Cruising Sailboat Sailors Power Generation with Watt and Sea Hydrogenerators

A while back ( February 2013) we did a post on the Watt and Sea cruising hydrogenerators as a viable option for power generation on cruising sailboats whilst on passage. Sufficient power is always a problem for cruisers and especially today with all the electronic equipment that seems to finish up in the on board mix.

The four types used in the past, and still currently installed on many boats, have been partially successful to a point, but not one of them has been able to generate sufficient available and constant power on their own.

Cruising 300 power output

I list them here with their shortcomings:

Diesel generator: Heavy, noisy, fuel burning, running for hours at a time and space consuming.

Wind generators: Ok when sailing into the wind but ineffective downwind. Noisy until recently.

Solar panels: Improving, but still inefficient. Massive space consumers.

Towed Generators: Very efficient but problems with deploying and retrieving.

Cruising 600 power output

Now we have the Watt and Sea hydrogenerators which have proven themselves already in long distance ocean racing and the earlier cruiser versions. The improved versions in the 300 and 600 variants for cruisers are now available. 

The improvements are: 

Lighter weight by about 2kgs.

Better corrosion resistance

Improved hydrodynamics

Advanced convertor



Viewing this video you will see about thirty seconds in that the unit is producing 16+ amps (24V) at 7.5 knots. That is music to any skippers eyes, ears and sense of comfort and security! 

The power produced is quite stunning and with a start up input of as low as three knots, any vessel averaging over five knots for a 24 hour period is going to supply enough electricity for the boats requirements.

Here are the specifications for various boat speeds:

Power : 5 knots produces 120watts (10A - 12V; 5A -24V) 

              8 knots produces 500watts (40A - 12V; 20A - 24V)

Start-up speed: 3 knots

Is this the future of power generation at sea? This system certainly has many benefits and using a towed generator myself on my voyage I can vouch for the bliss experienced knowing that there was sufficient power and more flowing into the boat through the units 'power line'. 

With these units being fixed to the transom, that can only alleviate and cancel the deployment and retrieval problems experienced with towed units.

The price of the Watt and Sea units starts from $3600 which is similar to a low end diesel generator. The Watt and Sea of course is far easier and cheaper to install, gives constant input whilst your vessel is moving, uses no diesel and you will never hear it.

Additionally, from the environmental aspect they come with impeccable characteristics. Even the dolphins resonate with the song of the propeller as you can see in this video:



Images and videos courtesy Watt and Sea

You can read much more about the cruising lifestyle and 'dollar saving tips' whilst on passage in my book 'Sailing Adventures in Paradise', downloadable from my website http://www.sailboat2adventure.com/


   

Sailors CaseMate vhf App Holder Device for Smartphones

With smartphone apps for sailors coming thick and fast nowadays, here is a different slant on things. It is refreshing to see how one young man has thought beyond just the application itself, and extended it into the area of combining the app with a piece of equipment to facilitate a potentially very valuable device for sailors when they are at sea and need to communicate by radio.

Seán Toomey, a 23-year-old student at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), came up with the idea for his waterproof VHF invention, called Casemate, last year as a thesis project for his product design degree.

Sean Toomey with his vhf CaseMate

He is now searching a partner firm will be found to put it into production. 

Seán's personal experience led him to do some research. 'More people are now relying on phones in case they have an emergency,' he told the Irish Examiner, 'but I spoke to a few people at the Royal National Lifesaving Institution (RNLI) in Dún Laoghaire. They said it was a problem in some cases they responded to, where people had tried unsuccessfully to raise the alarm using mobile phones.'

While there are many waterproof phone cases on the market, Seán’s design also includes the electronics that enable VHF radio communication, which are not found in even the smartest of smartphones. By sliding the phone into the case and connecting it to an in-built connector — which also doubles as a charger — the user has a VHF radio that can be activated very simply through a phone app. 

The buoyant prototype was successfully trialled last year, but Seán is still finalising design and software in his spare time, having started work this year for Dyson near Bristol in England. 

The firm is recruiting in Irish colleges for bright young minds with inventive ideas in a drive to recruit 400 engineers for its expanding technology range. 

For DIT Hothouse, the college’s innovation and technology transfer centre, the aim is to find a commercial partner to take on Seán’s patent-pending technology and sell it to consumers. Ideally, it should retail for less than €100, with VHF handheld radios currently available to buy for between €50 and €200. 

'I would love to think if it was taken up and made available, that it could get into as many hands as possible,' Seán said. 

Here is the link for further information, to the DIT information sheet in pdf format:
http://dit.technologypublisher.com/files/sites/vhf-casemate1.pdf

Sean's invention could be a real break-through for coastal sailors. If YOU want more information about the invention or know of an avenue for the commercialisation of it, here are the details: 

Contact Dermot Tierney, DIT Hothouse Senior Licensing Executive email dermot.tierney@dit.ie

Image courtesy DIT, video courtesy DIT and YouTube

You can read much more about the cruising lifestyle in my  book 'Sailing Adventures in Paradise', downloadable from my website http://www.sailboat2adventure.com/

AIS Hacking Problems for Sailboats, the Marine Industry and Possible Future Fixes

There has been much written about the hacking of the AIS system and hopefully most sailors are aware of the possible problems associated with it. This article digs a little deeper and highlights more ramifications of the continuation of this phenomena......read on:

The next hacker playground: the open seas - and the oil tankers and container vessels that ship 90 percent of the goods moved around the planet.
In this Internet age, as more devices are hooked up online, so they become more vulnerable to attack. As industries like maritime and energy connect ships, containers and rigs to computer networks, they expose weaknesses that hackers can exploit.

Hackers recently shut down a floating oil rig by tilting it, while another rig was so riddled with computer malware that it took 19 days to make it seaworthy again; Somali pirates help choose their targets by viewing navigational data online, prompting ships to either turn off their navigational devices, or fake the data so it looks like they're somewhere else; and hackers infiltrated computers connected to the Belgian port of Antwerp, located specific containers, made off with their smuggled drugs and deleted the records.

While data on the extent of the maritime industry's exposure to cybercrime is hard to come by, a study of the related energy sector by insurance brokers Willis this month found that the industry "may be sitting on an uninsured time bomb".

Commercial marine traffic with AIS

Globally, it estimated that cyber-attacks against oil and gas infrastructure will cost energy companies close to $1.9 billion by 2018. The British government reckons cyber-attacks already cost UK oil and gas companies around 400 million pounds ($672 million) a year.

In the maritime industry, the number of known cases is low as attacks often remain invisible to the company, or businesses don't want to report them for fear of alarming investors, regulators or insurers, security experts say.

There are few reports that hackers have compromised maritime cyber-security. But researchers say they have discovered significant holes in the three key technologies sailors use to navigate: GPS, marine Automatic Identification System (AIS), and a system for viewing digital nautical charts called Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS).

"Increasingly, the maritime domain and energy sector has turned to technology to improve production, cost and reduce delivery schedules," a NATO-accredited think-tank wrote in a recent report. "These technological changes have opened the door to emerging threats and vulnerabilities as equipment has become accessible to outside entities."

Tip of the iceberg
As crews get smaller and ships get bigger, they increasingly rely on automation and remote monitoring, meaning key components, including navigational systems, can be hacked.

A recent study by security company Rapid7 found more than 100,000 devices - from traffic signal equipment to oil and gas monitors - were connected to the Internet using serial ports with poor security. "The lines get blurry, and all industries and all technologies need to focus more on security," said Mark Schloesser, one of the authors of the study.

How AIS is hacked

Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay, an Internet security company, said an attacker managed to tilt a floating oil rig to one side off the coast of Africa, forcing it to shut down. It took a week to identify the cause and fix, he said, mainly because there were no cyber-security professionals aboard. He declined to say more.

Lars Jensen, founder of CyberKeel, a maritime cyber-security firm, said ships often switch off their AIS systems when passing through waters where Somali pirates are known to operate, or fake the data to make it seem they're somewhere else.

Shipping companies contacted by Reuters generally played down the potential threat from hackers. "Our only concern at this stage is the possible access to this information by pirates, and we have established appropriate countermeasures to handle this threat," said Ong Choo Kiat, president of U-Ming Marine Transport, Taiwan's second-largest listed shipping firm by market value. The company owns and operates 53 dry cargo ships and oil tankers.

Virus-riddled
A study last year by the Brookings Institution of six U.S. ports found that only one had conducted an assessment of how vulnerable it was to a cyber-attack, and none had developed any plan to response to any such attack. Of some $2.6 billion allocated to a federal program to beef up port security, less than 1 percent had been awarded for cyber-security projects.

When CyberKeel probed the online defences of the world's 20 largest container carriers this year it found 16 had serious security gaps. "When you look at the maritime industry there's extremely limited evidence of systems having been breached" compared to other sectors, said CyberKeel's Jensen. "That suggests to us that they've not yet been found out."

Michael Van Gemert, a security consultant to the oil and gas industry, said that on visits to rigs and ships he has found computers and control systems riddled with viruses. In one case, he said it took 19 days to rid a drilling rig en route from South Korea to Brazil of malware which had brought the vessel's systems to a standstill.

"The industry is massively in need of help, they have no idea what the risks are," he said.

The main ship navigation systems - GPS, AIS and ECDIS - are standards supported by bodies such as the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). Indeed, that body has made AIS and ECDIS mandatory on larger commercial and passenger vessels.

Researchers from the University of Texas demonstrated last July that it was possible to change a ship's direction by faking a GPS signal to dupe its onboard navigation system.

Marco Balduzzi and colleagues at anti-virus vendor Trend Micro last month showed that an attacker with a $100 VHF radio could exploit weaknesses in AIS - which transmits data such as a vessel's identity, type, position, heading and speed to shore stations and other ships - and tamper with the data, impersonate a port authority's communications with a ship or effectively shut down communications between ships and with ports.

In January, a British cyber-security research firm, NCC Group, found flaws in one vendor's ECDIS software that would allow an attacker to access and modify files, including charts. "If exploited in a real scenario," the company concluded, "these vulnerabilities could cause serious environmental and financial damage, and even loss of life."

Sailboat AIS installation pod

When the USS Guardian ran aground off the Philippines last year, the U.S. Navy in part blamed incorrect digital charts. A NATO-accredited think-tank said the case illustrated "the dangers of exclusive reliance upon electronic systems, particularly if they are found vulnerable to cyber-attack."

"Most of these technologies were developed when bandwidth was very expensive or the Internet didn't exist," said Vincent Berk, CEO of security company FlowTraq.

No quick fix
Fixing this will take time, and a change in attitude.

"Security and attack scenarios against these technologies and protocols have been ignored for quite some time in the maritime industry," said Rapid7's Schloesser.

Researchers like Fotios Katsilieris have offered ways to measure whether AIS data is being faked, though he declined to be interviewed, saying it remained a sensitive area. One Google researcher who has proposed changes to the AIS protocol wrote on his blog that he had been discouraged by the U.S. Coastguard from talking publicly about its vulnerabilities.

Indeed, AIS is abused within the industry itself.

Windward, an Israeli firm that collects and analyses AIS data, found 100 ships transmitting incorrect locations via AIS in one day - often for security or financial reasons, such as fishing boats operating outside assigned waters, or smuggling.

In a U.N. report issued earlier this year on alleged efforts by North Korea to procure nuclear weapons, investigators wrote that one ship carrying concealed cargo turned off its AIS signals to disguise and conceal its trip to Cuba.

It's not clear how seriously the standards bodies treat the threat. Trend Micro's Balduzzi said he and his colleagues were working with standards organisations, which he said would meet next year to discuss his research into AIS vulnerabilities.

The core standard is maintained by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) in association with the IMO. In a statement, the IMO said no such report of vulnerabilities had been brought to its attention. The ITU said no official body had contacted it about the vulnerabilities of AIS. It said it was studying the possibility of reallocating spectrum to reduce saturation of AIS applications.

Yevgen Dyryavyy, author of the NCC report on ECDIS, was sceptical that such bodies would solve the problems soon.

First, he said, they have to understand the IT security of shipboard networks, onboard linked equipment and software, and then push out new guidelines and certification.

Until then, he said, "nothing will be done about it."

Article courtesy Reuters, images courtesy Google

You can read more about sailboat ocean cruising and live aboard life in my book 'Sailing Adventures in Paradise' downloadable from my website http://www.sailboat2adventure.com/

Interlux Paints New Boat Paint App for Smartphones

For all you paint happy cruisers out there salivating over the next boat painting project?! there is now an app for your smartphone to pore over. From Interlux Marine Paints, the app can be downloaded for iPhones, and iPads. It is not clear if it is yet available for Android devices, however most cruisers have an iPad on board these days so the app can be downloaded into it and the Android version will soon follow.

Interlux app installed on smartphone 

The following are the features for the Interlux Boat Paint Guide app:

A quick reference guide which gives you all the detailed information about the various Interlux paint products and which one might be the right one for your boat.

App contents

Next, there is a built in paint calculator to estimate how much paint you will need for your boat, so you won't need to go into those time consuming calculations (guesses?) you once needed......or multiple trips to the paint store!

It then gives you all the tips about the gear you will need, precautions to take and tips on health and safety whilst using the products.

App quick reference guide

Finally, when you are ready to make your purchases, no matter where you are, the app has a built in store locater to find your nearest dealer by address or your location.

The app can be found in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

Interlux is the first on the market with this app and undoubtedly other marine paint manufacturers will follow with their own. In time they will be available for all devices making this time consuming job a more simple and pleasurable experience.

Images courtesy Interlux and Sail-world.com

You can read much more about boat maintenance and the cruising lifestyle in my book 'Sailing Adventures in Paradise' downloadable from my website http://www.sailboat2adventure.com/