Fighting Fog

WHEN LINES OF SIGHT SHRINK AROUND THE BOAT IN A THICK HAZE, POWERFUL TECHNOLOGY AT THE HELM CAN SHOW THE WAY FORWARD.

- Jason Y. Wood

We’ve all seen it: A dark shape emerging from the all-encompassing whiteness, to grow and morph into a trideck motoryacht or even a coastwise freighter under a good head of steam, skipping by much too closely for comfort. “He saw us, right?” someone invariably says, as the big boat disappears as quickly as it emerged, while someone else stares even more intently at the helm, maybe tweaking the knobs of some pre-touchscreen unit that’s placing your boat and crew way out of its depth, and, some would say, in harm’s way.

No matter where you do your boating, whether you’re crossing offshore shipping lanes when encountering a fog bank or threading your way through a busy harbor, you don’t want to depend on the other guy to see you and fix the problem. You need to fix it yourself, and it’s pretty easy to do with a few smart electronic upgrades. Your helm may already have the capabilities, and an upgrade may be as simple as the addition of some peripheral hardware. The direction you choose may depend on the kind of boating you do.

“Radar is a big seller around here,” says Ryan Hisey of Radar Marine, an electronics dealer and installer in Bellingham, Washington. “There’s a lot of moisture in the air, and if it’s really hot and gets cool overnight you wake up in the morning and it’s all foggy. You get some pretty dense, heavy fog, so people get caught now and again, and it freaks them out a little bit.” Radar Marine serves some recreational boats in its area, but Hisey says they have commercial clients from California to Alaska.