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From: Faure, Marin (no email)
Date: Tue Feb 01 2005 - 22:10:59 EST
>Larry said-
>Any chart depths greater than 4' are irrelevant except when looking for
an anchorage. I need charts to tell me where I am and I will be
satisfied to know that within a few hundred yards. I suspect my needs
are similar to those of the vast majority of TWL members, give or take a
few feet in draft and a few knots in cruising speed. For us, many of the
features in the commercial navigation programs (Cap'n, Nobletec, MaxSea,
ChartView, etc.) are overkill.
Somebody posted a comment here awhile ago that said there were two kinds
of boaters: the ones who sit mostly at the dock and outfit their boats
with every gizmo known to man, and the ones who keep their boats simple
and actually use them. I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to limit
boaters to being in one of these two categories only, but there is some
truth in what this person said.
Boating, like flying, is a world full of variables. Many of these
variables force decisions that could have serious consequences if the
decisions are wrong. One of the objectives in being a safe pilot is to
eliminate as many variables as possible from the equation of getting
from Point A to Point B because the fewer variables there are, the fewer
opportunities there will be to make a bad or incorrect decision. I
believe the same can be said of being a safe skipper.
You can make navigating a boat as complicated or as simple a process as
you would like it to be. Which route you go will depend on your
ultimate objective. To make an example of someone on this list without
his permission, Capt. Mike Maurice makes a living getting people's boats
from Point A to Point B. This means he's confronted with all manner of
variables in terms of water and weather conditions, the condition and
capability of the boat, and the abilities of the people on his crew.
His primary objective (I assume) is to get the boat safely to Point B.
To that end, he wants (as he has stated) a navigation system that tells
him what he needs to know with complete reliability and that can be used
and interpreted no matter what sort of other variables he may be dealing
with at the time, like crappy weather, a sick engine, an iffy electrical
system, and so on.
So in this "real life" situation, the last thing he or anyone else in
this position needs is to have to wade through ten layers of menu items
to get his nav (or radar) system to do what he needs it to do Right Now.
A color wheel that lets you select what color you want the lettering and
navaids and land mass contours to be on the screen is real clever and
fun to play with at the dock, but it's not something one is likely to
need in real life. (I'm making that up-- I don't know if the current
generation of complex nav systems have color wheels, but you get the
point.)
Navigating a boat is really easy in terms of what you need to know. You
need to know where you are in relationship to everything around and
under you, you need to know where you'll be if you keep going the
direction you're going, you need to know what route to follow to get
where you want to go without hitting anything, and you need to know how
much time getting from one place to another is going to take. That's
pretty much it. Okay, there may be times when it's handy to know where
you've been in case you need to follow the bread crumbs to get home.
So while a nav program that can show you the relationship (in millions
of colors) between your boat's speed over the ground and the phases of
the moon is really cool from a "look what my nav system can do" point of
view, the reality is that it's probably pretty useless information.
Because the deal about having as few variables as possible in boating
and flying also applies to the equipment and systems you're using.
When the shit hits the fan and you're worrying about big waves and high
winds and poor visibility and stuff is sliding all over the cabin, most
people's brains have a way of narrowing their functional bandwidth,
particularly people who don't do this sort of thing for a living, which
is most of us on this list. We may be able to remember how to set a new
course in a nav system if it's a matter of either punching up one that's
already in there or entering an A-B course, particularly if there are
dedicated buttons for doing so. But our ability to remember complex
command sequences or where things are in a menu-driven system will be
diminished dramatically, particularly when we are worrying about other
things like that "funny noise" in the engine and why does the bilge pump
light keep coming on? A system that's a snap to operate at the dock on
a nice day with the operator's manual handy can become a mind-numbing
mental block if the mind is already struggling to fight back panic.
And don't envision panic to be something that happens in a "Perfect
Storm" scenario. It might take something like that to make Capt.
Maurice panic, but I might start to lose it in six foot waves with lots
of logs in the water around me. Someone else might start to panic when
they unexpectedly find themselves short of their destination after dark.
But regardless of what it takes to put someone into "Oh God, what do I
do now" mode, the fact remains that for all of us in that mode, things
need to be REALLY simple in order for us to use them effectively to help
us make the right decisions. And that's when-- as Capt. Maurice has
pointed out several times-- you need systems with clear, basic functions
and no-brainer controls.
All of which is a very long way of saying I agree with what Larry has
written. Most of us don't need a quarter of what these "Microsoft
mentality" nav systems contain, and for those skippers who venture
beyond the comfort of familiar waters and weather, these complex systems
may actually be a detriment to the goal of getting a boat safely from
Point A to Point B. My opinion of course, which is worth exactly what
you paid for it.
______________________________
C. Marin Faure
GB36-403 "La Perouse"
Bellingham, Washington
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