Welcome to Sydney Plastiki

Another high profile user of WatchMate makes a successful journey. After 8,000 nautical miles at sea Plastiki arrives safe in to Sydney. When you get a chance take a look at the Plastiki website. They are certainly promoting some fresh thinking about how we deal with waste and their expedition philosophy sums this thinking up nicely.

WHAT’S THE PLASTIKI EXPEDITION PHILOSOPHY?

• It’s about recognizing that waste is fundamentally a design flaw (it does not appear in nature)
• It’s about re-thinking waste as a resource.
• It’s about cyclical 'cradle-to-cradle’ philosophies rather than linear thinking when it comes to
• how we design our world.
• It’s about a better understanding of the lifecycle’s and materials used in our everyday lives.
• It’s about being curious and open, being prepared to let go of assumptions in order to undertake
• a new ‘Planet 2.0’ way of thinking and acting.
• It’s about acknowledging that we don't have all the answers and that nobody is as smart as
• everybody.
• It’s about being collaborative and curious so to engage multiple perspectives, skills, opinions and
• organizations.
• It’s about constantly learning, unlearning and re-learning.
• It’s about re-integrating back into the web of life by recognizing and reducing our human
• fingerprints on the natural world.
• It’s about moving on from just articulating the problems and inspiring action of the solutions.
• It’s about encouraging the world to reduce, reuse, recycle and rethink more of the planets
• natural resources.
• It’s about delivering a spectacular global “Message in a Bottle”.

We wish the crew of Plastiki well. I'm sure that by having a WatchMate on board would remove one more navigational stress for the crew. By the way if you haven't see the latest AIS WatchMate RX yet this page is a great place to start.

Standard Horizon Matrix GX2100 combined with an AIS WatchMate

We have been hearing some great comments lately about how the AIS WatchMate 650 Display is a fantastic complement for the Standard Horizon Matrix GX2100 VHF radio for those skippers who need just a bit more out of their AIS displays.

The GX2100 does have its own very small AIS display but if you get the chance to see the WatchMate working alongside it as a dedicated AIS collision avoidance system you will immediately understand why people want to combine the products. The WatchMate increases the number of targets you can view and being a dedicated AIS system managing things like alarms, filtering out low priority targets and setting up profiles relevant for your location (ie Anchored, Harbor, Coastal, Offshore) is very very simple to achieve.

Connecting the two devices together is also straight forward, as can be seen here. The power consumption of the WatchMate is so low (1.2watts) it can be left on without being a major drain on you batteries.

Sanctuary Cove Boat Show

I just got back from the Sanctuary Cove Boat Show in Australia. We demonstrated the WatchMate and WatchMate-RX in the Vesper Marine booth and attracted a lot of attention. A number of existing WatchMate owners also came by to visit and thank us for the product or our service. That always feels nice.

That's Tony from Aquatronics on the right in the photo above. He is demonstrating a WatchMate-RX. Tony also made a short video of me introducing some of the basic features.