BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - I feel sorry for the people who bought radar for their cruising boats.

Mark Borgerson

In article .com,
llid says...

For the most part they wasted their money.

Why do I say this? It's because most of the so-called cruisers don't do
much in the way of cruising. To wit: Capt. Skippy who has been on the
hard for close to 9 months now and the little time he did spend cruising
he was rarely out of range of wi-fi and the Internet where he could pull
up radar images from powerful ground-based radar to inform him of storms
closing in. Why, I can pull up radar images from the Miami radar and see
storms approaching from miles away on my iPod.

Skippy, like most of todays so-called sailors ,doesn't need radar aboard
any more than they need sails as little as they use either. All they
really need is a diesel engine and Internet access. About 99% of the
time they have both. That's all they really need to stay happy. That and
plenty of spliff or rum.

LOL!

For navigation, with good chart plotter and good charts, a GPS system
can do almost as well as radar---if the charts are accurate. Radar
really becomes helpful when poking through the fog. It shows
the fishing boats and ferries that your chartplotter cannot--
unless they happen to have AIS transmitters. There were times
on the cruise between Ketchikan and Bellingham last year that I
was thankful that we had radar and that the Navy had trained
me to use it effectively.

Mark Borgerson