Category: Gear & Apparel
Expedition Medical Kits — For Journeys Long and Short
The Expedition Medical Chest series is unlike the cheap kits you get from the typical marine supply house, these kits are stocked with professional-grade supplies and tools to help you deal with health emergencies while at sea.
Victoria Allman Breaks-In a Trawler Galley
At last week’s Trawler Fest, our own favorite professional chef, Victoria Allman, treated a group of VIP guests of Kadey-Krogen to an evening of haute cuisine hors d’oeuvres (classy snacks). For two evenings, Victoria gave the gorgeous galley aboard the Krogen 55′ Expedition a workout. The Kadey-Krogen folks (author Shannon Band, actually) wrote about the [...]
Judging Innovation in the Boat-Building Biz
As I write this, I’m on my way back home from the “IBEX” international Boatbuilders Exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky, where I served as one of the judges in a panel that gave out a series of awards to recognize innovation in new products. IBEX is a unique, trade-only show where the people who make everything [...]
Protector Offers a Unique Yacht Tender
Late last week, Protector USA announced the availability of a new, extremely unique, 20′ yacht tender (or ski boat, sailing coach/support boat?) called “Protector – the Jet.” The design marries the classic high-performance Protector RIB hull to a Yamaha FX Cruiser SHO personal watercraft, which serves as the propulsion, control and main seating station. Tiffany [...]
How to Mark Your Anchor Chain
This post is the result of an item on Jeffrey Siegel’s personal blog, Taking Paws, on which he and his wife Karen document their travels aboard aCappella, a 53′ RPH DeFever trawler. The subject of marking your anchor chain is a popular one on forums and discussion boards around the boating world, and one of the [...]
Here’s Why You Need an iPad on the Boat
by Christine Kling (Editor’s Note — Chris Kling is a sailor with with more than 30 years of experience on the oceans of the world. She’s also an English professor at Broward College, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the published author of the Seychelle Sullivan series of mysteries, including SURFACE TENSION (2002), CROSS [...]
Take the Poll — What’s the Ideal Tender Outboard?
If you could have the perfect outboard for your dinghy or tender, what would it be? A diesel perhaps, because you’re already carrying hundreds or thousands of gallons of that fuel and because looking for and storing gasoline is such a pain in the neck, not to mention dangerous? I’ve long thought, for example, that [...]
Fugawi Announces NavPlanner 2 and Updated Marine ENC
Fugawi recently announced the release of Navionics NavPlanner2, powered by Fugawi. The company also said it has released version 4.5.5 of its Fugawi Marine ENC. NavPlanner2 is an atlas of U.S. coastal waters, navigable waterways, and more than 12,000 inland lakes for use on a home computer for map viewing, searching, printing, waypoint planning and [...]
Will Your Liferaft Work When You Need It?
Last year’s “Baja Ha Ha,” the fleet cruise from San Diego to Mexico, provides yet another impetus for all ocean cruisers to reconsider their liferaft situation. You DO have one, right? And it HAS been maintained, inspected and re-certified, right? And you actually know what’s stored in it and how to use it, right? And [...]
Interlux Recalls New Compass Varnish
Sometimes I guess you can just have too much of a good thing. The case in point here is Interlux’s new Compass varnish, introduced last fall, which incorporated a new, fast-drying chemistry. Unfortunately, it seems to be just a little bit too fast-drying. An OceanLines reader in North Carolina noticed cans of the varnish being [...]
Second Great Technique for Dinghy Anchoring
Our recent piece by Jeff Siegel of ActiveCaptain about a novel dinghy anchoring technique stimulated quite a bit of discussion from readers and we even heard about another, possibly even better, technique from John Marshall, owner of the Nordhavn 55 Serendipity. Marshall discovered a particular product that makes the process of anchoring the dinghy off [...]
Blackberry Weather App for Coastal Cruisers
Mobile Mariner LLC has announced the official launch of the Mobile Mariner™ for the Blackberry® smartphone, which will provide NOAA marine weather forecasts, tide information and life weather conditions for the coastal United States, including the Great Lakes. More upcoming releases will expand the application to other smartphone platforms and cover more international areas. Mobile [...]
Great Technique for Dinghy Anchoring at the Beach
By Jeffrey Siegel (ActiveCaptain); Videography by Karen Siegel Here’s a great technique for anchoring the dinghy off the beach. Our dinghy weighs about 800 pounds. She’s a rigid inflatable with a 40 HP engine. It’s our family car when we’re cruising and we put a lot of demands on her. So I was telling Larry [...]
KVH Offers Rebates for Upgrades to HD7 Sat TV System
KVH Industries said today that current TracVision satellite TV customers can upgrade to the latest HD7 system and get a rebate of up to $2,000, depending on which system they are upgrading. The promotion runs through June 30, 2010. The deal requires the customer to return to KVH the old system’s circuit boards via an [...]
Polish Your Diesel Nonstop
Parker Hannifin has a remarkable new fuel polishing system that has been designed specifically to run nonstop, using extremely small amounts of electricity and with a design that makes it seem nearly immortal when compared to conventional pumps. The new FPM-050 Fuel Polishing Module (click on the photo above for a larger view) consists of [...]
Torqeedo Adds More Electric Outboards
Torqeedo keeps adding new models to its line of electric outboards. The latest is the Travel series with two new units offering power equivalent to 1.5 hp and 3 hp, respectively. The Travel 503 and Travel 1003 not only offer more power than their predecessors but are tougher and are completely waterproof to IP67 [...]
More Night Navigation Models from FLIR
FLIR this week announced expansion of both its fixed M-Series and handheld First Mate series of night vision devices. They’ve covered several different price points now with the First Mate monoculars, which we wrote about here on OceanLines. The M-series also gets a new, less-expensive version that drops the low-light camera and carries only the [...]
Outfitting the Nordhavn 55 with Computers
With this article, we are beginning a new series that illustrates how the Nordhavn 55, one of the most popular of the globe-girdling Nordhavns built by Pacific Asian Enterprises, might be equipped with computers for navigation and other chores. Earlier this year, OceanLines ran an extensive series of articles on outfitting the Kadey-Krogen 55′ Expedition [...]
