Author: luken7

Christmas is coming, my birthday is coming. I’ve hit my 50’s. What better way to close out a midlife crisis? New sailboat will have to wait another year. Hemispheres is serving me fine and well.

This December Mazda releases the new MX-5 Miata Fastback convertible. To me, it has a certain 1960’s Aston Martin DB5 presence to it, especially with the machined metallic grey paint color. I’ve got a feeling dealerships will not budge from the list price and these will be in great demand.

Yes, Mark Manson nails it again. This article from January is now a full fledged book and will be released next month. I already pre-ordered on Amazon. When your blog post starts like this, you know it’s going to be good. Hit the link at the bottom to learn more about the upcoming book.

Now, while not giving a fuck may seem simple on the surface, it’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood. I don’t even know what that sentence means, but I don’t give a fuck. A bag of burritos sounds awesome, so let’s just go with it.

And this is the simple truth. I just received an email from Mark about the upcoming book and came back to this post. The timing of things happen for a reason, there’s times when you need reminders like these. Right about now, I need to remember these things, that too many irrelevant things that I cannot control or really don’t matter in the big scheme of things seem to be getting too many fucks from me. Majority of these things need the NGAF, or not give a fuck, so they can be reserved for the truly important things.

Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.

There was a time where I myself, simply did not give a fuck about too many things and it served me well. I can’t recall but I think my last major non-fuckery was in 2006 when I decided to leave a certain telco. Packages were being offered and we were told on a Friday that we had to have a decision on Monday morning. I, in typical non-fuckery fashion dialed into work Monday morning and said I’m taking the package, to the silent astonishment of management. I simply didn’t give a fuck and it served me well. Went from an average paid IT operations dude working long hours to much greater things. I’ve somewhere forgotten how to do that.

WE ALL HAVE A LIMITED NUMBER OF FUCKS TO GIVE; PAY ATTENTION TO WHERE AND WHO YOU GIVE THEM TO

One of the best compliments I’ve ever received was for a job refrence. It simply went, “I know a mother-fucker that can get that shit done, he may tell you where to go from time to time, but he’ll get that shit done.” I got the job.

Now, the art of not giving a fuck doesn’t mean not caring and being wreckless, it’s about knowing what to care about, what’s important to you, what matters to you, what you cannot control, what you can control. It’s about allocating your fucks to the things that matter and not giving a fuck to the things that don’t matter or things you cannot change or control. And speaking of control, if you have to waste cycles controlling something, it isn’t meant to be, let it go, don’t give a fuck.

Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.

Source: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

Well, once a year I sign off of social networking for a month, usually in September or October to just take a break and quiet down and reflect. Starting earlier this year as it seems to be the right time to do so with so many things going on, gotta focus on the important things right now. You’ll notice that my accouts (facebook, twitter, etc) will be disabled and will look like I’ve removed my account but it’s just disabled. Still posting to my personal and sailing blog though. So, see you next month!

NOAA introduces Zones of Confidence; mind your ZOC

Yikes! Did you know that some areas of the U.S. coastal chart you’re using may only show land and bottom features accurate in position to +/- 1,600 feet, and you shouldn’t be confident about the depth soundings either? NOAA has a new way to show boaters how old and inaccurate much of its survey data is, and it will surely give pause to those who pay attention. The concept is called Zones of Confidence and it’s slowly rolling out as diagrams on paper-style raster charts like the one above, but the ZOC accuracy info is coming much faster to NOAA’s ENC vector charts, and apparently it could be made easily accessible on the commercial vector charts you’re probably using.

NOAA is replacing the Source Diagram that’s printed (over land) on most detailed charts (usually up to 1:80,000 scale) with a much more informative ZOC diagram in an effort to “help mariners assess hydrographic survey data and the associated level of risk to navigate in a particular area.” Click the image above to better see the Source Diagram for the Penobscot Bay area I cruise compared to the new ZOC on the Humboldt Bay chart (also seen in the opening image and viewable online here). The Source Diagram does suggest how old the survey data is and includes cautions like “partial bottom coverage,” but the ZOC really gets down to the navigation level of risk nitty gritty.

Here’s the Humboldt Bay ZOC collaged so you can better see the disturbing numbers. Substantial areas of the chart were last surveyed at least 67 years ago and NOAA wants us to know that we should have little confidence in its accuracy. In fact, all the zones marked “D” on the chartlet are simply “Worse than ZOC C” which has that +/- 1,600 feet Position Accuracy I mentioned, and ZOC C depth soundings are only accurate to 6.6 feet plus 2% of the depth. Yikes!

Now let’s see how this plays out on the Humboldt Bay chart itself. All the features and soundings look equally accurate, right? But while the channels are MD (Maintained Depth, i.e. dredged) and the edges of the channels and the bay approaches are thankfully Zone A1 — which means recently surveyed with “+/- 16 ft position | 1.6 ft + 1%d depth accuracy” — that big protected area east of the channels is very low confidence Zone D. And if, say, you just made a first time Humboldt entrance to escape bad weather, doesn’t it look like a possibly good place to anchor for a rest?

Note also that while the Seafloor Coverage for Zone A1 is characterized as “All significant seafloor features detected,” in Zone D “Large depth anomalies may be expected,” and neither Zone B or C has that the “All … detected” confidence level either. Yikes. That NOAA blog entry about ZOCs explains that modern surveys using multibeam sonar can see all bottom anomalies, but the old tools like singlebeam sonars and lead lines were blind to wide swaths of bottom structure, and the surveyors weren’t quite sure where they were anyway 😉

So far NOAA has only issued four paper/raster charts with ZOC diagrams and the rest of the portfolio will only be updated at the new edition rate of about two per month. But, really, how many boaters even knew about Source Diagrams and how many will notice ZOC diagrams when paper charts are going out of use and the quilted raster charts seen on many apps, charting programs and MFDs often don’t display the off-the-water information blocks and diagrams very well?

But here’s the good news: NOAA is encoding ZOC information into their ENC vector charts and have already “completed Texas to Virginia … and are working our way up the rest of East Coast.” That doesn’t mean we can see it yet in plotters that display ENCs or in the C-Map, Navionics, Garmin, etc. vector charts based on NOAA vectorized data, but all that is quite possible.

Recall that what we see on vector charts is a combination of the underlying data and the device software that processes the data for screen display. And, by golly, NOAA is apparently making it quite possible for vector chart makers to display ZOC info in useful ways. Specifically, Lead Nautical Cartographer Sean Legeer told me:

The ZOC information is encoded as a meta data object called M_QUAL and is a simple polygon. So it should be able to be shaded any way an ECS manufacturer would like. The attribute CATZOC in this object can be used to estimate the accuracy or uncertainty. We also provide the date of surveys.

In fact, long time C-Map manager Ken Cirillo had already told me that they are considering an optional ZOC layer that will shade your actual electronic chart — not a diagram — with the confidence zones and enable pop-ups of the details. So that’s possible. And, heck, it seems possible that a boat wandering out of the A1 Humboldt channel and into Zone D could get a screen warning about how much the chart accuracy is changing. And, by the way, Humboldt Bay is not exceptional given what’s seen on all four of the ZOCed charts and how ZOC accuracy estimates seem to relate to the existing Source Diagrams.

The Coastal Explorer NOAA ENC screen above shows how Rose Point is at least showing the “Quality of Sounding Measurement” and Source Date for a spot in the Humboldt channel, though the ZOC data is not shown well in the Zone D area. (Rose Point, incidentally, is also involved in a NOAA beta test of depth crowdsourcing that seems promising.)

I don’t have a good finishing illustration of what ZOC data can look like in vector form on our plotters, PCs, and apps, but the space below is available. In my experience, most marine cartographers are quite aware that modern electronic charts look more accurate than they really are, so I am hopeful.

Source: http://www.panbo.com/archives/2016/07/noaa_introduces_zones_of_confidence_mind_your_zoc.html

(via Mr. Reader)

Thanks,
Tony Nelson

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