Features
TECHNOLOGY UPDATE
Live at Fort Lauderdale
International Boat Show (“FLIBS”)
It’s Tuesday morning here in Fort Lauderdale, and the world’s largest boat show came to an end last night. The 2006 show has been somewhat blighted by torrential rain and thunderstorms, but at least no hurricanes this year!
I had to laugh when I read a press release from the Boat Show organisers last week proudly stating that “more folk attended FLIBS 2006 on the first day than did during the whole show in 2005”. They must think we have incredibly short memories, as they neglected to mention that the 2005 show was hit by a hurricane during preparations, cancelled, then rearranged at a later date on a much reduced scale.
On Monday, another press release stated that “it will be revealed that by the end of the show the attendance will be higher than in any previous year”. Well, I’m sure that they will make sure that it is….
Whatever – this is quite some show.
It can’t be compared to the Monaco Show, as FLIBS is a public boat show, where merchandising is high on the list. Upon arrival at the Bahia Mar entrance you are forced to shuffle IKEA-style through two tents selling everything from Christmas trees for your boat to life jackets for your dog.
Once you have got through this, you are free to explore the docks where 1500 boats are exhibited, and the land area with some1200 exhibitors. If, like us, you are in the super yacht business there is only about 15% of the land and water area of any interest.
The largest tent in this area is the International Yacht Constructors’ tent, which houses all the exhibitors seen a few weeks previously at the Monaco Show.
They were very well represented with notables including Alice Huisman and Dick Van Lent.
Alongside this, there is the Electronics tent, and another large tent, called “400/500” probably so named due to someone’s lack of imagination, which houses other relevant exhibitors.
However, apart from this section, at least 90% of the rest of the tents and booths are related to the massive sports fishing and eating industry in south Florida.
When standing at the root of some of the docks, all you can see are row upon row of sport fishing boats stretching to the horizon.
Outside the super yacht area, there is a palpable feeling of “pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap” and throughout the show there are so many food stalls that the smoke and smells of frying and grilling can become quite noxious.
One of the reasons for our visit was to find out about any technological innovations from the US which have has yet to reach Europe.
Predictably, we only found one product that was exciting and brilliant, and all the others were just enhancements to existing products.
XM WX Weather
The most exciting new product is a weather data receiver using XM satellite radio. It is called XM WX Satellite Weather.
In almost real time, XM WX Satellite Weather delivers location-specific, animated, high resolution weather data, in chart overlay form, directly to a subscriber’s onboard chart plotter, without the need for a separate PC connection.
There are over 20 types of graphical weather information, and this data is the same site- specific, analytical weather technology used by the US TV meteorologists across the country.
The data is collected from multiple government agencies and commercial providers.
Garmin and Nobeltec have implementations which were running live, and we thought they were stunning. They were able to show current conditions, city forecasts, NEXRAD radar with precipitation type (animated and hi-res), surface air pressure, surface analysis, lightning, storm cell size, speed and direction, hurricane track, visibility forecast, wind speed, sea temp, wind direction, wave period, wave direction, wave height, buoy data and more.
The service is by subscription and requires an antenna and receiver.
It covers the whole of the USA currently, and will cover Canada and the Caribbean in the next six months.
It works up to 200nm offshore, and there is a possibility that it might be extended to Europe, but no dates are available.
3D charting with overlaid sat photos
Everyone from Raymarine to Simrad to Furuno had a proliferation of fabulous high quality screens with an array of 3D bathy seabed images or sat photos overlaid on charts.
Cameras with night vision and image stabilization
There were many new camera enhancements from companies such as NightVision and FLIR.
The NightVision 5000 now includes radar tracking and image stabilization. Radar tracking means the camera, when interfaced to the radar, will point and focus on a target selected from the radar.
Nobeltec Seetrac interface builds 3D image of uncharted reef entrance
Nobeltec launched their interface with the Seetrac tender tracking system. The unique feature of this interface is that the depth data which is sent back to the Nobeltec software from the tender or tenders surveying an uncharted reef entrance ahead, is used in their bathymetric recorder to build a 3D image of the uncharted reef entrance ahead.
Glass bridge and video switching<7b>
This is not new, but is currently extremely popular. There were several exhibits showing up to 7 screens on a bridge with radar, chart plotter, monitoring systems with the ability to seamlessly change what is being displayed on each screen.
“Dive with a hookah – pleasure from top to bottom”
This eyecatching headline certainly had me confused for a while! I envisaged some combination of a brothel and diving school, but closer inspection revealed it to be a towable doughnut (usually used for towing small children at high speed behind your rib) in which is mounted a compressor connected to a couple of garden hoses with scuba mouth piece and regulator.
The idea is that you dive without tanks, breathing through the hose which is connected to the doughnut- mounted compressor on the surface behind you. Will it catch on? Somehow I don’t think so…
Cigarette Boats
Earlier in the week, our attention was caught by the dock full of very loud cigarette boats, loud not only in noise terms, but also in colour!
They definitely appeal to a certain type of individual…
On Sunday evening we were having dinner on the terrace of the famous Rustic Crab restaurant when one of these cigarette boats slowly and noisily motored past, with a topless girl posing on deck, obviously enjoying the excitement she was causing amongst the diners!
I didn’t let it put me off my platter of crab, frogs’ legs and gator steaks…
Who’s here from Mallorca?
It’s such a small world – we’ve had dinner this evening with Phil Edwards and Diane Franklin from Yacht Help, both of whom we’ve seen a few times over the week.
We have also bumped into Remy Millot from Pinmar, but that’s it as far as we’re aware.
However, FLIBS is always packed with many clients, so we’ve had a very busy and interesting week, and would rate the whole trip extremely worthwhile. .
Fortunately we’re heading back to Europe on Thursday which is probably just as well, as we’re already showing signs of going native.
First hint was when we started referring to our accommodation as “the condo” and second worrying sign is that we’ve just hired a Mustang convertible for a few days!
By Roger Horner of E3 Systems
For further information on any of the above, please contact us.
email on info@e3s.com and website www.e3s.com
Tel: +34 971 40420/400738/702975