It isn’t often that a small town in Nebraska gets featured in Navagear. Still, this cautionary tale deserves some attention. Note how all the kids had PFDs and nobody died.

Luke Nichols has this story in the Beatrice Daily Sun:

A Wymore man was cited at Rockford Lake Monday evening after the boat he was driving capsized, sending all nine occupants into the lake.

Dan Zuehlke, conservation officer for Nebraska Game and Parks, said Kevin Marom was driving a 15-foot fiberglass speedboat during windy conditions Monday.

The boat’s maximum capacity was five, but Marom had eight other occupants with him including five children. Zuehlke said wind gusts Monday afternoon were near 50 mph causing two to three foot waves on Rockford Lake. The boat capsized after nose-diving into a swell.

A rescue effort was led by Mike Alm, another boater on the lake at the time, who transported the children into the shoreline.

“The conditions were pretty bad,” Zuehlke said. “It was nothing short of a miracle that we aren’t looking for bodies in the water today.”

All five children in the boat were wearing life jackets, there were no injuries.

Read more

This isn’t a “gear and gadgets” story, unless you count gear and gadgets destroyed by a whale, I guess. But the story is so compelling that I’ve chosen to link to it here. Deborah Bach has the story at Three Sheets Northwest:

[The Beneateau 35 L'Orca rests in the water of West End Basin in Astoria after being struck by a whale and dismasted. Photos by Coast Guard Petty Officer First Class Shawn Eggert.]

The 35th annual Oregon International Offshore Race had just started Thursday morning when a whale about 30 feet long breached out of the water, smashing into one of the racing sailboats and dismasting it.

Ryan Barnes, who was driving the Beneteau 35 – ironically named L’Orca – said the boat was about half an hour into the 193-mile race from Astoria to Victoria, B.C. when a whale that looked to be a humpback breached about a foot off the boat’s starboard side.

“It hit the mast about halfway to three-quarters of the way up and then proceeded to fall forward and on the starboard side of the boat,” Barnes said in a video interview.

Read more

[This press release comes from a new advocacy organization called Save Our GPS. I don’t know enough about the issue to express an opinion about it, but Navagear readers ought to be aware of the issue. —Tim]

Testimony Occurs One Day after Launch of Coalition to Save Our GPS

WASHINGTON, March 11, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A representative of a founding member of the Coalition to Save Our GPS told a House subcommittee today that a recent action by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could cause "consequences of disruption" to the Global Positioning Systems (GPS) that will be "far reaching, likely to affect large portions of the population and the federal government."

In testimony prepared for delivery before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science of the House Appropriations Committee, Trimble Vice President and General Counsel Jim Kirkland stated that a recent highly unusual FCC decision to grant a conditional waiver allowing the dramatic expansion of terrestrial use of the satellite spectrum immediately neighboring that of GPS creates a serious risk of severe interference to millions of GPS receivers. The conditional waiver was granted to a company called LightSquared.

Kirkland testified one day following the launch of the Coalition to Save Our GPS, comprised of representatives of a wide variety of industries and companies who have joined together to resolve this serious threat to GPS.  The full testimony is available [http://www.saveourgps.org/testimony] at the Coalitions’ website: www.SaveOurGPS.org.

Kirkland said that, "Initial technical analyses have shown that the distant, low-powered GPS signals would receive substantial interference from high-powered, close-proximity transmissions from a network of ground stations. The consequences of disruption to the GPS signals are far reaching, likely to affect large portions of the population and the federal government. Therefore, it is imperative that the new system not be deployed unless it can be conclusively guaranteed that the GPS users are fully protected from radio interference."

He declared that "LightSquared’s proposal to build 40,000 terrestrial base stations operating at 1 billion times the power levels of GPS signals as received on earth represents a tectonic change in the use of this band. While the GPS community lauds efforts to add new broadband competition and free up spectrum for mobile uses, this must be done in the context of rational, long term spectrum planning, rather than the rushed, ad hoc waiver process followed by the FCC to date.

"Spectrum is a public asset and it should not lightly be handed over at the behest of a private party. More fundamentally, the laws of physics cannot be waived by the FCC. This is a serious problem with no obvious solution."

Kirkland outlined the 30 year history of GPS, describing it as "a critical and extremely reliable part of our national infrastructure. Millions use it every day," and spoke in detail about the myriad uses of GPS in widely varying sectors of American life, including public safety; homeland security; consumers; aviation; transportation; agriculture; forestry; engineering and construction; surveying, mapping and land management; utilities, natural resources, disaster management and scientific research.

Further information, including safeguards the Coalition recommends the FCC adopt, is detailed on the Coalition’s website.

About the Coalition

The "Coalition to Save Our GPS" is working to resolve a serious threat to the Global Positioning System. The FCC granted a highly unusual conditional waiver for a proposal to build 40,000 ground stations that could cause widespread interference with GPS signals – endangering a national utility which millions of Americans rely on every day. The conditional waiver was granted to a company called LightSquared.

The Coalition includes representatives from a broad range of industries, including aviation, agriculture, transportation, construction, engineering, surveying and GPS-based equipment manufacturers and service providers. Initial members of the Coalition are the Aeronautical Repair Stations Association, Air Transport Association, Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, Association of Equipment Manufacturers, Case New Holland, Caterpillar Inc., Edison Electric Institute, Esri, Garmin, General Aviation Manufacturers Association, Deere & Company, National Association of Manufacturers,  OmniSTARand Trimble.  Additional members are expected to join in the near future.

www.SaveOurGPS.org

Take a close look at this picture and tell me what kind of project I’m working on.

Hint: it’s related to the most-viewed page on Navagear.com, after the front page.

OK, you know those cool time-lapse videos like “Panama Canal at 600 knots” and the like? Well, I thought maybe I could do some time-lapse video of my local waters, and it might be kind of fun.

So here’s what I came up with. Don’t laugh.

Anyway, I mounted my little camera onto this preposterous tripod contraption and set it to take pictures at one-minute intervals. That’s the quickest it will take pictures.

And then I went for a little circuit of Lake Union. I took some nice pictures, but one minute is not NEARLY often enough for this sort of thing. I need a camera that takes pictures about once every five or six seconds.

Once I’ve got my pictures, I’ll need to figure out how to build them into a movie. Anybody with some experience here, please feel free to make recommendations in the comments! Thanks.

Oh, you want to see some of my “movie”? Well, it’s more of a slideshow, and without the sensation of motion, it’s a fairly boring one!

…etc. I think you get the point.

One thing that becomes clear is that the camera isn’t QUITE level! In my boat, I need to adjust the camera so it will be level while I’m at the helm (starboard side), NOT so it’s level while I’m standing on the bow adjusting things. Hmmm.

Yet another example of the sort of story I used to feature here on Navagear. Nowadays, you can find this kind of story over at Puget Sound Maritime.

First, you can read about the Last voyage for lumber schooner Wawona. Then check out the Wawona photo gallery, including several archival photographs from the Northwest Seaport, like this one:

Our friend Todd Lappin of Telstar Logistics has gotten himself published in a real newspaper! Great job, Todd…there’s no telling how long these print-media dinosaurs are going to survive, and you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you were published in the New York Times.

My friend Tom Forsythe of Level Sky (the go-to outfit for brightwork refinishing in Seattle) took some pictures yesterday. He didn’t indicate that the boat was about to flop over from the weight of the snow and start filling up with lake water, so all’s well, I guess. Actually, she looks like she’s floating to her lines, pretty much.

I’ve had Two Lucky Fish in my new slip on Lake Union for a week now, and I’ve got to say I picked a hell of a week to move in to a new, unfamiliar location! In freshwater, no less. I’ve learned a lot.

First, it virtually never gets cold enough for Lake Union to freeze. Seriously, it’s incredibly rare. Very unlikely. But you will note that I didn’t use the word impossible.

Second, when boathouses (like the one I’m tied up to) get a lot of snow on them, they sink a few inches. When it rains on the snow, and the snow holds all the additional water on the roof instead of allowing it to drain off, they sink a few more inches. So make sure your lines have a bit of slack in them. Mine are fairly tight, but they are all arranged at acute angles to the dock; none run perpendicular from the boat to the dock. They should be fine, but if it starts raining hard, I’ll make sure I get down there to make adjustments and remove snow from the boat.

I’m positive I should be able to come up with some suggestive double entendre involving “my Johnson”, but for the life of me, I can’t think of a thing!

I went down to the boat today to add some mooring lines and see that everything was made fast and battened down in anticipation of another “weather event”. This one calls for snow AND wind, but perhaps not so much wind as we were anticipating.

So anyway, while I was there I took some pictures for y’all.

One problem, though…I couldn’t get my camera to work until I’d warmed the battery up! Sheesh…

And then I discovered another problem. I couldn’t adjust some of the lines. They were frozen into solid icicles.

I can only imagine how those old sailors made it around Cape Horn in sub-freezing temperatures!

Anyway, happy winter holidays to you and yours! At our house, we celebrate the Winter Solstice, and then we celebrate Christmas.

I’ve written before about how much I appreciate Rite in the Rain all-weather paper products. I used one for my log aboard Two Lucky Fish, and I carry another smaller one with me every day.

But today, we put a sheet to the ultimate test!

Here’s Blake, 7-month-old offspring of Navagear founder and publisher Aaron. Blake likes paper. He doesn’t write on it. He crumples it and gnaws on it. Sheets of normal paper last about two minutes before some conscientious adult feels obligated to fetch all the goopy bits from his mouth and throw them away.

The Rite in the Rain paper Blake is clutching in his right hand has been actively used for about half an hour.

Once he finally relinquished it, it looked…pretty good, actually! Great products.