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By Ben Ellison — Fall
2004
Profiling the electronics on the 53-foot DeFever aCappella makes for a wonderfully cheerful “Helm Shot” debut, since owners Jeffrey and Karen Siegel eagerly credit modern electronics with helping to make their recent grand voyage safer, easier, and more fun. Despite limited experience, the Siegels managed to successfully—in fact, singingly—voyage their 30-ton little ship from Maine to the Abaco Islands and back unaccompanied, i.e. “a cappella.” Given an ear, they willingly share a concerto of electronics lessons learned, which is what this column is all about.
The photograph (above right) shows aCappella’s peaceful and powerful lower station. All the fixed equipment had already been installed when the Siegels bought the boat used in 2003. “Our philosophy, learned buying houses, is not to change anything during the first year,” Jeffrey says. Given rapid electronics evolution, I see a lot of exceptions to that wisdom, but in this case, all the gear had been selected by the experienced, original owner just a year earlier. One could argue that the setup—Raymarine’s top-of-the-line High Speed Bus (HSB) networked plotter, radar, and fishfinder, along with its ST60 Tridata instruments and ST7001 autopilot—was better than new, having been “broken in.”
At any rate, the Siegels appreciate how HSB, along with Raymarine’s SeaTalk, lets them mix most of their data and imagery across screens, including the additional ten-inch display, Tridata, and autopilot head at the upper helm. For instance, the photo shows their daytime mode; during the overnight passages, they’d flip the radar, more critical than charting when offshore, over to the bigger display. They also learned to put the waypoint bearing and distance numbers onto the 7001 grayscale LCDs, saving the color for image detail.
aCappella’s radar, with its four-foot, 4-kw open-array scanner, is especially valued. The Siegels enthused about how well its MARPA worked and how comforting such automated target plotting could be, especially in traffic. (I surmise that the boat’s optional rate gyro and Naiad stabilizers both contribute to its MARPA stability.) They also learned how to use maximum radar zoom, along with bearing and range tools, to keep tabs on nearby anchored boats in windy conditions. Jeffrey notes that a dangerous neighbor is much more likely to take corrective action when told “my radar shows you’ve dragged 60 feet to the southeast” instead of something more vague.
If you’re getting the idea here that the Siegels do their homework, you’re right, but some schooling was serendipitous. They realized the value of their port and starboard depth transducers (Tridata and L760 fishfinder) when they put aCappella, whose skeg draws almost six feet, aground “right in the center of the Intracoastal, dead between a buoy pair!” A slight difference in left to right depth readings suggested the best direction to wiggle (with twin screws and thruster), and it worked.
>> Next page >> Part 2: Jeffrey hopes someone will develop a WiFi antenna and cabling system better suited to boats. Page
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