Similar to ACR’s ResQFix PLB, McMurdo has introduced a GEPIRB (GPS-equipped Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) that’s smaller yet supposedly performs better.

The 1.5-pound SmartFind Plus ac­complishes this largely by using LEDs for its strobe, which along with automatic seawater activation, built-in flotation, and longer trans­mission life are what distinguish EPIRBs from PLBs (plus the fact that some models come with an automatic float-free mount).

Note that Simrad has also introduced a compact GEPIRB in the same price range and that both companies also offer GPS-less models, but those will typically take longer to de­liver less-accurate position information to the SAR authorities.

Sunseeker’s latest 37M Trideck Yacht, all 121 feet and 180 tons of her. This is a yacht with  four big en suite guest cabins, an improbably large, full-beam owner’s suite, and an upper lounge/bar that seems almost as generously proportioned as the main saloon below. The sheer quantity of internal volume available for the accommodation seems to be the result of some cunning sleight of hand, as if it has been borrowed from a bigger boat.

Although there has been some clever lateral thinking, the idea has come not from bigger boats, but from the smaller sport cruisers that have been Sunseeker’s stock in trade for decades. At a stroke, simply raising the foredeck has given the owner’s suite the best of both worlds: the width of the yacht‘s full beam, combined with the light and window area of the main deck. In spite of first impressions from outside, the fore­deck slopes upward from the bow to the wheelhouse windows and is reached from each side deck via a set of steps just for­ward of midships.

Not content with that, the designers then took the idea upstairs and stretched the upper lounge and its attendant “balcony” across the full beam, too, giving the upper deck the sort of floor space you’d normally expect only on the main deck of a yacht this size.

Space: Like oxygen, you take it for granted until you find yourself without quite enough of it. Which is why on boats it’s the ultimate luxury—particularly boats designed with the charter market in mind. The Sunseeker 37M satisfies both RINA and MCA regulations, and with two doubles on the low­er deck plus two min en suites with fold-down Pullman berths, this is a yacht that can accommodate up to 12 guests. Even with the option of a full-beam VIP suite instead of the two doubles, she still sleeps ten.

But, with its restful scheme of cream and beige, walnut ve­neers, and solid -walnut journey, there is nowhere in the guest accommodation that feels at all cramped. The guest cabins be­low are arranged symmetrically around a central lobby, which is reached down a spiral staircase on the starboard side, and each has an unusually spacious head and plenty of stowage. The crew quarters, three cabins with six berths plus a com­fortable dinette and auxiliary galley, occupy the forward sec­tions, accessed via the main galley.

The piece de resistance, though, is the master suite in the bow, which you find down the starboard corridor from the saloon, past the day heads. Here you enter full-beans territory, with huge superstructure windows that flood the space with light. The bed is offset slightly to port, making way for a pair of free­standing armchairs and a coffee table. The walk-in wardrobe on the port side forward does, for once, fully deserve that description, while the MSD and bidet have their own com­partment with a basin to starboard. Down four steps leading forward, you find yourself in a domestic-size bathroom, with a pair of sinks, a big shower on the port side, a bath to starboard, and plenty of floors between them.

In fact, deck area throughout the accommodations is always adequate or better, and no obvious compromises appear to have been forced on the design team. The main-deck saloon is a rational, light, and well-ordered space with squared-off sofas and chairs facing each other, a bar at the cockpit door, and the dining table amidships, close to the galley. This is just one of the tables onboard that can seat 12—there is another upstairs on the aft deck, partly shaded by the flying-bridge overhang, with its attendant lounge and bar. The cockpit, meanwhile, has seating for up to nine and a pair of coffee tables.

It is thanks largely to that dominating, split-level owner’s suite that the 37M has a world-heating interior. But for a marque as deeply rooted in offshore performance culture as Sunseeker, it was never going to be enough just to build a big, pointy yacht with plenty of internal volume. She had to per- form as well.

The hull shape is a typically Sunseeker deep-V, with a 20-de­gree deadrise at the transom and flat-top propeller tunnels to keep the shaft angle to a minimal 10 degrees. But there, in na­val architecture terms at least, the family resemblances cease. A yacht as large and heavy as this, with close to 1,000 hp between the smallest power option and the largest—there are three MTU engine options, from twin 2,335-hp V-12s to the 2,812-hp motors installed in this first boat—had to be de­signed for comfort and efficiency at speeds ranging from 12 knots for passage making all the way up to the high 20s. So as well as building in plenty of lift along the full length of the planning surfaces (dead rise amidships is a shade more than 20 degrees, and at the forefoot it’s just 30), key to the plan was putting the center of gravity far enough forward to eliminate any planning “hump” as the yacht gathered speed. The result, according to Ewen Foster of the Don Shead design office at Sunseeker, is “a non planning, hard-chine, planing hull. It just rises up and goes as speed increases. It’s more efficient and rolls less than a round-bilge hull, and it banks into turns— which is what people expect of a Sunseeker!”

Apart from Foster, who confesses to being “never satisfied,” the design and build teams are delighted with the perfor­mance of the 37M. During the 500-mile round-trip from the shipyard to the London Boat Show, the trials team recorded a best two-way average of more than 27 knots.

“We knew from the outset that this was never going to be a 30-knot boat,” adds Foster. He explains that so far over the model lifetime of the Sunseeker 105, the company has seen how much extra weight goes into a boat that has to satisfy var­ious new classification society rules for charter. There also seems to be more demand for increased fuel capacity and greater range. So with the 37M designed to fulfill both RINA and MCA requirements for large charter yachts, and with a bunker capacity of some 20 tons, her design displacement was calculated at 180 tons at half load—about double that of the 105. The initial estimate of top speed was around 24 knots with the largest engine option—a figure that everyone in­volved is now delighted to acknowledge as rather conservative. And while these 4000 Series MTUs are die largest engines that the machinery space has been designed to accommodate, the hull has been designed to cope with the extra power and speed of any future performance upgrade without modifica­tion.

The first 37M was sold off the drawing board—to Formula One team owner Eddie Jordan, who was also the launch cus­tomer of the 105—and the next two are already tinder con­struction. Build time is 40 weeks, and Sunseeker claims to have orders for three more.

The yard already seems to be looking further ahead. There’s talk of a 112-foot (34-meter), two-decker- but for that you might have to wait a little.

ACR’s ResQFix Personal Locator Beacon is 35 percent smaller and 25 percent lighter than its previous AquaFix model and yet purportedly performs better.

This is not so trivial when you consider that this six-inch-high unit is meant to acquire a fast GPS fix in tough conditions (like from its float bag next to you in a rough sea), transmit that position and your ID via 406 MHz to the search-and-res­cue satellite system, and also send out a 121.5-MHz signal that rescuers can home in on (note that your own yacht could use that homing signal too).

My confidence in this complicated technology was bolstered when I visited ACR’s factory last year and saw both its elaborate GPS simulation facility, used to fine-tune the Pill’s receiver, and its extensive testing routines. The $750 ResQFix, which uses a five-year lithium battery and is waterproof to 33 feet, also has its two circuitry, battery pow­er/voltage, and GPS acquisition testing built in. Note that PLBs like this are also carried by small aircraft pilots and others who venture into wilderness, watery or otherwise.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that one of the features particularly intrig­uing to many electronics shoppers these days are those slick virtual engine-gauge screens you can pull up on many a multifunction display (MFD). Never mind for a moment that most of those MFDs can’t yet connect to many engine models; instead, imagine how those screens would look if you ran a company that makes umpteen real ma­rine engine gauges every year.

Many of its current gauges—there are some 10,000 models if you count all the available colors and the various brand names they’re sold un­der—feature a little data LCD in addi­tion to a traditional pin and dial. Moreover, the company’s MG2000 sys­tem includes a powerful microprocessor that’s built into a gauge: like casing and able to talk with all sorts of engine con­trol modules (ECMs), then mix the data with other inputs to do calculations like fuel flow, and finally rebroadcast every­thing to a network of less-intelligent gauges.

Which is how I came to be sitting in an I860′s building checking out an elabo­rate, do-everything, touch-screen graph­ical user interface (GUI). ‘Maestro earned its name because this PC-based system is intended to let its user conduct most every imaginable helm function. Picture not just full virtual engine gaug­es and charting with radar overlay and fish finder, but also quad cameras, con­trol of and other equipment, even e-mail and Web browsing. The Maestro project is ambitious, but there are nu­merous reasons to believe that.

Thus Maestro looks and feels a lot like Maptech‘s current fourth-generation i3 system, not to men­tion the Sea Ray -Navigator it also pro­duces. That’s good, as over the years Maptech has come a long Way toward making fingertip navigation elegantly easy. And I say that based not just on the demo, but also some real finger-on time trying Maestro‘s prototype software loaded into a touch-screen tablet com­puter.

In tall-windowed rooms first used by those uniform seam­stresses, I saw everything from metal lathes and dial printers to circuit board populators, all in action. And it’s ISO 9001 and Gold U.S. military supplier certifica­tions suggest it knows how to make things well.

At any rate, the hardware side of Mae­stro looks good. A custom aluminum casing means the separate processing unit stays cool without fans, and all sorts of connectivity is built in, including a Wi­Fi radio and a PCMCIA slot meant for a high-speed cellular data card. The $8,000 base system includes one sun­light-viewable 12-inch touch screen but will support a second touch screen as well as output via S-video to an onboard TV screen.

The compa­ny claims that its smart products like the MG2000 and Maestro can understand not just ECMs that speak in NMEA 2000, SmartCraft, and J1939 but also J1587, ALDL, and ISO 9141 K-Line. Frankly, I’d never heard of the latter three before, and I think that a number of marine electronics developers are just learning about them, too.

And Maestro is not only significant new product. Antares is a 3.8-inch color dis­play that will bring much of this same digital engine infor­mation to small boats, includ­ing fuel management and even remote control of Jensen Marine stereos. It will first be seen as an OEM product, but expects to re­tail it for retrofits eventually.

Meanwhile, the company has also been developing a series of WatchDog communications products, and the latest 750 model is turning heads. While currently targeted at commercial fisheries, its ability to combine Iridium satellite, GSM cellular, and GPS to provide reliable yet reason­ably priced global tracking, monitoring, and messaging has attracted the interest of serious cruisers.

So, should you happen to boat up the Thames this summer, look for that old factory clinging to the western hank about ten miles north of Long Island Sound?  ’While many of the big marine- electronics brands we all know are con­glomerating (Northstar and Navman recently joined Simrad and Lowrance under the Navico umbrella, for exam­ple), a new one may be coming to life in the little Yankee town of Uncasville.

Mika Orlando went from owning a CABO 31 to a CABO 40 to a CABO 52 Express in just three years. “CABOs have amazing fish- catching ability,” says Mika. “On our second time out during a tournament, we were still just dialing in our new CABO 52 Express and we caught and released a 300-lb. blue marlin!”

Top quality power.
Quality on the CABO 52 begins in the engine room. MAN V12-1550CRM, 1528 HPm, V¬12 common rail injection, turbocharged and after-cooled marine diesel engines nestle into the glistening white gelcoat finished engine spaces, with plumbing, wiring, shafting and control cables neatly run, secured and easily accessed. Power options range from 1500 HPm MTU V-10′s to 1675 HPm Caterpillar C32′s. “One thing’s that unique about the 52 is that even with all the power, I can run the boat by myself,” says Mika. “I can actually, physically, take it out of the dock by myself. There aren’t many boats that size that one person can run. I can do that because it’s very agile, it just turns on a dime. It’s just as maneuverable as my 40. It has very large propellers, 53-inch wheels. It’s just so maneuverable.”

Top quality safety and comfort.
One of the reasons I kept getting larger CABOs is because we’re doing more competitive fishing.
You have to go offshore in the Gulf and stay out for as many as three days, maybe 150 miles offshore. You needed large fuel capacity, efficient fuel economy and everything onboard. A lot of people don’t want to stay onboard for three or four days without coming in. And most importantly, it has to be a safe boat. The Gulf of Mexico may not get hundred-foot waves, but it gets different types of waves that can sink vessels a lot easier than swells. The CABO 52 is perfect.

The CABO 52 is, of course, very comfortable. Some people say there’s no cabin room on an express boat, but we fish with eight guys on overnight trips and we all make it work pretty well. With the two heads, large sleeping quarters and the gourmet galley, it’s very easy to have that many people on long overnight trips.

Introducing the CABO 38 Express:
CABO broke the rules and opted to build the 38 with all of the high tech laminating techniques used in their larger boats. The hull and deck on the 38 are constructed using the highest quality vinylester resins and closed cell polyurethane foam core, vacuum bagged for maximum strength and to minimize the performance robbing weight associated with standard lamination techniques used by other builders of boats in this size range. Look at the performance chart below The 38 has a cruising speed over 30 knots equipped with standard Caterpillar 710 HPm diesel engines and the top speed is expected to exceed 37 knots with optional MAN common rail 800 HPm engines. Actual speeds attained with each engine package will be posted on CABO’s website as soon as all sea trials are completed.

Why a 38 Foot Express?
CABO wanted to offer an intermediate size boat with the same ride and handling characteristics of a larger boat in a version that would provide greater range and performance for current owners of CABO product under 40 feet as well as owners of larger outboard powered boats who are looking for greater comfort off-shore but not willing to sacrifice performance.

The new CABO 38 fits the bill precisely, the 38 is laid out to fish. The forward cabin is arranged with three single berths for overnight at the Canyons while the salon can accommodate two additional anglers in the upper and lower berth formed by converting the settee. There is also the option of a more conventional island berth arrangement forward for those more inclined to family cruising. On deck, all of the features you would expect to find on an off-shore fishing machine are well laid out and accessible to the cockpit. Tackle and rod storage, sink and live well are all standard and other sport fishing options like freezer plates are available.

The CABO 35 Express is the boat many say established CABO‘s reputation for building the highest quality sport-fishing boats available. The new 38 Express is the boat that will guarantee they keep that reputation!