Your boat almost certainly needs a working bilge pump to stay afloat, so calling this accessory “important” is a significant understatement. And as anyone who’s owned a boat knows, bilge pumps can, and do, fail. They might get clogged, they may suck in grit or bits that jam or damage the impeller, and they can suffer from electrical issues too. In fact, it’s a question of when, not if, a bilge pump or repair will be needed. Which procedure is necessary will depend on the nature of the problem. 

How to Fix a Bilge Pump

The best way to fix a bilge pump is to preempt problems with preventive maintenance. 

When it comes to bilge-pump wiring, this is a matter of performing regular visual inspections to make sure all wires, connections and switches are in good condition. Like virtually every other problem that could arise, it boils down to keeping a clean bilge. When a bilge pump needs repairs, the culprit is often a foreign object being sucked up into it. IF the pump ingests grit, pebbles, fiberglass shards, fish scales or bones, and just about any other relatively hard object, it can cause the impeller to become stuck or damaged. Sure, the pump has a strainer to keep foreign objects out, but thin or small items can work their way through.

Even softer items like seaweed or cloth can be problematic if they get pulled up against the strainer and restrict water flow. That pump is designed to run with water moving through it, and if it spins for too long without any it can burn up. And fishing line, especially braid, is an epic pump-killer in a class of its own. It can get sucked right through the strainer, wind around the impeller shaft, and cause it to lock up. If the pump continues running it won’t be long before a complete failure occurs.

Simply keeping your bilge clean can prevent this issue. Remember, even on many self-bailing boats, things can get washed into the bilge via a deck-hatch gutter or some other point of entry. So constantly pay attention to the bilge and keep it clean as a whistle.

If the bilge pump stops working and you’ve eliminated wiring as the culprit, what’s next? It’s almost certainly a clog or a jam. In the case of a clog, clean around the strainer basket. If the clog is in the outflow, try removing the hose from the pump and blasting it out with a washdown or garden hose. Clogs in the outflow usually result from a critter crawling or flying into the fitting in the hull side and building a nest. A strong blast will be oftentimes enough to resolve the issue.

In the case of a jam, pull the pump out and remove the offending item. Most modern bilge pumps connect to the strainer basket via plastic clips, which can be squeezed together to release the pump cartridge. Then turn it upside down to get a look at the impeller. Clean out any foreign objects and replace the cartridge into the basket. If it still isn’t working, a replacement is probably in order because the cartridge itself is sealed and isn’t intended to be disassembled for repairs.

How to Replace a Bilge Pump

Since most modern bilge pumps connect to the strainer basket via those plastic clips, boaters can usually purchase an identical pump and simply swap the old cartridge out for a new one. All that’s needed is to remove the outflow hose, change the wiring connections, and replace the outflow hose on the new cartridge. You shouldn’t need to drill any holes or turn any screws.

If the pump has to be replaced with a different model or the existing one is of an unusual type, on the other hand, you may need to remove it completely and mount the new one in place. This can range from screwing it down onto a dedicated mounting platform to bolting it to an L-bracket on a stringer or the transom. In any case, the best practice is always to mount the new pump exactly where and how the original one was mounted. Similarly, if at all possible use the same outflow hose or at least a new outflow hose of the same diameter (to be sure it fits the barb on the through-hull properly), routed in the same manner as the original. The bottom line is that the boat was designed to have that pump mounted in a specific way in a specific place and altering it is generally not a good move; otherwise you may find that more water collects in the bilge before being pumped out, the pump doesn’t pick up water properly, or it doesn’t evacuate it at the same rate.

Remember that any wiring connections that need to be made belowdecks will be subject to constant moisture, and they need to be protected by heat-shrink tubing and loomed or supported in the same way the old wires were. If drilling any new holes is necessary they should be sealed with a waterproof adhesive/sealant like 3M 5200.

No matter the type or size boat, few accessories aboard are as important as the bilge pump. Make sure it keeps pumping and if fixing a bilge pump doesn’t seem to be going well, just replace it. The alternative—a sinking boat—is something no boat owner should ever risk.

The post How to Fix or Replace a Bilge Pump appeared first on Yachting.

It was 5:30 in the morning, and Chad Rollins was on the treadmill. When the Search and Rescue alarm sounded, it surprised him. He’d only heard it once before at the US Coast Guard Station Sabine, in southeast Texas near the Louisiana border. He was a 25-year-old petty officer second class whose job was to fix diesel and gas engines on the boats, and handle maintenance and repairs. “I’m basically a mechanic,” he says, adding that when the SAR alarm goes off, everybody jumps. “We know it’s serious; we know somebody is in danger. Somebody needs the Coast Guard.”

Rollins ran to the communications room. “What do we got?” he asked a fellow petty officer.

“A capsized tugboat.”

“I didn’t ask any other questions,” Rollins says. “I ran off and put on my uniform. It was my job to go down and fire up the boat to get it ready and get it underway.”

There was so much fog hanging over the Sabine River that even from water level aboard the 45-foot boat, he and the two other Coast Guardsmen who headed out could only see about 20 feet ahead of their hull. They knew the 75-foot Sea Cypress tug had capsized only a mile away, based on the call for help, but they couldn’t get eyes on the vessel in distress. And they were well aware that time was critical because the call had come in over VHF radio channel 13, not the standard hailing channel 16.

“They were sinking, and they could only grab the radio that was near them, so that’s what they called the mayday on,” Rollins says. “That boat took on water fast.”

One Coast Guardsman drove, another manned the spotlight, and Rollins acted as lookout, just outside the skipper’s window. After about five minutes, he says, “I saw the faint flicker of a flashing strobe light.” It was Sea Cypress, with a nearby pilot boat and its crew trying to help.

It turns out a freighter had come through the river so fast, throwing a wake so big, it yanked the tugboat off the barge it was tied to. The tug swung sideways and went over as the freighter kept on going.

Rollins instructed the Guardsman at the helm to get as close as possible to the pilot boat. From there, Rollins hopscotched his way to the capsized tug.

The captain was trapped with another middle-aged man, a deckhand, in the dining area around amidships. “The only way that I was able to communicate with those men was through an 8-inch porthole. I could see their faces and talk to them, but 8 inches is not very big,” Rollins says. “They were standing inside the tug in chest-deep water. At that point in time, we didn’t know how fast it was moving. We knew it was rising.”

Rollins was also in waist-deep water on the outside of Sea Cypress, which was on its side almost 90 degrees. He could see panic in the captain’s face.

“He was saying, ‘Please get me out, get me out of here,’” Rollins recalls. “Panic only makes things worse.”

Rollins followed his training. He calmly asked the captain a simple question: What is your name?

“He told me his name,” Rollins says. “I asked who was in there with him. He gave me the other individual’s name. I said, ‘I’m petty officer Chad Rollins, and I’m going to get you out of there by any means necessary.’”

Little did they know how much he meant it.

The first attempt was to cut a hole in the steel hull. The barge that Sea Cypress had been pulled off had an oxyacetylene torch—about the size of a hammer and often used in welding, producing a flame of around 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Somebody had dragged it over and given it to the men trapped inside, but using it with the rising water all around was a struggle. They couldn’t get a good foothold near the porthole to use it effectively. They’d only been able to achieve about a 6-inch cut in the hull of Sea Cypress, barely enough to stick a fist through, let alone two whole bodies.

“I asked the guys inside to pass me the torch, and I attempted to cut, but I was sending sparks and smoke all over them,” Rollins says. “They were in an enclosed space, and the smoke was filling the space, so they couldn’t breathe. They yelled at me to stop.”

At this point, Rollins realized, nothing specific in his training was going to help. There is no manual of steps to follow for a situation like the one these trapped men were in; knowledge and experience were all anybody had to work with. So, Rollins thought like what he is: a mechanic. He looked around for other tools available in the moment.

His first idea was to ask for a line from the pilot boat. He handed one end of the line through the porthole to the men. He told one of them: “Tie it around your waist. I’m going to hold you up while you cut.”

In effect, Rollins had just instructed the men to aim the oxyacetylene torch right at him. “I told him, ‘Try to go as long as you can without stopping because you’re going to be shooting that hot metal all over me. You’re going to be covering me with sparks.’”

For the next three to five minutes, Rollins used the weight of his body to hold the man up while he tried to cut a human-size hole in the hull from the inside.

“I was just getting blasted with metal,” Rollins says. “You know sparklers that kids play with on the Fourth of July? You ever been burnt by one? It’s like that, but times a thousand, raining down all over my body, my head, my neck. It was like a shower of sparks flying at me about 6 feet from the hull.”

But even that wasn’t enough. After making a cut only about a third of the way around, they had to stop. “It was still smoking up inside pretty good—he had to fan some of the smoke out,” Rollins says. “I told him he was doing a good job, and he was being brave, and he was calm, and I was proud of him, and then we continued cutting.”

The water kept rising, and the men inside still couldn’t reach high enough to cut all the way around and break free. The porthole was too close to the deck above them. They couldn’t get an angle on it to use the torch.

Rollins realized he needed a different tool.

“I asked the pilot from the Sabine pilot boat if they had a fire ax,” Rollins says.

They did, and Rollins was soon swinging that ax—basically, a pickax—as hard as he could into the steel hull of Sea Cypress. He aimed for the areas the torch had already cut. “It was probably about 20 swings,” he says. “I wasn’t really making much headway.”

Yet again, he thought about the available tools. “I asked for a pry bar, which is a long piece of metal I could jam into that area and try to pry the area he had cut away from the hull a little bit,” Rollins says. “I got it bent out a little bit, but there was no way to get leverage on it.”

Next, he called out for adjustable wrenches. The pilot boat had the 6-inch variety. “I used them to bend the hole up, to make it big enough for them to get out of.”

Finally, Rollins had created a hole big enough to get the men through—but there was a new problem. The captain wanted the deckhand to be rescued first, but the deckhand, who was about 6-foot-5 and 270 pounds, had injured his foot. He couldn’t climb out on his own.

“I’m 6 feet tall and was about 220 pounds at the time, but I was a hardcore gym-goer. I was benching 350 at the time,” Rollins says. “I told him to hug me and don’t let go.”

Using his body weight as leverage, Rollins got the deckhand free. He then turned back to the captain, who was also struggling. The captain was about 6 feet tall and 250 pounds.

“I told him the same thing: ‘Grab hold of me,’” Rollins says. “I pulled him out as well.”

By that time, as if on cue, the fog had started to lift from the Sabine River. As everyone else looked on, the captain threw his arms around Rollins. “He gave me a big hug and told me I’d saved his life,” Rollins says. “I was fist pumping. They got out, and we were extremely happy. We all kind of sat down, just kind of exhausted.”

That was on March 31, 2023. About eight months later, this past December, Rollins got a call from his master chief. It was a Wednesday, and Rollins was off-duty, but the master chief asked him to head to the station for a meeting.

“I showed up, and there were some very important people there, command members,” Rollins says.

It took him a bit to realize they were there to present him with the Coast Guard’s Meritorious Service Medal, which “is awarded to those who truly go above and beyond,” said Master Chief Petty Officer Steven Beasley. “Petty Officer Rollins acted selflessly and embodied the motto ‘So others may live.’”

Today, Rollins is earning a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He hopes to move back home to Mississippi—where his mom is an EMT, and his stepdad is a fire chief—and ultimately work for Boeing or NASA. “I want to be a mechanical engineer on the SpaceX program,” he says.

Rollins’ wife, also an EMT, is making a shadow box to display his medal and the blue T-shirt he wore as he took the brunt of the flames. Their young daughter will grow up knowing it as the shirt with all the holes in it from the sparks, from the day her daddy was a hero.  

The post Saved at Sea appeared first on Yachting.

In 2020, the BSB Group released Oscar, a machine vision collision-avoidance system. Oscar used cameras to detect objects, and it would send real-time alerts to avoid collisions.

The company, now called Sea.AI, has since partnered with Pixel sur Mer, a French data-management and vessel-control company, and with ENSTA Bretagne, a French university with expertise in robotic engineering and autonomous navigation. Together, the trio is innovating Exos 2024, an AI and multisensor system for detecting, identifying and autonomously dodging obstacles.

These sensors include automatic identification system receivers, global-positioning system receivers, radar and cameras. Exos 2024 fuses information from all the networked sensors, allowing AI to make more-informed decisions than an optical-only solution.

Gaetan Gouerou, Sea.AI’s co-founder, says one of Exos 2024’s main challenges is determining when the system should intervene. “The autopilot will only take over in the event of a proven dangerous situation,” he says. “The acquisition of reliable information required for such action is a challenge.”

Gouerou says the group’s collective experiences will allow them to build a solution faster than any of the three could develop the technology alone. The plan is to make Exos 2024 available to singlehanded sailors competing in the 2024 Vendee Globe around-the-world race.

Database Building

In 2020, Sea.AI commanded a million annotated maritime objects in its database. It’s now more than 9 million objects. Exos 2024’s AI examines real-time imagery captured by its cameras using information gleaned from its database to detect and identify nonwater objects. Sea.AI plans to leverage the gains it makes with the Exos 2024 project to improve Sentry, a collision-avoidance system for power cruising.   

Take the next step: sea.ai

The post Exos 2024 Autonomous Collision Avoidance appeared first on Yachting.

I wasn’t trying to sink my ship, but I did. The night was clear and calm, and my mission was simple: Pilot a cargo ship away from its berth, past a breakwater, around two buoys—each set about a nautical mile offshore and a mile apart—and then return home. If I’m being honest, I’d dismissed the mission as a milk run. That is, until my bow struck concrete.

My mistake was unforgivable: I’d been driving by sight, hammers down, and hadn’t consulted my chart plotter or radar.

Luckily, my vessel was virtual. This nautical nightmare unfurled within the Multi Vessel Interactive Trainer simulator. And the experience was humbling enough for me to gain respect for MuVIT’s ability to teach real-world boating lessons.

Boating isn’t easy. The number of objective variables involved in navigating from Port A to Port B is impressive, and that’s without involving subjective concerns like vessel handling or docking. There’s a reason why so many boating schools and training programs exist. The trouble, however, is that schools and courses take time and often require travel, which isn’t always life-compatible.

While MuVIT is a simulator, it lets new and experienced boaters practice their vessel-handling, navigation and instrumentation skills in a safe, calm environment. MuVIT also allows users to switch vessels and change weather, both of which affect vessel handling. And it includes a pause button, which buys a frazzled user time to gather a few wits before reengaging throttles.

A lot of this technology got its start in 2013, when America’s Boating Club (formerly the United States Power Squadrons) received funding from the US Coast Guard to create a simulator. The concept was to let instructors teach basic boating skills on the hard. These simulators, called Boating Skills Virtual Trainers, are physically large setups that are expensive to ship, and they only offer a single virtual vessel: a 20-foot Boston Whaler that plies a virtual millpond. America’s Boating Club owns 23 BSVTs (other organizations also own some) and says that while the simulators are effective teaching tools, their cost, complication and limited curriculum present constraints.

“It got us into simulators,” says Lisa Wilson, America’s Boating Club project manager for the boating simulation program. The next step, she says, was to develop a smaller, simpler and less-expensive simulator that was easier to ship.

The solution is MuVIT, a laptop-based system that resides atop Virtual Sailor software. It uses a tablet, a steering wheel, a set of 3D-printed throttles, a mouse and a wireless router.

“It’s a work in progress,” says Scott Morris, a longtime America’s Boating Club instructor who began developing MuVIT in 2015. “All the software is commercial, off-the-shelf parts.”

MuVIT kits can be purchased for about $1,675 at muvit-boating.com. Alternatively, boaters can build their own MuVIT using off-the-shelf hardware (see the website for specs). The software package costs $65 ($40 for Virtual Sailor and $25 for the tablet scripts).

The first MuVITs reached the America’s Boating Club of Tampa Bay in 2016. Additional Coast Guard grant money let the team roll out MuVIT on a national level in 2022. To date, Morris has built about 20 MuVIT simulators, and third parties have assembled additional sims.

Most boaters encounter the BSVT or MuVIT at a boat show or an America’s Boating Club class. Morris, who teaches all the courses except celestial navigation (his wife teaches that one), says he uses MuVIT throughout his curriculum. “I like it for teaching docking,” Morris says, “especially when I give [students] complex situations to deal with.”

This is where MuVIT becomes engaging. While the basic docking simulator can be tricky out of the box, depending on one’s chosen vessel and docking skills, users can add complexities, including cross winds, tide and current, darkness, rain and deteriorating weather.

“You really get a feeling coming into tight situations,” Wilson says. “Your palms can get sweaty, but at least you don’t have to worry that if you run into something, you haven’t caused damage. I think that’s a lot of Confidence-building.”

Wilson and Morris say brand-new boaters who take a course and use a simulator often report a greater level of situational familiarity when they first encounter a complex real-world problem. Likewise, Wilson and Morris say MuVIT has proved itself effective for teaching or refreshing students about chart plotters and radar for navigation and collision-avoidance work.

Conveniently, Virtual Sailor vessels have virtual but working chart plotters, instrumentation (including fuel gauges), GPS receivers and radars. These instruments can be accessed via onscreen buttons or the simulator’s touchscreen tablet.

“We use it for our marine navigation course,” Morris says. “We can teach a full radar seminar with it.”

This brings us back to my shipwreck. Because I was running the simulator in night mode, and because my final waypoint was hovering forward of my virtual bow stem (head-up-display style), I just opened the throttles and pointed. Had I taken even basic responsibility and consulted the chart plotter or radar, I wouldn’t be savoring my slice of humble pie.

But lesson relearned. This is why Morris created MuVIT, and why America’s Boating Club continues to develop the simulator.

While a significant amount of seaway separates a virtual driving experience from the real thing, MuVIT does an impressive job of creating a realistic user experience. Users can select from a list of virtual rides, and the simulator automatically adjusts its helm and throttle responses to replicate each vessel’s real-world handling characteristics. This includes adding advanced systems such as thrusters or multiple screws.

“I found that people like to learn to use twin engines,” Morris says. “I can set it up to be single or twins, and they can learn how to handle their new twin-engine boat, or find out if they can handle a twin-engine boat.”

Then there’s weather. Users can manually adjust everything from time of day (or night) to cloud ceiling heights to visibility to wind (up to 49 knots) and seas (up to 30 feet). The simulator attempts to replicate how a chosen steed would handle conditions. Morris says he often uses MuVIT to show students how to cross waves without getting pounded or rolled. I found the driving—especially into (or down) big seas—engaging, and I worked to pick the best lines and angles.

MuVIT also does a good job of replicating nighttime operations, and it presents itself as a smart way for beginner boaters to pre-flight what can otherwise be an intimidating scenario.

But the coolest meteorological-related feature that MuVIT delivers is the ability to create custom forecasts that unfurl during the course of a simulation. This opens the door to testing one’s skills on a virtual cruise that starts under bluebird skies and deteriorates into storm conditions, or in a white squall that coincides with docking.

Morris suggests that students spend time “turning up the weather” and learning how the different boats handle different situations. Should palms get sweaty, there’s always the pause button.

To make things easier at first, MuVIT software includes a few pre-configured situations. These include a basic chart-plotting scenario, where the vessel is offshore and users can tap their chart plotter to create waypoints and run routes; docking simulators; and the cargo-delivery mission that I failed. The permutations rack up fast given that each scenario can be executed in different vessels, weather and visibility.

Given that MuVIT systems are cost-effective and easy to ship, and can serve as curriculum companions or learning platforms, it’s fair to say that America’s Boating Club is accomplishing its project objectives. That said, MuVIT isn’t a polished commercial product, or even a fully developed one. The 3D-printed throttles, for example, are a bit soft, and users can expect some bugs and crashes.

So, what happened after my virtual sinking? I turned nighttime to full daylight, consulted my radar, added a few waypoints for safety, and reran the course. This time, I made sure to keep my speed down on the final leg—success.

It’s amazing what situational awareness, throttle control and basic responsibility bring to boating. It’s even better when you get to relearn this lesson using virtual-world software, not real-world crashes.

Sailing Curious

In addition to powerboats, MuVIT offers virtual sailboats. There’s basic tacking and jibing, and some boats allow users to trim their sails to match their true wind angle. Things become more interesting when deteriorating weather conditions are involved. The Dinghy Sail simulation has a virtual racecourse.

The post Simulator Training For Boaters appeared first on Yachting.

In June 2022, I helped some friends deliver a high-performance sailboat from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Seattle. Our crew was experienced, so we opted to sail west of Vancouver Island. Those waters are frigid, and the shorelines are desolate, so I carried two personal locator beacons.

The first PLB, an Ocean Signal MOB1, was rigged inside my Spinlock Deckvest 6D life jacket, ready to self-activate and transmit my position via the automatic identification system if the jacket inflated. The second PLB, a McMurdo FastFind 220, resided in a case on my jacket. If manually activated, it would transmit 406-megahertz satellite signals to the international Cospas-Sarsat program, for routing to search-and-rescue authorities.

Back then, this two-PLB setup was the gold standard, but it used only GPS (not the entire global navigation satellite system) to determine position information, and it provided zero reassurance that the signals had been received.

Now there’s a better option. ACR’s ResQLink AIS PLB-450 and Ocean Signal’s PLB3 are multifrequency beacons that operate on AIS and 406 MHz frequencies. The two brands have the same parent company, and the PLBs are identical, aside from their styling. They both can leverage the full GNSS to fix their location, which they broadcast. They can be paired with life jackets, and they come with built-in Return Link Service, which illuminates an LED once Cospas-Sarsat has received the signals. Also, both beacons employ near-field communication, which lets them share a wealth of battery and test-result information via ACR’s companion app.

The PLB-450 and PLB3 are, as of this writing, the world’s most sophisticated PLBs, but the technology to build multifrequency beacons has existed for years. Two things changed that allowed these devices to go live.

First, Return Link Service came online in January 2020. It’s provided by the European Union’s Galileo satellite network, and it lets mariners receive a simple LED-based confirmation that their distress signals have been received. The importance of this technology cannot be overstated; documented cases exist of lives lost to information voids.

Second, in February 2023, the US Federal Communications Commission authorized a single PLB that can transmit both AIS and 406 MHz frequencies. This is one of the most important marine-specific changes that the FCC has made in decades. It created a regulatory opportunity for manufacturers to build multisignal PLBs.

Prototypes had existed for at least a year before that FCC change, so ACR and Ocean Signal soon began shipping the new beacons. I was excited to receive a PLB-450 to review.

My first move was to register the beacon with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This simple process involves inputting information, such as the PLB’s identification and serial numbers. Next, I downloaded ACR’s app, and I placed my iPhone next to the beacon. The devices connected, an iOS pop-up appeared, and I tapped it to launch the ACR app. I was presented with a wealth of PLB-specific data, including battery condition (high) and “total time on” (10 minutes).

ACR’s instructions make clear that it’s important to self-test the PLB, which also broadcasts on the 121.5 MHz frequency. Rescuing authorities sometimes use this frequency for final-mile recovery work. The catch is that commercial aircraft carry 121.5 MHz receivers, so it’s important to self-test any 121.5 MHz-enabled PLB only during the first five minutes of each hour.

I waited my turn, and then headed to the driveway, where I have a semiclear south-facing sky view. The first self-test, called a function test, involved pressing and holding a slider-protected key. The LED flashed blue once, indicating that the beacon had passed its exam. I confirmed this with the app.

Next came the GNSS Test. Here, I ran into some trouble, as the PLB flashes its results in red or green, and I suffer from red-green colorblindness. So, I reran the test with my wife standing next to me. She saw a single long red flash, followed by a number of shorter green flashes. Again, the beacon passed, and the app confirmed the results. It also showed me how many satellites were in view (three), how long it took to acquire its first fix (35 seconds), its fix type (2D fix) and its position accuracy (greater than 215 feet).

Like the MOB1, the PLB-450 (and PLB3) can be paired with a life jacket so that if the jacket inflates, the PLB activates. ACR and Ocean Signal achieve this via an activation slider, a safety cover and some ribbon that loops around the jacket’s air bladder. Should the jacket inflate, the ribbon pulls tight, the activation slider and safety cover pop off, and the beacon lights up. This autoinflation system is clever, but it must be carefully rigged (imagine packing a parachute). A seven-minute video on ACR’s website explains it.

I donned my life jacket in the driveway to see how it felt to wear the devices. There’s no escaping the fact that a PLB-450 is larger than a MOB1; however, I found this bulk was offset because I no longer had to carry the FastFind 220. Overall, a PLB-450 (or PLB3) is cost-competitive with a two-beacon setup, it weighs less, and it offers the same operational life of 24-plus hours.

There’s no question that I would have preferred to carry a PLB-450 or PLB3 on my delivery from Ketchikan to Seattle. The downsides are nonexistent, and it’s spectacular to be able to broadcast your emergency and position with great accuracy to both local traffic and rescuing authorities, and to receive Return Link Service confirmation.

The post Saving Yourself With ACR’s PLB appeared first on Yachting.

“Person overboard!“

Few phrases conjure darker fears among mariners. The good news, of course, is that contemporary beacons and geofence-breaching pendants can swiftly alert a skipper and crew about an MOB emergency, and can often help with rescue efforts. The less-than-cheery news, however, is that this equipment requires crewmembers, guests and family to carry or wear the equipment. This scheme can also presuppose that a person who has gone overboard is still conscious, treading water and capable of activating a beacon, probably in a seaway, maybe at night.

For the owners and captains of superyachts that carry at least 18 feet of freeboard, MARSS Group’s groundbreaking MOBtronic system provides safety without active user participation.

The Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010 mandates that all cruise ships operating in US waters carry equipment that can detect or capture imagery of people who have gone overboard. The resulting ISO standards are strict: Systems must achieve a 95 percent probability of detection while recording no more than one false alarm per day, on average.

Flash-forward to today: UK-based MARSS has developed a solution called MOBtronic, which it has been selling to a few superyachts longer than 300 feet. While MOBtronic currently has a significant freeboard requirement, it employs active-detection technologies rather than pendants or beacons. It can autonomously sense a person overboard and immediately advise its human-on-the-loop operator.

MARSS is also exploring a solution with lower freeboard requirements for smaller yachts. While this technology is not currently available, MOBtronic offers a look at what’s possible when sensors and hybrid intelligence converge.

With regard to hardware, each installation involves a network of MOBtronic sensor pods that are installed along a vessel’s upper decks. Collectively, this equipment creates 360 degrees of coverage. There’s a virtual or physical server running NiDAR CORE, which is MARSS’ hybrid intelligence system that blends detection technologies and human input. There’s also a dedicated touchscreen display. Each sensor pod measures 14.1 by 10 by 3.6 inches, weighs 14.55 pounds and carries an IP66/67 rating. Each pod houses Doppler-enabled, microsize solid-state radars that constantly sweep an area measuring roughly 262 feet long and 26 feet wide (and at least 18 feet high). The package also incorporates a thermal-imaging camera and a processor. Additionally, owners can spec a daylight camera, but this isn’t required by ISO standards.

For scale, a large cruise ship might be fitted with 12 sensor pods, while a 300-plus-foot yacht might carry six.

“The sensor pods themselves have computers built into them, and they are doing most of the heavy-lift processing,” Mike Collier, MARSS’ business development manager, says of the radar- and video-feed analytics. “It’s very light on data that has to go back to the central server.”

The way MOBtronic works starts with radar, which effectively serves as the system’s tripwire. From there, it progresses to thermal imagery and analytics. Each MOBtronic radar pipes its signal to its processor, which has been trained via digital signal processing to identify an overboard person’s volume, size, shape and velocity (think bird mode, but for finding human beings).

Should the radar signal detect a possible match, the pod’s thermal-imaging camera begins working to verify, via video analytics, if this is actually a person in the water.

“It’s a five-stage process,” Collier says. “It takes data from the radar and does two calculations on that, and then it looks at the thermal-imaging-camera data and does some analytics on that as well. And if both things match, then an MOB alarm is raised.”

A human operator is then notified, and that person decides whether and how to escalate the situation. Go-to procedures include conducting head counts, notifying rescuing authorities and nearby traffic, and launching rescue craft and drones.

MOBtronic provides the vessel’s networked navigation system with its GPS location at the time of the emergency. In turn, the nav system can often calculate the person overboard’s predicted set and drift. Some nav systems can also cue a networked camera to follow that real-time position.

MOBtronic doesn’t track the person in the water, at least not outside the area of sensor coverage—but Collier says this isn’t the point. “The system was always focused on the detect part because that’s the most difficult part,” he says. “The bit that was always missing from the puzzle was accurate detection of someone falling from a vessel, and that’s what we focused on. The operator of the vessel can make the decision what they do next.”

As for the system’s 18-foot freeboard requirement, which is currently a limiting factor for many yachts, Collier says it has more to do with meeting and exceeding ISO standards than it does with sensor blind spots.

“It’s really difficult to achieve 95 percent probability of detection and only one false alarm a day,” he says. “We need to give the radar sufficient time to create a track … and for that track to continue all the way down to the water.”

Relaxing the freeboard requirement for use outside of the cruise-ship sector is already in the works. “It won’t be the same technology,” he says. “It might be something slightly different.” One possibility is to add a form of AI called machine learning to the camera feed, which could help MOBtronic understand what’s happening faster and with greater accuracy.

In addition to superyacht-level freeboard requirements (and costs), the system will generate some human-on-the-loop work for the bridge or helm watch. That said, these drawbacks are small prices to pay for an active, autonomous detection system that requires zero participation from the people it’s protecting—especially on a charter yacht, or one with landlubber guests who make unseamanlike decisions. Going forward, this technology could be a compelling safety proposition for many yachts. After all, few things assuage fear faster than situational awareness.

The post MARSS’ All-in-One Detection System appeared first on Yachting.

For more than 25 years, Italy’s Videoworks has been a go-to company for yacht owners worldwide who want the latest onboard technology. The firm is known for installing audiovisual setups that rival those inside mansions ashore, as well as satellite communications, cybersecurity systems and, most recently, home automation packages that incorporate artificial intelligence. The custom interfaces that Videoworks offers let yacht guests control everything from streaming movies to lights and air conditioning aboard yachts, while the company’s Active Noise Control Systems help keep the din down wherever yacht owners want peace and quiet.

Now, the company is offering Health Remote Monitoring, an area of medicine that’s been around for decades but that really started to accelerate along with the internet’s evolution in the 1990s. During the pandemic the past few years, telemedicine systems got another technological boost, when all kinds of medical experts, including doctors and veterinarians, began offering patient consultations via video calls and online data transfers.

Today, numerous types of telemedicine systems are available, many of them in collaboration with service centers where on-call medical professionals are at the ready for incoming information and requests for help. Videoworks says it’s taking a slightly different approach, though, with more of a focus on patient privacy—what with overall privacy being a key concern aboard most superyachts worldwide.

“What makes this service truly original is the direct connection with the patient’s personal physician, rather than with a service center, as is commonly the case with telemedicine, in which the patient’s data is analyzed by whichever doctor is on duty,” the company said when announcing the service. “This preserves the patient’s privacy and, above all, ensures direct communication with his or her own doctor, who is familiar with the patient’s pathologies and state of health.”

Experts in the telemedicine field say one of the top trends to watch is the increasing use of AI in remote-monitoring systems, for everything from diagnosis and diagnostics to patient follow-up. Expectations also include an increased use of wearables in these systems, with watches and other technology now able to track people’s heart rates, blood pressure and other important vital signs.

All of these system integrations happening aboard a yacht, while still maintaining personal privacy for owners and guests, will require expertise in cybersecurity protocols, satellite communications and more. That’s what makes Videoworks so well positioned to become a major player in the telemedicine marketplace on the world’s oceans.

In September at the Monaco Yacht Show, Videoworks gave showgoers a glimpse of the future, allowing them to test the Health Remote Monitoring system. Visitors to the company’s booth could measure their blood oxygen level and heart rate using a classic pulse oximeter, reproducing what the system does on board a yacht.  

The post Videoworks’ Personal Health-Monitoring System appeared first on Yachting.

Two weeks before Christmas, when most Americans were ready to relax with friends and family, the U.S. Coast Guard command center sprang into urgent action. The 30-foot Catalina Atrevida II was not where it was supposed to be. Sixty-four-year-old Kevin Hyde, 76-year-old Joe DiTomasso and his dog Minnie had left Cape May, New Jersey, on November 27 for a cruise to Marathon, Florida. For a while, everything went fine. According to news reports, DiTomasso was known for losing his phone, so his family didn’t worry after the men left North Carolina on December 3 and then went silent.

But by December 11, that quiet was deafening. The US Coast Guard Fifth District Command Center in the mid-Atlantic was notified. Rescuers immediately issued urgent alerts and reached out to commercial vessels in the search area. Multiple aircraft and cutters were launched; vessels from the US Navy’s Second Fleet started searching.

By the time a tanker crew spotted the Atrevida II more than 200 miles off the Delaware coast, 10 days had passed. The boat was dismasted. The men were exhausted. They had no fuel or power. All their radios and navigation equipment were dead.

What likely saved their lives was the fact that they were waving a green flag—pretty much their only remaining option.

The Human Factor

Kevin Ferrie knows stories like this one all too well. He’s a retired US Coast Guard commander who now serves as a civilian with the US Coast Guard Office of Auxiliary Boating & Safety.

“The majority of accidents that are in our database—the root cause is human factors. Somebody did something or made a poor judgment call,” he says.

Ferrie knows what’s behind those statistics on a level that most boaters never will. He also provides shore-side support for the annual Salty Dawg regattas that guide groups of sailors down the East Coast to the Caribbean and back. And he’s a long-distance cruiser himself, having sailed from Maine to the Caribbean aboard a 45-foot Jeanneau with his wife, their four kids and a pair of Labrador retrievers. He once found himself in a situation where his autopilot broke, and he needed to use an Iridium Go! as well as a Garmin inReach to communicate with shore-side help. He didn’t need 10 days to start losing his mind; disorientation from trying to fix the autopilot hit him in a day and a half.

“It was in the lazarette. I had to pull out all this gear to get to it and contort my body in all kinds of ways,” he says. “Off and on, it took me like 36 hours to fix it, including communicating offshore and waiting for responses. I was exhausted.”

All his experiences have taught him one overarching lesson about offshore cruising: Preparation is key. “The minimum federal safety standards are important: You need your life jackets, your distress signals, your VHF radio,” he says. “But that’s really baseline. If you’re heading offshore, it’s not enough.” 

Communications

In terms of offshore preparation, communications technology that lets boaters summon help includes everything from cellphones and VHF radios to personal locator beacons and EPIRBs. Having as many types of communication as possible available is key, he says, because, in a lot of cases, simply being able to call for instructions or help can stop a bad situation from escalating into a dangerous one.

One recent example he encountered was with a vessel that lost its rudder this past fall off the East Coast. The husband and wife who were aboard set off their EPIRB and used their Garmin inReach to communicate with the Coast Guard and shore-side support.

What the couple initially feared was an emergency became a solvable problem because they were able to communicate, and because they knew other people were keeping track of them.

“At first, they were like, ‘Oh, my God,’ and we had to help them get through that mental problem,” Ferrie says. “Ultimately, they ended up with the Coast Guard arriving on scene and towing them in. But with help, they were able to make way toward the coast and rendezvous for help. They had the communication devices and the spares. They needed somebody to say, ‘It’s OK. You’re prepared for this.’” 

The Float Plan

Next on Ferrie’s list of important preparations for offshore cruising is filing a float plan. The US Coast Guard has a float-plan form online—for free—that boaters can download, fill out and leave with a responsible person ashore. It includes details such as the boat’s make and model, and the types of communication devices on board, and details about where the boaters expect to be, and when—all information that rescuers will need if the boat doesn’t show up where it should be.

In the case of the Atrevida II, family realizing the boat was overdue was a key component in the search efforts. That information is the essence of what makes filing a float plan such an important step in the offshore-cruising process. A float plan can sometimes be a boater’s only way to “signal” for help if an onboard emergency develops quickly.

“In a fast situation, the float plan is incredibly important because you may not even have time to make the mayday call,” Ferrie says. “Fire can happen really quickly on a boat. It can block access to everything except your way overboard.” 

Shore-Side Support

Having designated shore-side support people is different from filing a float plan. With shore-side support, a boater has volunteers or paid professionals helping to keep an eye on their course and anything happening around them, including developing weather systems.

“It’s more of an active person that’s watching out for your best interests,” Ferrie says. “With shore-side support, they’d be proactive and reach out to you. They’d say, ‘Hey, did you know this? Are you watching the weather? This is what I’m seeing heading your way in 12 hours.’”

Having shore-side support in place keeps everyone’s mind at ease both on the boat and ashore, he adds. During the Salty Dawg rallies, boaters are required to check in with the shore-side support teams at fixed intervals. Everybody involved knows that as the boats are making their way down the Atlantic coast, a failure to check in means something has gone wrong. For a boater having an emergency offshore with no other way to communicate, simply knowing that shore-side support people will take action can make all the difference between staying calm and panicking, which makes the onboard situation worse.

Safety Gear

Buying a bunch of top-notch safety gear and loading it onto the boat is not enough, Ferrie says. All the gear in the world won’t do a boater any good if he doesn’t know how to use it. “If you just buy a life raft, but you don’t know how to deploy it or what’s in it, that’s bad money spent,” he says.

Life jackets are a hugely important safety-gear requirement. According to the US Coast Guard’s most recent boating-accident data, 81 percent of fatal boating accidents involved people drowning, and some 83 percent of those victims were not wearing life jackets.

“Offshore, you should always wear a life jacket, and, with the inflatable designs, there’s no excuse about comfort anymore,” Ferrie says, adding that for sailors, “you also should always be attached to the boat. Run jacklines from the stern to the bow and clip your life jacket into them.”

He also thinks of communication devices as a form of safety gear, if boaters understand what each device on board can, and cannot, do.

“A personal locator beacon is basically an EPIRB for a person,” Ferrie says. “It will alert the authorities that there’s an emergency. But there’s also an AIS MOB beacon that alarms any boats in the area with AIS and gives them the position. So if you went overboard at night and the crew were sleeping, a personal locator beacon would not alert the crew, but an AIS MOB would wake them up.”

As for life rafts, they’re not required for offshore passages, but Ferrie highly recommends having one on board. He urges boaters to take advantage of the opportunities that come with every life raft’s required service intervals, which are a great time to learn how that particular piece of safety gear works.

“If your life raft is due for a service, talk to the service company, and be there when they open your raft,” he says. “Examine the raft. Visit the facility, and understand what rations come in the raft. Do you need more emergency rations? A ditch bag? You need to prepare that, and it depends on where you’re sailing. A coastal hop down the East Coast of the US is a lot different from a 30-day passage to the South Pacific. You have to think about how long it might take for people to find you.” 

Spare Parts

When Ferrie thinks about spares, his mind takes him to places well beyond parts and tools. Yes, those things are important, but he thinks about spare everything—including food, water and fuel—because in an extended emergency, a boater may need more than a 10 percent reserve of all three.

Carrying extra water is a must, he adds, because human beings can survive without food for a while, but not without water.

“Water tanks offshore can get contaminated in rough weather if you have saltwater intrusion,” he says. “Don’t count on being able to make water in a rough sea state. Have some water in five-gallon jugs.”

Many decisions about which spare parts and tools to stow boil down to the individual vessel and what its critical points of failure could be. “A lot of it’s in steering gear, the halyards if you’re sailing, fuel filters. If it’s rough, you may stir up sediment in your tank, and if you do that, you’ll have clogged filters,” Ferrie says. “You need to know how to fix that and have the critical spares on board.”  

Crew Endurance

Having enough crew so that everyone can be focused on-watch and resting off-watch is also “a huge one” that Ferrie thinks about in terms of preparations. If whoever is at the helm is exhausted when something goes wrong, the odds skyrocket of a solvable problem getting worse.

“There’s a saying: People typically break before the boats do,” he says. “At some point in a heightened-stress situation, it becomes a mental game.”

He adds that boaters should never, ever get themselves into a situation where they will feel forced to arrive at or depart from a certain location on a specific day or at a specific time, for any reason.

“You need to understand the weather,” he adds. “There’s a saying in cruising: If you have visitors coming, you can pick the location or the time, but you can’t pick both. When you’re forced into a schedule, you tend to make poor decisions. You feel like, ‘I have to get to this island because my mom’s going to arrive.’ Be patient, and wait for the weather window that suits your skills and ability and your boat.” 

Take Classes

Another key piece of advice is to  take boater-education courses. Many people wrongly assume that only beginners need classes; in fact, every page of this article includes a sidebar about advanced classes available for powerboaters and sailors alike. Classes can be taken nationwide, not only for offshore route-planning and passagemaking, but also for gaining a detailed understanding of how communication devices and mechanical systems work.

Everything a boat owner learns in those classes can be passed along to other crew members, including those who join a passage only for a short leg at a time.

“Think through possible worst-case scenarios and how you would respond to them,” Ferrie says. “Do that as an exercise with your crew. What would you do in a man-overboard situation? Do they know to stop and stare and point at the person?”

Yes, simply being able to keep eyes on a boater in trouble can sometimes make all the difference, as it did for the Atrevida II. After the tanker crew spotted the sailboat’s waving green flag, both the men and Minnie the dog were able to get aboard the tanker and hitch a ride back to New York. The men were exhausted and beaten up from the weather. They were taken to a hospital for observation to make sure they didn’t have hypothermia. One described his legs as feeling like rubber from trying to stay upright for so long.

But they both lived to tell their tale, just like the more than 75,000 people the Coast Guard Office of Auxiliary Boating & Safety has saved during the decades since its inception. And in a bad situation, that’s the statistic any offshore boater ultimately wants to be.

Learn the Basics

America’s Boating Club (previously known as the US Power Squadrons) offers an entry-level course for beginners who want to learn the basics of everything from navigation to safety equipment. This course also meets most states’ boater-safety education requirements.

Add New Skills

Boaters who complete the America’s Boating Club basic class can move on to higher-level courses. One course focuses on offshore navigation, with lessons in things like celestial navigation as a backup in case GPS equipment fails beyond the sight of land (and landmarks that can be used to navigate back home). This course also covers ways to set offshore navigational routines.

Cruise Planning

Another class that America’s Boating Club offers is focused on cruise planning. It covers how to plan a longer-term itinerary, as well as equipment the boater may need, key safety gear, crew training, communications, dealing with weather, handling emergencies and tips for cruising outside the United States.

Teaching the Tech

Yet another class that America’s Boating Club offers focuses exclusively on marine communication systems. It helps students understand the differences between VHF radio, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System, radiotelephones, long-range communication systems and other technology that can help keep offshore boaters in contact with civilization.

For Sailors

The American Sailing Association has more than 300 schools across the United States as well as locations in other countries. After passing the basic keelboat sailing class, boaters can advance to basic coastal cruising, which teaches lessons focused on operating a boat during the daytime with wind conditions up to 20 knots.

Advanced Sailing

Upper-level classes from the American Sailing Association include advanced coastal cruising and offshore passagemaking. The passagemaking class is designed for boaters who want to sail extended offshore itineraries that will require celestial navigation. Sail repair, offshore first aid, abandon-ship protocols and other skills are also part of this course.

It All Comes Down To Preparation

“The minimum federal safety standards are important: You need your life jackets, your distress signals, your VHF radio. But that’s really baseline. If you’re heading offshore, it’s not enough.”

Basic Problems To Avoid

According to US Coast Guard accident data, top problems include operator inattention, improper lookout and excessive speed.

Main Types Of Boating Accidents

The US Coast Guard’s top five are collisions with other boats, collisions with fixed objects, flooding/swamping, grounding and falls overboard.

Watch The Weather

The US Coast Guard’s top 10 factors contributing to accidents include weather, which killed 30 people in the most-recent-year statistics available.

Being Offshore Is Different

The US Coast Guard’s most recent data shows that more boating accidents happen offshore in the Atlantic Ocean than in any single state. 

The post Offshore-Cruising Safety Tips appeared first on Yachting.

Life rafts are mission-specific safety gear. If you’re planning to stick to coastal cruising without ever heading offshore, then you might consider one type of raft instead of another. Ditto for cruisers headed to warmer climates as opposed to colder locations. Owner-operators who always cruise alone may be fine with a smaller raft, compared with a family of four, who would need a larger version.

All of which is why Jacksonville, Florida-based Revere makes a variety of life rafts for these purposes and more, with recreational and commercial versions in various sizes and styles. “We have been around since 1936. We have many different product lines,” says John Tuerk, senior sales manager.

The Regatta model shown here is built for offshore cruisers, which is indicated by its ISO 9650 rating. This raft’s features include a dual-tube design with independent air chambers, just in case one chamber deflates; an insulated floor to help the people inside stay warm; and a self-deploying canopy to provide protection from the elements.

Also included are hand flares, parachute flares, a signaling mirror, seasickness pills, a repair kit and other items that might be needed to keep people comfortably afloat until help can arrive. 

Take the next step: reveresurvival.com

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