Forwardscan cats and whales

[Albro359]

No, it doesn't see whales
We have Forward Scan and a Vulcan 7 in the cockpit with Navionics charts.
We have C-Map charts in our Furuno Navnet in the navstation networked to a display in the cockpit, and Maxsea TimeZero Professional on a laptop at the navstation also running OpenCPN with GE2KAP generated satellite charts and a tablet in cockpit mirroring the laptop screen...oh, and we have paper charts as well !

BUT the Forward scan is only any good if we are moving slowly and in calm water. the boat pitching slightly throws it all to hell, rolling not so much.

We go into unknown fairly shallow anchorages with FS on, Navionics Sonar charts on and an eye on the depth sounder and eyes outside looking .

In some places we have found everything to correlate, in others not at all.

As for whales....seen a few, but never hit one.

Having said all that, 10 years ago we sailed around the reefs in Fiji with only paper charts and a hand held GPS and never hit anything....

Cheers

[CatNewBee]

Also noticed the Forward scan brings error readings in deep water and shows up with shallow depths, I assume because of water layers with sharp density shifts due to different temperatures. So it is useless in deep water too, readings are nonsense there.

[BobFord]

Without recourse to technical facts- I have a habit of leaving Depth Sounders(2) on ,making music ( normal stuff like Ossie !! ) and leaving props free wheeling,when there is a risk of Whales. Started this donkey's years ago , out of Galapagos but have found Whales much more prolific aro' the Australian coast. Have had the creatures very close , especially at night and have seen them keep a distance , but move with me , during daylight. Has worked for me in about 60,000 nm but ' fingers crossed '

[SteveSadler]

Here in Maui, we go whale watching every weekend in the season.
With our hydrophone we listen to their songs. They sing in all notes, squeaky highs to deepest lows. All the whales sing the same song note for note.
Every year the song changes a little. Fascinating and erie. We also hear approaching powerboats. This is what I mean about making noise so they can hear us and once aware of our presence, avoid us.

[Simi 60]

We had the interphase at some stage on ours.
Previous owner reckons it was a waste of time and money, died early and cost more than it was worth to repair.
Now we just have a mass of wiring, boxes and two brick sized transducers on the bottom

We always have two sounders running with multiple frequencies when on passage.
One of them (numbers and loud alarm) has never been turned off in the two years we have lived aboard.
We also have a sizeable engine and a massive fan.

Still didnt stop whales surfacing close enough in front that we had to go hard over with a burst of reverse to avoid collision.