Broadband Radar

February 15, 2009

By Marilyn Mower

There’s still time to get to the Miami Boat Show and see a brand new radar product in the Convention Center that will knock your socks off. It’s the world’s first recreational marine Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave radome. Navico, the parent company of Northstar, Simrad, Lowarance, Eagle and B & G has introduced not just an incremental improvement, but an entirely new system for 24-mile radar that eliminates the magnatron entirely, which also eliminates the main bang that blinds radars eyes within 200 yards of your boat. The new radome transmits at 1/20,000 the power of traditional radar (less than 1/10th the energy of a cell phone) and emits no harmful radiation outside the dome. The technology is called BROADBAND RADAR and it’s brilliant—as are the displays on the screen. Simrad, Lowrance and Northstar will release the new 18” domes in Q-2 of this year. This is radar so precise you can use it for docking. Southern Boating will have a full feature on Navico’s Broadband breakthrough in our April issue.

Everything in Boating is Connected

February 9, 2009

Marilyn Mower

Chances are you have admired, owned or ridden on a boat designed by Jack Hargrave. Even if you don’t fall into one of those categories, if you are a power boater, Jack Hargrave changed the way you go boating. At the request of Willis Slane, in 1959 he designed the first inboard motoryacht built of fiberglass. Part yacht, part fishing boat, they called it a convertible.

Fiberglass was a new material at the time and the small resin and cloth boats testing the stuff were about as attractive and exciting as bathtubs or my rotomolded kayak. People didn’t trust fiberglass and resin to hold up in a pounding sea. Jack understood the science behind the petrochemicals and he worked with Owens-Corning to figure out the tricks of shaping fiberglass cloth into rigid structures. He did his own demolition tests on hull panels by driving over them in his Corvair.

Interestingly, Jack never went into the fiberglass boatbuilding business. He left that to Hatteras and to many other clients such as Atlantic, Amels, Hitachi Zosen, Striker, Prairie, Halmatic, Daytona, Cheoy Lee, and others. He continued to design boats built of wood, steel and aluminum for other customers, in fact, he was one of the first to help Burger Boat Company adapt to aluminum. Jack was not an innovation junkie, rather
what gave Jack a thrill was to sit down at his drawing board with a clean sheet of paper and sharpened No.2 pencils to begin a new project.

Jack did his designing before the advent of 3D computer modeling. His drawings were meticulous, his lines spare but never tentative. What’s all the more amazing is that he was blind in one eye. So what? He learned how to draw and to handle a boat anyway on Lake Superior. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Jack joined the Merchant Marine carrying fuel and supplies to the war effort.

Jack took what he’d learned as a kid on the lakes, as a merchant mariner, as a charter captain, and as a racing sailor and rolled it all into his Westlawn Yacht Design Course. He plowed through a two-year course in seven months so he could get to work. And work he did, right up until his passing February 26, 1996.

In 2008 Jack Hargrave was inducted him into the North American Boat Designers Hall of Fame in Mystic Seaport. In announcing Jack’s honor, naval architect Dave Geer said: “There’s no question that Jack Hargrave was the single most preeminent powerboat designer of the 2nd half of the twentieth century. To this day—if you can find a Hargrave-designed boat for sale—buy it. There are no finer powerboat designs.”

Recently, during the Stuart Boat Show, I was on an unusual 76-footer named Walrus designed by Dave Geer for John Luhrs as a floating showcase of the skills and craftsmanship available from a repair and refit yard he owns called St. Augustine Marine. In the conversation group was the owner of an Atlantic 47 in search of a complete refit. Our tour guide said, oh, a Hargrave. The owner of the yard loves Hargraves and has one called Koala.  

Everything in boating is connected. I remember the first time I saw Koala from the deck of my sailboat motoring up to a marina on Oyster Creek. I thought it was about the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Two years later I recognized Koala immediately in a pile of photos when I began researching a book about Jack Hargrave’s designs called American Classic: The Yachts and Ships of Jack Hargrave. Koala was built in 1966 by Burger Boat Company. I had no idea John Luhrs was her current owner. He’s got good taste.

In putting together the annual Haul Out Guide, which will soon be in your mailbox or at your favorite newsstand, we took a look at some major projects requiring professional help. One was the repowering of a 64-foot Hatteras, designed of course by Jack Hargrave. It was a model that featured twin engine rooms separated by a passage to the owner’s stateroom aft—Hargrave’s solution for having accommodations fore and aft of the engine room without eating up space with a second stairway. This project was carried out at Saunder’s Yachtworks in Florida’s panhandle.

The second major project we show in the Haul Out Guide was a stern extension done to an 83-foot Cheoy Lee at St. Augustine Marine on Oyster Creek. The Cheoy Lee was designed by the late Tom Fexas, who followed Jack Hargrave as Cheoy Lee’s designer.  Fexas was a huge admirer of Jack’s and of his pioneering work with fiberglass.

So, Mike Joyce, who today owns Hargrave Custom Yachts, accepted Jack’s award from Geer. That and the fact that Joyce also owns the rights to build and distribute Tom Fexas’s famous Midnight Lace design just completes the circuit. Everything in boating is connected.