Overboard Boater

A flashlight that plugs into your 12V outlet and recharges in 90 seconds? Sounds too good to be true, but it exists. 5.11 Tactical sent me a tester unit of its UC3.400 “Light For Life” flashlight a while back, and after a season of use I’d call it a solid addition to your onboard tool collection.

The flashlight recharges through an ultracapacitor electrostatic storage system rather than chemical batteries, which allows for the fast recharge.The UC3.400 features three LED lights that last for 50,000 hours of use. Fully charged, the light operates for 60 minutes at 90 lumens, and 15 minutes at peak 270 lumen output. There’s also a 270-lumen strobe mode.

While I wouldn’t use it to locate channel markers on a midnight cruise, it’s good for looking around the engine compartment, going belowdecks, or fumbling around at the launch ramp on a pre-dawn mission. It features a rugged housing, to law enforcement specs, and because it lasts forever and you don’t need to worry about dead batteries, you can stow it onboard long term.

Price: $170, Contact: www.511tactical.com

As an afterthought, 5.11 threw in a pair of Taclite Pro Shorts:

Made of a lightweight cotton/poly blend, the Taclite shorts are treated with Teflon for stain and water resistance. They’re made for cops on the beat, but I’ve been wearing them as fishing shorts. They wash off easily, they don’t absorb fish blood, they’re breathable, and they’re super rugged. Plus, the “magazine” back pocket holds my fly box for quick access and the external knife pocket works for a fishing blade or a pair of pliers. I’d recommend them to any angler for inshore and offshore duty.

Price: $45

Boating is a healthy pastime, right? You’re outdoors, breathing in fresh air, and–if you’re on my boat–eating your weight in processed junk food. I’m usually on a boat for one of two reasons, fishing or otherwise getting recreational. Fiddling around with cooking or food prep is a colossal waste of time. Rip open a bag, pop a top, chomp it down, and be done with it.

Here are the best scientifically proven food products to bring aboard.

PRINGLES: Is there a better boat food? The chips are protected in an ingenious tube so they don’t get smashed beyond edibility when crammed under the console. It keeps the chips from getting soggy and disgusting. If the inventor of the Pringle’s tube found it suitable to be buried in, it’s good enough for my boat.

GOGURTS: No need for bowls, spoons, or napkins to ingest breakfast. Fellow Boatermouth writer Lenny Rudow used to raid his kids’ lunch-food and bring stacks of them on offshore tuna trips to the canyons. [Lenny also invented the famed "boat sandwich," wherein you roll a cold cut in a piece of cheese.] Your hunger is satiated, rather healthily, in seconds.

HARD PRETZELS: The choice of Kevin Falvey, another boating writer, for mako shark trips. Or any trip. You can just throw a box in a locker at the beginning of the season and if they go stale, how can you tell?

BEEF JERKY: Would be the A-One top choice but for the inconsistency between brands and batches. Some come out just right, others worse than shoe leather. But if you get a quality bag of jerky, it hits the spot and fills the protein void left by the other snacks. It takes a long time to chew and can distract from the tedium of trolling.

DRIED MANGO SLICES: They have the veneer of being healthy; they’re derived from one of the three most awesome fresh fruits in existence. But when you read the bag on a lot of packaged mango slices, you’ll see they’re processed with incredible amounts of sugar. And, possibly, sulphur dioxide. Eat a bag and you’ll have boundless energy, I guess because it combines the magic of fruit with the sugar of Mountain Dew and the calories of a Big Mac.

That’s right, orange construction fence. We kept our boat in a mooring field on Long Island Sound that was dominated by ornery New York City seagulls. They probably cut their teeth working landfills and weren’t intimidated by any traditional gull repellents. On the launch ride out, I could see the white splatter all over the hard top and the crushed shells and crab parts on the bow. The dockmaster at this establishment, a great guy also named Pete, came up with a great system for keeping the sonsofbitches at bay.

You can buy a 50′ roll of orange construction fence at the hardware store for about $20. I hooked one end to the bow cleat, rolled it over the hard top, getting elevation off the top with a fender snugged underneath, and tethered the other end off the stern. I cut the extra from the roll and stowed it in a locker for backup.

When it was time to boat, I just unhooked the installed piece, rolled it up, and stowed it away. The whole process took less than five minutes and the seagulls never got purchase on the hardtop or deck again.

In real life, bean bags and futons have gone the way of fondu sets and pet rocks. But on a boat, bean bags rock. Seriously. A marine grade bean bag can make a huge difference for the crew when running long distances on a center console or in the cockpit of a battlewagon, where seating is scarce.

Last year I used an E-Searider Medium Teardrop Marine LONGNECK ($110, e-searider.com/) for a project boat, and after the season I put it in my office and used it instead of my desk chair.

Last week, on a 25-mile run in cold weather through a moderate chop, we threw bean bags in the back of the cockpit, buttressed by the transom, and sat protected from the wind by the freeboard and from the pounding by the bags’ shock absorbing properties.

When it’s time to fish, stow them the hell out of the way.

I downloaded yet another iPhone app that bodes well for boaters with an addiction to their little phone buddy. The NOAA Buoy Data Reader app from Verona Solutions provides the latest update from the nearest data buoy, or from the one nearest to your ultimate destination. Rather than explain what it does, let me show you a screen grab from my phone for my home waters:

As you see, it gives you some basic data to judge your sea state. It is not a forecasting tool. But I tried it on the water this week and it worked well, providing us an accurate picture of waters.

The caveat: Make sure you’re not relying on your cell phone for ANY serious cruising data unless you’re 100 percent sure you’ve got cell phone or wifi coverage where you’re boating.

And if you’re going to whip your iPhone out on the water, for dog’s sake protect it. My favorite case is the Aquapac Phone Case.

The NOAA Buoy Data App costs $2.99 on the iTunes app store.

As an alternative consider the more comprehensive Bombora app that goes for $4.99. (Especially if you like to surf, too.)

The SPOT Personal Tracker on duty in the Everglades.

In the Everglades there is a waterway known as Lost Man’s River. The name could serve as a descriptive modifier for the entire 1.5 million acres of National Park. The endless and barely distinguishable mangrove channels and rivulets of the Glades proved a perfect place to test a device that helps you stay found. So recently I took a SPOT Personal Tracker into the Everglades to see how it worked.

The Personal Tracker works via GPS only it doesn’t tell you where you are or where you are going. There’s no screen to view tracks to retrace. What it does is tell others where you are. When you get your SPOT unit you register it and create an account on www.findmespot.com. Then you type in the email and cell phone numbers of the people you want tracking you.

Cell phone reception dies about halfway down the road from the Park entrance to Flamingo, where we launched our boat. I used SPOT to keep in contact with people over the next few days. The Personal Tracker has four functions: SOS/911-hit it if you need to be rescued and it notifies the closest emergency response agency; Help-hit it if you run out of gas or need a tow; I’m OK–sends your GPS coordinates to all your contacts, and a personal message. The fourth, Track Progress, allows followers to view your waypoints on a Google Map.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the Personal Tracker. You have to lay it on a flat surface to make it work. The blinking lights indicating what function is working are too similar. I was never sure if I properly activated the Track Progress function. There’s no way to tell if your contacts are receiving your emails until you get home. And, finally, it’s one way communication. If you need dialogue, bring a SAT phone.

But here’s what I loved. It worked. And it worked well. My contacts could follow me in real time and knew, even though I couldn’t talk to them, that I wasn’t hopelessly lost in the swamp. At home I could retrace my trip in my personal account,  and show off my wanderings on my SPOT Shared Page. Overall, it’s a great addition to any boater’s safety protocol.

Price: $99 for unit, $200 for unit plus one year of basic service.

Contact: www.findmespot.com

NEW FROM SPOT: Satellite GPS Messenger

The Satellite GPS Messenger looks more user-friendly.

Over the summer, SPOT came out with an updated unit called the Satellite GPS Messenger. I have not tested it but it is smaller and lighter, and looks to have a more user-friendly keypad design than my tester. Plus it’s got a custom message function. And the “message sending” indicator light looks like it rectifies one of my issues with the original unit.

COMING SOON: SPOT announced at the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show two weeks ago that it’s coming out with SPOT HUG (Hybrid Universal Guardian), a service for boaters that incorporates the tracking functions of SPOT with a security feature that helps prevent boat theft. You install a “base station” on your boat and keep a key fob on your person. If your boat moves out of a designated “Home Base” range when you and your fob aren’t around, it sends an alert with GPS coordinates to you and a monitoring center. Look for HUG in the spring of 2010, and hopefully for a test here.

So this is what I said about the Whaler 370 Outrage:

“Six people onboard, two- to four-foot seas outside the inlet, three- to five-footers in the Gulf Stream, an increasing 15- to 20-mph wind and a 60-mile run to the fishing grounds. These numbers might lead some to suggest recalculating at the nearest dockside restaurant. But we threw a new number into the equation that made it easier to point the bow offshore: 370. As in the new 370 Outrage, the largest boat Boston Whaler has built to date.

There’s a trend among many builders to offer large center-console boats powered by multiple outboards because of the design’s versatility, the better power-to-weight ratio, and the comparative ease of outboard maintenance. With the 370 Outrage, at 37 feet, 6 inches and at a base price of $384,000, Whaler is making a loud entrance to the party. But the question is, by going so big, did it try to do too much? That’s the type of inquiry that can only be answered 60 miles offshore with a full trolling spread.”

Read the rest of my review on here on Madmariner.com.

Costa Del Mar Zanes with 580 Silver Mirror lenses give a hi def view of the water.

For scientific purposes, on a recent fishing outing I took off my shades and stared at the water. Clouds rolled in, obscuring the surface with their reflection and magnifying the glare.  I put the shades back on, a pair of Costa Del Mar Zane glasses with 580 Silver Mirror Lenses. The vegetation and underwater contours of the shoreline popped as if on a big flat screen HD.

The whole purpose of lens polarization is to reduce glare, caused by how light waves bounce off a flat surface like, say, water. These waves reflect back to your eyes along a horizontal plane. Sunglass makers combat this by making lenses with vertical polarization filters that block the reflected light, cancelling out glare. This can be done on the cheap by spraying a thin chemical film on surface of the lenses, like you’d find on drugstore shades. Or it can be encapsulated within the lens, as Costa does with its 580 glass lens technology.

Costa calls them 580 lenses because they block yellow light, the hardest for the human eye to process, at 580 nanometers. (Visible light ranges from about 390 to 780 nm.) The result is they enhance the remaining light and give you that feeling that the whole world is coming at you in vivid detail.

The 580 technology has been around for a few years, but what I noticed about the new Silver Mirrors is how well they worked in low light conditions. I could pick up things at dawn and dusk or on overcast days that I missed when I threw on other high-quality polarized glasses. Costa says the Silver Mirror lenses let in more natural rays, with 12 percent light transmission compared to 9 percent for other lenses.

In an age of ridiculous over-specialization, the 580 Silver Mirrors are also versatile. They served me well both on a lake and searching for pelagics 40 miles offshore, and in a variety of conditions. (I could actually see better with them on while driving in the rain.)

The nylon Zane frames, named after the Zane Grey Reef in Panama (named after, well, Zane Grey), are updated versions of the popular Fathom style. The price tag will scare people off; some will have a hard time shelling out $239 for an item they’re guaranteed to lose, drop overboard, or step on. But the hi def view may be worth it.

For more information visit www.costadelmar.com