The beautiful, old Chris-Craft motoryacht Secret Love glided quietly out of the dark Miami Beach Marina and I stood in the pilothouse watching a flat-screen monitor show a camera's eye view of the water ahead. Looking up and out through the pilothouse windows, a dark and moonless Biscayne Bay was ringed with the lights of Miami and Miami Beach. Yet the screen showed a scene more like high noon.
I was aboard this boat, along with a dozen of my journalistic colleagues, at the invitation of FLIR, Inc., probably the world's leading manufacturer of thermal imaging devices. And our pilothouse display was showing the image generated by a state-of-the-art thermal camera temporarily mounted on the foredeck of the Secret Love. In fact, FLIR had installed several different models of marine-rated imagers on our test boat and I had the chance to check them all out.
The top of the line Voyager unit mounted at the bow revealed debris in the water hundreds of feet ahead of the boat, allowing our skipper plenty of time to change course. It is gyro-stabilized and can pan and tilt quickly to check out targets all around the boat. The magic is a special thermal imaging disk capable of distinguishing differences in temperature as small as 50 one-thousandths of one degree Celsius. It's really as simple as this: everything has a temperature and nearly everything either emits or reflects heat in different ways, allowing a sensitive device to "see" using heat rather than light.
It's remarkable technology. Though only those with megayacht budgets are likely to be able to afford the roughly $75,000 price tag of the Voyager unit on Secret Love's bow, the Navigator II unit mounted on the flybridge – about $9,000 with options – is within the reach of many serious cruisers. The Navigator uses the same basic technology as Voyager, but is not gyro-stabilized, and pan and tilt functions are upgrades.
It is not exaggeration to say that the thermal imaging technology demonstrated last night by FLIR turns nighttime boating into daytime boating. The visibility provided by the FLIR units is that dramatic. It is an enhancement, in my opinion, on the order of that provided by radar.
Many of us have radar aboard nowadays. And someday, I think we'll have these cameras too.
FLIRFLIR Navigator in dark waterway
