Joe Coons
This month, I want to ramble a little and give you a potpourri of items that may catch your attention . . .
Padden Creek Marine issues a newsletter to folks on a mailing list they maintain, and I'm fortunate to be on it. The publication is called Around the Yard, and the winter, 1996 issue was a particularly good one! It dealt with seacock maintenance, deck hardware installation, wire connections and wiring, and, most important, "Safety" as an intrinsic part of "Seamanship". Vic and Duff say they'd be glad to give you a copy: stop by the yard,
Yachting magazine had a most interesting editorial in their January, 1996 issue. Dealing with the irrational gyrations of government, it highlighted the GPS paradox: Here is a system capable of accuracy within a few feet, which has its signals intentionally degraded by the Department of Defense ("selective availability") to accuracy within a few hundred feet. This is to keep us from being attacked by such places as the Soviet Union.
Of course, this degraded accuracy is unsatisfactory for marine navigation. So the Coast Guard is installing a set of "differential" transmitters which will correct GPS receivers with a special "differential receiver" module back to the required accuracy for marine use. These extra transmitters, according to Yachting, will cost "only" 14.3 million dollars.
But the differential system the Coast Guard is building won't work for airplanes, so the FAA is building its own differential system to the tune of $500 million, which will cost $15 million a year to run.
So we taxpayers are paying for satellites capable of doing the job but prevented from doing so by one department, and then paying for two other departments to overcome that prevention!
And all the time, as the editorial points out, today's terrorist attacks are really perpetrated by some guy in a rental truck who drives up to a street address.
Madness!
An editorial comment of my own: Don't believe everything you read in the "slick" magazines about boating, especially if they're talking about particular products! Reason: many of them are simply prostitutes to their advertisers. If you are a boatbuilder or supplier and you want good coverage in a story, buy an ad. In my brokerage days, I knew of "boat reviews" that were written by "journalists" who had neither seen, been in, or knew anything about the boat except what they were told by manufacturers, or could glean from advertising.
While many magazine articles on "how to" subjects are valuable, you should still read them with the legendary "jaundiced eye". There is one exception: the twin publications Powerboat Reports and Practical Sailor, which are kind of the Consumer's Reports of boating, good publications (but expensive, unfortunately). You and a buddy might want to subscribe. Perhaps the sailor's runner up would be Cruising World, which seems to have a good reputation. Unfortunately, most the rest bring you only a few articles each month upon which you can depend. The January Yachting is a great example of lots of ads and puff-pieces, only a little meat. Pity.
Talk to you next month! Have a safe one.
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