Boat Toys

As bought the Irwin is a pretty much a stock moderate displacement cruiser without a lot of frills and thrills - including some things most cruisers feel are essential.

Of course some purist think those things are frivolous and just a waste of money on a 'real' sailboat.

A wind transducer is one of those things:
You have to have them, or hate them. Most sailboats of any size have them (so much for the purist).

These are different than the even more common 'windex' - the little arrow thingee's on the top of the mast. Windex is sailor speak for 'wind index'. It provides a visual reference ( ‘index’) of the direction the apparent wind (more sailor speak)  is coming from.

These are simple, require no power and last years if you can keep the birds off them. They also cause painful cricks in the neck while staring up at them, can’t be seen at night or through a bimini or cockpit enclosure.

Thus the advantage of the transducer. It sends a signal via wire (some are solar powered and wireless) down to a converter that reads the signal and translates it to a visual representation of wind direction and speed. 

Raymarine ITC 5 Sensor Pod Converter

With today’s advanced systems it also computes apparent wind speed and direction and allows the savvy skipper to plot courses for least time arrivals, vectoring and other big words with fuzzy nautical meanings.

There’s a catch – to do that you have to have a display such as this:

This one is the Raymarine i70. It’s not just wind, it has 22 different screens to display everything from wind to engine RPM, depth etc. All the electronics I’m installing are Raymarine’s current generation in order to eliminate communication and compatibility issues (a fantasy).

Of course all these geegaws have a cost, and not just in boat bucks. They consume power, require space and need cabling to be run all through the nice pretty interior of the boat to get signals where they need to be.  Oh, yeah, and the ‘where’ for the transducers is 55 feet up the mast and need power and signal cabling run safely all the way down, through the boat to the cockpit.

I’ve just ordered this stuff – any questions what I’ll be doing next weekend?