The 2021 winner of the Ocean Navigator Chuck Husick Marine Technology Award is the Lynx Smart Battery Management System (BMS) (www.victronenergy.com/battery-management-systems/lynx-smart-bms). The Lynx unit is a full-featured BMSystem for managing lithium…
In a recent issue that included a story on repowering, we wrote that Volvo marine marinizes Kubota engines for some of its engine offerings. This point brought a response from Stanley Feigenbaum, one of the founders and former owners of…
Editor’s note: Below is Part 2 of an article providing information on choosing and installing a LiFePO4 lithium battery system aboard a cruising sailboat. Part 1 appeared in our 2021 Ocean Voyager annual issue on page 8. Recently we…
Twenty years ago my husband and I were inside a Florida Sam’s Club buying deep-cycle lead acid batteries for our Peterson 44. That same year the Maxi-cat Playstation set a transatlantic speed record with a lithium battery on board.…
In the past 20 years satellite communications has grown from a novelty item for voyagers to something more like standard equipment for the voyaging boat. Between fixed terminal satcom options and handheld…
With seven employees, the closing of Broomfield & Son, Inc., in Providence, R.I., in March 2020 didn’t make a splash on the…
When sails fail due to sunlight damage, what parts of sails are most likely to fail? We asked a…
An obscure press release from NOAA on February 26, 2021, made an announcement about the availability of a…
I’m often asked by my power voyaging clients, “What do I need to know about making good crimp connections?” Fortunately, not very much. Material selection High quality solderless or “crimp” connectors start with high quality materials. When a connector…
If you are planning an offshore cruise under sail, you need access to as much vessel data as possible in one single place. A multifunction chartplotter display is the nerve center of the modern offshore cruising vessel, bringing together chart…
Earlier this year, I finally upgraded from lead acid batteries to lithium iron phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries on my Valiant 40, Brick House. I’d researched for at least a year and South Africa, with its great tech base and good exchange…
An essential component of any offshore cruising yacht’s electrical system is an inverter, which converts 12V DC into 110V or 220V…
Navigation software for viewing electronic charts, voyage planning and in-voyage navigation has come a long way from the early days of raster images on a computer monitor. Navigation software packages are offered by an assortment of companies as either…
A successful ocean voyage depends largely on the way we manage energy on our vessels, be it from the wind, the sun, the ocean, the auxiliary engine or a separate generator. As offshore sailors, our goal is to gain…
When looking for instrument displays to receive data from the various navigation, communication and security devices on our vessels, many…
Sextants are wonderfully analog optical devices. A sextant user from the 1850s would have little problem using a modern sextant. Now a company in South Korea has begun offering something it calls the Korea Digital Sextant (KDS) that digitalizes…
The app allows users to upload their own deck plans and photos and configure them with icons to represent the position of cameras, alarms and preset ‘hotspots’ which, when selected, send cameras automatically to favorite pre-configured…
Devon, United Kingdom – Global Distribution Solutions (GDS Ltd.), a team of experienced and dedicated marine industry sales, distribution and channel management professionals, announced today it has been appointed…
Egersund, Norway – C-MAP®, a leader in digital marine cartography and cloud-based mapping, announced today it has opened its BioBase™ EcoSound™ platform to include free subscriptions to qualifying organizations. Owned by Navico and operated through C-MAP, BioBase is a platform for aquatic…
Charging a cellphone, for most of us, requires jamming a tiny electrical contact into the base of our phones and hoping the…
In the past year, the U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO), the primary source for the Nautical Almanac in the U.S.,…
Wet cells: The de facto standard for high capacity batteries in boats for many years has been the basic wet cell lead-acid battery. These are somewhat simple in design. Plates are submerged in a liquid acid electrolyte contained in a…
