You mean it takes two domes to receive all the DirecTV channels?

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This one should be especially interesting. I encourage all of my talented Navagear readers to complete the survey. Did I mention there are prizes?

Anyone who has walked through a boat show knows how far marine technology has come in recent years.

From pod drives that allow you to dock the boat with a joystick to thermal imaging cameras that let you see in the dark, new and (sometimes) better gizmos are coming out at stunning speed.

But what is it that boaters really want and need? And which technologies will really make a difference on your boat? These are the topics of Mad Mariner’s latest contest, a 15-question survey, sponsored by the Dallas Summer Boat Show, that attempts to provide some answers to those very questions.

Read the rules and take the survey before the deadline at 11:59 p.m. EST on July 3 and you will be entered in a drawing to win one of three prizes. We’ll announce the findings of the survey – along with the winners of the drawing – on July 6.

First prize is a SPOT Satellite Messenger and one year of service, worth about $250. Second prize is a free one-year membership at Pier88 Diving Co., a nationwide network of diving professionals who perform damage inspections, remove propellers or cut away tangles anytime you call. Third prize is a free installation of Navimatics Charts&Tides, a marine navigation and tides program for Apple’s iPhone.

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[It's another MadMariner feature from a few weeks back. —Tim]

Last week, in a blog post titled “Astronomy 101” I discussed the visual marvels available to boaters who watch the night sky with only the naked eye.

But as you begin to master stargazing, you’ll likely want to know a little more about what you’re seeing. When that happens, there’s some gear that you should consider acquiring to make the experience even more satisfying.

Start with a red flashlight with adjustable brightness. Once you’ve got your night vision, you don’t want to ruin it using a bright white light to glance at your star chart (or to find your drink, for that matter).

My favorite all-purpose flashlight is the little white-LED Petzl Tactikka Plus headlamp with a red flip-up filter and three brightness settings. A set of AAAs seems to power it forever, and the red filter and adjustable intensity make it useful for all kinds of tasks around the boat or house. In fact, since I moved mine to the boat, I really missed it at home, so I bought a second one.

BINOCULARS AND CHARTS

You’ll need a pair of good-quality 7×50 binoculars. The reason I recommend 7×50s is that many cruisers already have a pair. The qualities that make this size so useful aboard a boat are precisely the same qualities that make them a good choice for astronomical work: they offer a wide field of view so that you can find what you’re looking for and keep it in sight. They also have reasonably large objective lenses, which gather a lot of light, allowing you to see more astronomical targets. They’re also not too heavy, so you can use them long enough to really see what there is to see. Finally, despite what you might think, 7x magnification is enough to provide enormously enhanced views, compared to the naked eye.

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Captain Richard Rodriguez has an interesting tale to tell over at his BitterEnd blog. We’ve discussed Loran a lot recently, and Rescue 21 periodically, as well. In this case, neither one was particularly effective!

The yellow line is the US – Canadian Boarder

An interesting set of circumstances made today’s call a bit like the old childhood game of Marco Polo.

Fortunately the strand had a good handle on where he was in relation to buoys and his own situational awareness. Knowing that he’d passed over Alden Bank and was moving towards Cherry Point served him well.

Here’s how the story went down. At about 09:45 the 28′ Uniflight in the call below contacted the Coast Guard requesting our services. He gave a Lat/Long, indicating that he was dead in the water, North of Patos Island. My ETA to his position, normally an hour, was extended by 15 minutes to do a 2-3′ sea.

Usually when I’m 3-4 miles out I can see the strand, but with the sea state and a small target, I figured it would take a bit longer. When I was about 1.5 miles out, there was still no boat, but his comms with both the CG and me were clear. I asked for an updated position and he offered it up. Still no boat, but he’d drifted a bit. When quired about his position, I asked if he was using a GPS and he said no. At first, I figured WOW, this guy can do a cross bearing fix. In reality he had an older LORAN C, which reads radio time differences between sets of stations. Loarn accuracy varies but not usually be this much, unless there’s work being done on the system, and he had drifted.

I called CG Group Port Angeles to see if they could Direction Find him with the new Rescue 21 system, which has been up and running here for about 18 months. Group PA came back with a position some ten miles away, East of Point Roberts. For Rescue 21 to work properly at least two LOP’s must be available. However in the Southern Strait of Georgia, only the Mt. Constitution high site on Orcas Island is usable for that stretch of water.

As a result the older technology and the newest technology did not work well.

The moral of the story. Always know where you are. Always have a backup plan.

John Konrad has an update on eLoran over at his excellent gCaptain website. His focus is on commercial mariners, but the coverage of navigational technology such as GPS and Loran is equally relevant for recreational boaters.

Being generally of an impatient nature, I’ll skip right to his conclusion:

Next Steps

The mariner is facing a few critical battles in the electronic navigation front. With their adoption of Web 2.0, the deployment of Rescue 21 and a myriad of other, forward thinking, initiatives the USCG is taking a leading role in the development of new technology aimed at maritime safety but, as encouraging as their work towards using new technology to keep safe is, questions still arise within the USCG on the necessity of  critical systems. You need not look further than gCaptain’s post titled “Vessel Search And Rescue – Should LRIT Replace Amver?” to realize the USCG, IMO and others are struggling with questions that seem rhetorical to the average mariner. It is our job to help guide the decisions, let our thoughts be known and avoid failures in imagination.

Let’s support the adoption of eLoran and continue dreaming of reasons for its use. Sure it is not absolutely needed to safely operate ships and competent mariners will continue to learn traditional navigation but, like GPS today, future mariners will view eLoran as a tool they couldn’t possibly live without.

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With apologies to They Might Be Giants, and in appreciation of their 1990 song “Particle Man“:

Aluminum man, aluminum man;
Aluminum man meets stainless man.
They have a fight, stainless wins;
Stainless man…

If you don’t know the song, that probably doesn’t mean much. But I was motivated to rewrite the lyrics to that song by today’s post over at Capt’n Pauley’s Virtual Boatyard:

An aluminum mast step coupled with an aluminum mast sounds like a good idea and it was. That is, until a PO (previous owner) decided to add a stainless steel mast base organizer under the aluminum mast step casting.

A mast base organizer is a piece of stainless steel with four ears, one on each side of the rectangular center. The ears are turned up at an angle and have holes spaced in them. The holes are for attaching turning blocks for the various lines coming off the mast. The turning blocks then aim the lines at their respective winches or cleats.

While they are handy things to have, the combination of aluminum castings, stainless steel and saltwater is not a good combination. The less noble metal, in this case the cast aluminum mast base, corrodes. And this one had done so. My first inkling of trouble was the fact that the fasteners were locked in corrosion and had to be cut away.

You can see the remains of the corroded mast base, the organizer, and some progress toward a solution in this image:

Definitely keep reading! The finished product, retaining the aluminum mast AND the stainless steel organizer, but without any metal-to-metal contact between the two, is a miracle of do-it-yourselfer ingenuity:

We’ve mentioned Steve Roberts before. I’m fond of calling him “the original over-gadgeted technomad”, and he doesn’t seem to mind.

He’s a great source for outside-the-box thinking when it comes to solving technical problems. Longtime readers may remember his comments about a home-brewed alternative to expensive vessel tracking and monitoring systems, for instance.

Sometimes, Steve gets so much reader interest in a project he’s described over at his Nomadness blog that he creates a kit for those of us who aren’t quite ready to build it all from scratch the way he did.

Case in point: his new waterproof GPS datalogger.

Waterproof GPS Datalogger Kit – 1 GB, Bluetooth, & Charge Cable – $195.00

One of my favorite devices aboard Nomadness is the GPS datalogger… something I have used on all my boats (even kayaks) to record every second of the adventures. The generated files, with one GPS fix per line of text, can then be easily dropped onto Google Earth or other mapping tools, showing a complete log of the trip.

You can read more about this, featuring an earlier version, here. The article shows a number of examples from my recent journeys, and the 621-mile shakedown cruise of the new ship in 2008 is shown in its entirety in this image. What’s beautiful about this data is that I can zoom all the way in and observe the effects of current, dicey docking situations, and other phenomena… and even tag it with notes that key it to the ship’s log, blog postings, or photos! You can even do it with online tools, like the excellent GPS Visualizer.

I have had numerous inquiries since writing that article and posting on various forums, and for a long time just linked to Sparkfun electronics… the delightful geeks in Colorado who build the tracker boards. But it occurred to me that boaters might like a bit more: a waterproof enclosure, a suitable SD card, a charging cable, and a reasonably non-technical explanation about how to use it. So I have assembled this little kit.

Click over to read the rest of the product description. It could be a great little tool, especially on kayaks, small boats, and dinghies that might not otherwise possess any position logging.