ROCKtober Cruise Set

Posted by Captn Andy on Sep 22, 2011 in Destinations, Equipment | 0 comments

Finishing preparations for our ROCKtober Southern Cruise.  Annie and I will take the boat from Merritt Island (our home port) to Savannah Ga.  Annie can only stay on for the first two days, in that she is now a working girl again.  I’ll finish the trip north and, old boating companion, Jim Lucas will jump on in Savannah.  Yes, this would be the recently married Jim Lucas.  No, he doesn’t live in Savannah, he’ll be flying in from, waterlogged,  courtesy of Irene, Connecticut.  Should be fun.  We’ll bring the boat back south, stopping in some of the spots we’ve missed on previous trips through this area.

We’ll be testing a new NAV system on this trip.  Seadee’s main ship computer is getting a little long in the tooth, so I started investigating other options.  We installed a Garmin 5212 on the fly bridge several years ago, and that system works great.  We also installed a NEMA 2000 back bone, an Airmar PB200 device (heading, GPS, and Weather) and a Garmin 441 GPS in the main stateroom.  The main ship’s computer has been a Shuttle running Windows XP and Nobeltec Admiral.  I’ve never really been happy with a PC based NAV system as the main ship’s system.  Too many port conflicts, resets, system freezes, all at the wrong time.  The Garmin stuff just works.  Easy to update, NEMA 200 ready,  Plug and Play.  If I was to do it all over again, that’s the way I would go.  In the mean time, something has to be done.  So, being a Mac guy,  I pulled the Shuttle out and installed a Mac Mini running Boot Camp (allowing me to run Windows programs) and Coastal Explorer 2011.  Coastal Explorer immediately found all of the ports with NEMA 2000 and NEMA 0183 data.  The Nobeltec Radar uses the ethernet port to communicate and Coastal Explorer found and presented a setup screen to set up the radar.  We have tried the new system out locally and everything seems to work fine.  I don’t think I’ll be entirely happy until I can afford to put in a nice Garmin 7215 at the helm.  However, to make the switch, the radar would have to be replaced, and why not a new AIS 600 transmitter/receiver,  and the Garmin XM Weather reviver to update all of the ship’s systems to NEMA 2000?  Total price tag to make the Garmin Network switch: Over $7000!  Just another day in boating.  You can follow our progress by clicking on our SPOT page.