The Electronic Sailor

The great Yankee skipper Joshua Slocum used only the simplest of navigational instruments--a compass, a sextant and his famous "dollar clock"--when he sailed his 37-ft. Spray round the world alone from 1895 to 1898. The solitary skipper of a spanking new sloop called the Oxy will find his life at sea far easier than Slocum's when he sails in a singlehanded race across the Atlantic next year. If he wants to relax and leave the helm, all he will have to do is flip a switch on an electronic self-steering device; day or night, an array of dials on an instrument panel will tell if he is getting the best performance out of his boat. Small, hand-held computers will zip through calculations that cost Slocum tedious hours.

Under construction in landlocked Switzerland, of all places, Oxy is the brainchild of a Swiss electronics engineer named Jean-Claude Protta, 32. An avid ocean sailor, Protta took a 15-month, 12,000-mile cruise and came home in 1971 with a headful of ideas about new electronic equipment for navigation. He brought his plans to Oxy Metal Industries International (O.M.I.I.), a division of Occidental Petroleum, which was looking for new applications for metal oxide semiconductors (MOS)--the tiny components that engineers use to cram extremely complex circuits onto silicon chips less than a quarter of an inch square. MOS had already proved their value in the U.S. space program for which they were developed. They also have certain qualities ideal for use at sea. For one thing, they can be easily sealed in plastic, thus avoiding the problems caused by dampness. For another, they use minuscule amounts of power and can operate for long periods on internal batteries.

On Course. Protta, who soon became head of the Swiss firm's new subsidiary, Oxy Nautica, wants the 56-ft. Oxy to demonstrate his gadgetry. Other firms make and market equally sophisticated devices, but few offer equal versatility and most require far more power. The Oxy has integrated all its equipment so that a surprising complexity of information appears on a control panel that would not be out of place in the cockpit of a 747. Almost everything the skipper needs to know--from the depth of the water under his keel to the wind speed and direction at the masthead--will be available at a glance.

Another of the firm's innovations will add speed and accuracy to a deep-water sailor's celestial navigation. Taking sextant sights on sun, moon or stars from the pitching deck of a small craft is difficult under the best of circumstances. Most skippers turn to a crew member to note the precise time of their measurements, and such teamwork allows ample room for error. With no one to note the time for his sights, Oxy's skipper will rely on a specially designed quartz chronometer built into the handle of his sextant.

Quadruple Speed. When he shoots the sun, for example, he will only have to press a button to stop the chronometer's second hand. After he has recorded the time, another button will restart the second hand and a memory circuit will keep the clock running at quadruple speed until it has caught up to where it would have been if it had not been stopped. After that the clock will resume clicking off the seconds at a normal pace. Once he has taken his sights, Oxy's skipper will not have to pore through tables and a nautical almanac to find his position. A miniature electronic calculator will figure everything out. When Oxy's skipper wants to catch some needed sleep, he will rely on an automatic pilot in which a masthead wind vane or a special electronic compass will team up with an MOS microcomputer to keep the boat on course. The system draws so little current that it will operate up to two weeks on four small flashlight batteries.

The whole navigational setup costs $2,500--a feasible price, perhaps, for yachts in the $20,000 price range. Few yachtsmen are likely to want or need the entire array, but few who go to sea can fail to find some valued help in MOS circuitry. Other manufacturers are constantly improving its skills. Texas Instruments Inc., for instance, is already using MOS chips to further reduce both the size and price of increasingly sophisticated pocket calculators. Hewlett-Packard has gone furthest of all by producing a pocket calculator that can be programmed to handle specific calculations of as many as 100 steps, from highly technical medical measurements to celestial mechanics for the yachtsman and an analysis of the Wall Street stocks that may or may not be paying his expenses.

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