Auckland, 22 February 2016 - When you are launching a new 50-metre luxury yacht, the last thing you want to do is run aground before it has left the harbour.
So when New Zealand-based superyacht builders, McMullen & Wing, launched its latest luxury expedition motor yacht recently, it took the precaution of using a WASSP multibeam sonar system to produce an underwater profile of the Tamaki Estuary in Auckland as the vessel headed out towards open water.
WASSP (which stands for Wide Angle Sonar Seafloor Profiler) multibeam sonar has been developed and manufactured by Electronic Navigation Ltd (ENL) in New Zealand. It is designed to provide detailed profiles of the water column and seafloor highlighting reefs, wrecks, fish schools, seafloor hardness changes and foreign objects.
“WASSP provides operators such as superyacht captains and owners the ability to carry out their own surveys without the more expensive cost of out-sourcing to a third party survey firm to undertake the project, whilst still obtaining the accurate and reliable information needed, as we saw in this recent project with the launching of the McMullen & Wing vessel,” said WASSP Ltd chief sales officer, Terry McDonald.
“WASSP allows non-surveyors to self generate valuable information, and the system’s practical design and intuitive ease of use requires minimal installation or operational training.”
WASSP also features wireless connectivity enabling it to be installed in a tender or support vessel and send real-time sea floor mapping information via wi-fi radio link to the superyacht's bridge system for display on a MaxSea navigation plotting platform.
“Unlike other systems, the transducer is mounted in the hull of the tender, thereby avoiding the need to slip and engineer transducer hull penetrations on the superyacht - usually an exercise superyacht owners like to avoid,” said McDonald.
“Alternatively for ‘rapid deployment’ the transducer can be pole mounted to the side of a tender.”
In addition to helping the skippers of expensive luxury yachts avoid underwater obstacles, WASSP can also be used for non-critical applications such as wreck finding for scuba-diving, fishfinding for sports fishing or just general seafloor exploration.