Track your boat's rock and rolling with new app

摘要

Stay stable: Fishing boats rock and roll, pitch, yaw, surge, sway, and heave. A new iPhone app helps skippers respond to the movements as they navigate rough seas in tough weather. It is called SCraMP — for Small Craft Motion Program — and it has avariety of tools for boat operators."There is a view that gives them the accelerations they've seen, so they can have a sense of how bad they are being beat up," said Leigh McCue, a professor at Virginia Tech's Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, who created the app. "There is ascreen that will tell them how severe their roll motions have been and a screen that gives them a choice of three different warning metrics, and fishermen can plug in numbers they feel comfortable with."She said stability indicators have been talked about for years, but prototypes were too bulky or expensive. After getting a smartphone, she realized it had all of the computing power that was needed, and input from fishermen helped hone the app to theirneeds.