SMALL-BOAT GYRO
When boat-stabilizing gyroscopes first came out, captains scoffed. They scoffed at the need for it— if you can’t take the seas, stay on the land. They scoffed at the efficacy—that chunky thing won’t fit on a sport-fisher, let alone my center-console. And they scoffed at the price.
LLess than a year after its debut, Seakeeper started showing up at boat shows with progressively smaller gyros to cover even more recreational boaters’ needs. The latest, the Seakeeper 1, fits boats from 23 to 30 feet long. It proved critics wrong, and now most boatbuilders offer it as an option. Plus, companies such as NorTech build every boat they make capable of accepting one without an expensive retrofit. The naysayers are officially shot down.
What is a Seakeeper? Most people old enough to boat had a toy gyroscope as a kid. It was a metal flywheel on a spindle, housed in a wire cage. Consider it a spinning top confined to a cage. When you wound a string around the gyro wheel’s spindle and yanked it out, it set the wheel spinning inside the cage, and its centrifugal force resisted your effort to tilt it, tip it or knock it over. It was the ultimate doodle gadget, and found its way onto executive desks too. The new Seakeeper 1 works on a similar principle, but it is far from a doodle gadget. I’ve been on many boats with various larger Seakeeper gyros, and the difference between them being “on” and “off ” is dramatic. Aboard a Boston Whaler 405 Conquest, for example, a Seakeeper 6 kept us steady and comfortable for a nine-hour fishing trip. Without it, we may have given up hours before the sailfish showed up and we could wire two of them.
With the Seakeeper 1 installed on a 27-foot center-console with a maximum crew, we shifted our weight back and forth until we had the boat rolling side to side up to 15 or more degrees. Then somebody flipped on the
Seakeeper, and nothing we could do would restart the rock and roll.
The Seakeeper is not just about seasickness either. The boat’s roll is so dramatically dampened that passengers, perhaps elderly, can move about the deck with optimum balance. At the end of a day, fatigue will come from fighting fish, not the pitching deck.
Seakeeper’s first recreational boat product was the Seakeeper M7000, which has
since evolved into the Seakeeper 9, for 50- to 59-foot boats, then the company worked its way into both the smaller and larger boat markets. The latest introduction is the Seakeeper 1 for boats 23 to 30 feet long. The company didn’t just make this stabilizer smaller, it made it easier to integrate into a small boat’s construction and more easily retrofitted.
The Seakeeper 1 weighs in at 365 pounds and is less than 2-feetsquare-by-under-16inches high, about the size of a 50-quart cooler. It can be bolted down under the helm seat and onto the deck or in the bilge. It will run all day on a single deep-cycle 12-volt DC battery, keeping your crew comfortable in uncomfortable conditions that may normally keep fishing friends off the seas.
At about $15,000 plus installation, the Seakeeper 1 is a bargain, costing less than 10 percent of the cost of a boat it would be installed on while increasing the enjoyable, boatable days by 100 percent.