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I jumped
at the chance to accompany the owner of a newly built 36-foot waterjet-powered
boat on a quick delivery from Maine to Connecticut. The trip would be
an excellent opportunity to see some contemporary electronics at work
offshore, including how well they interfaced with a more typical user
than me. I was also up for a ride on this particular vessel.
Jambo
is the second of a semicustom line called the FX 36 constructed by an
up-and-coming Maine builder, Mike York, and designed by another able down-homey,
Mark Fitzgerald. The pair have made up for thin development and marketing
budgets with heart, hard work, and attitude. I’d seen Jambo during
her sea trials last fall and was smitten.
Given
the endless procession of lows that marched across New England this spring,
I guess we were lucky to have a cold front blast through the night before
the trip. We got to corkscrew across the Gulf of Maine with frisky seas
on our quarter instead of pounding directly into them. At first the conditions
made me nervous. I’d heard some grumbling about jet-boat handling
in following seas, and I knew the strange yet exhilarating, feathery feel
of Jambo at her WOT of 32 knots. But we settled for an rpm slightly below
cruise, and, jump about as she might, Jambo always felt like she had both
feet (jets) on the ground, never showing a tendency to bow steer or spin
out. Even with a little sightseeing en route, we averaged about 20 knots
for the 11 hours that elapsed before we tied up at Fairhaven Shipyard.
And
didn’t we get the once-over from the crowd of slip dwellers gathered
for a Memorial Day weekend barbecue! Jambo, which means hello in Swahili,
always draws attention with her exceptionally clean and modern look, especially
so when caked with salt and piloted by a wide-eyed crew. We were treated
kindly, got a good rest, and, despite sharp seas from the south, cracked
off the remaining 80 miles to Noank in a little over three hours the next
morning. After nearly 300 miles of mostly bumpy road, I was still smitten.
So what
about those electronics? As I suspected, we needed a lot of them. Laying
down course lines with a pencil would have been nearly impossible in the
bumps. As it was, punching in commands on the Northstar 951 demanded fair
dexterity, and we were ergonomically glad that we could easily reach it
and the other devices while standing braced behind the wheel. The 951
ran flawlessly, though I found myself wanting more plotter display area.
Moving fast, particularly in a complex area like Buzzard’s Bay,
we were constantly zooming the Navionics charts in and out on the 53⁄4-inch
screen, trading between detail and big picture, sometimes lacking enough
of either.
The
Raymarine ST7000 autopilot also worked well—extraordinarily well
considering that it had an installation problem and had never been put
through its initial setup. Like so many custom builds, Jambo’s was
rushed at the end. I’d offered to do the user setup underway but
got an error message, probably because the electronic compass was in backwards—deduced
when the unit’s displayed course came up opposite to our actual
heading. I engaged the autopilot anyway, my finger close to the standby
button until I was convinced it wouldn’t suddenly do a 180, and
darn if it couldn’t steer better than I could in the tough conditions,
even on its default settings. Equally impressive was the Simrad RA41 radar.
It showed a remarkable ability to resolve nearby targets while auto-eliminating
clutter even as we danced the Jambo jump, plus its double-speed scanner
gave us the choice of rapid display updates or dual ranges, both valuable.
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