In today's yacht channel report I'm going to look at something that i don't usually look at which is
a navy ship. In this case, it is an unmanned drone sub-hunting ship. The original prototype is called
the Sea Hunter and they've apparently launched a sister ship called the Sea Hawk. So these
vessels are screaming around on the oceans at high speed without any crew on board now, mostly
in prototype testing phase. But a fleet is coming, and for strategic reasons, military reasons, they
make a great deal of sense. For budgetary reasons, it costs about $15-20 twenty thousand a day
to run one of these ships versus $700,000 a day for a destroyer. So that makes perfect sense. The
actual vessel is quite interesting and i'll get into the specs on the vessel and
the capabilities. It's kind of a cool little ship - so let's look at this baby... First of all,
it is 132 feet long. It's got almost no beam. You see it's got two armas. They are saying that it
travels at 27 knots, but as i pointed out it's going to be going faster than that if they're
going to be chasing Russian nuclear subs. It's got an endurance of 90 days at sea without crew,
with a 10 000 nautical mile range. It can launch and recover a parasailing device here so it's
sort of an eye on the sky which increases its communications capabilities and of course its
viewpoint over the horizon. Might be handy to have on a yacht. If you're sitting in your sailboat at
3am on watch somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific, you don't want to meet one of these.
The operators could be sitting in a bunker in Arizona or San diego or in a mountain in Colorado.
I don't know- maybe they get up and get a coffee or go to the bathroom or are otherwise
distracted and they don't see your little boat and that is worrisome. I'm sure that there are
all kinds of protections, but as an industry, I think that we should be keeping an eye on this
use of the oceans- as we all share the oceans and in the same way when they propose a wind farm:
the fishermen, the yachtsmen, the whale watchers, the snail protectors... everybody gets a voice
and and sometimes they get heard. For instance, with Cape Cod wind, they were going to put up a
big wind farm between Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and the Cape and that was just a
terrible idea. After about 10 or 15 years of litigation, they've decided not to do it and
it's going to go way offshore, where it should be. But stuff happens and if you look at the last
five or ten years, the Navy has had a couple of mishaps that you never would have thought
could have happened. And that's with probably five or ten sailors on the bridge, who are presumably
looking out the windows occasionally and have all kinds of instruments to tell them that
it's getting shallow or there's a big ship that's about to whack them or whatever other
calamities that they did not see that resulted in some horrendous accidents. Given that,
I am not a hundred percent confident that these unmanned high-speed vessels zooming around on the
oceans are a good idea for the rest of us that like to go out in the ocean. That is our report
today from The Yacht Channel on the Sea Hunter and let me know if you run across one of these babies.
I look forward to seeing the comments and we will see you again with another
report or a review or whatever else comes to mind see you soon you.