I kind of hesitated to write this post in a way - its become so common for people to rave or bash AI and it seems to be in every conversation or article. Even if it wasn't written by AI. But I have had some really good experiences with using Chat GPT on our boat so I thought I would share some of my 'Use Cases' for AI. I'm hoping I don't really need to go through the obvious warnings do I? Don't rely on AI without checking, it does make mistakes, it does hallucinate...

  1. Navigation

    Might as well start with the most controversial idea - getting a passage plan from an AI! Well this was a bit of fun and a bit of a sanity check really - I gave it the place names of my start and end points (I picked an Easterly cardinal off the IOW and a destination of Alderney) and asked it for a course to steer for the time we were planning to leave. What surprised me was the fact it checked both the tides and the weather - it made a perfectly reasonable course suggestion. Of course I ignored it and did my own - which was only 1 degree different, possibly due to the estimations of tidal streams given the lack of resolution of the tide atlas. I was just impressed it considered all the main factors - it already knew we had an 11m sailing yacht, but I liked the fact it added weather and tides and gave me a detailed explanation of its reasoning.

  2. Sailing Comfort

    Related to the above I was chatting to another skipper about the sea conditions and suitability for us as we tried to find a weather window. I also tried Chat GPT. It was able to give me a pretty fair estimate of how pleasant or otherwise the conditions might be - we hadn't been on a long sail for so long I had forgotten what the different wind and wave combinations would feel like, so I wanted some guidance. Interestingly, once I had done the basic question I went on to ask the AI to generate me a table for different wind speeds with waves in different directions so I could print off a handy guide to the feel of conditions in different situations. Again, experience makes this redundant - but when you are rusty, or maybe chartering early in your sailing career, this could be a useful guide.

  3. Strange Noises

    We've had a couple of situations where there has been an odd noise that we have struggled to locate or understand. One was a strange humming as we were sat in a marina. We eventually realised the mast seemed to be vibrating. Again we asked Chat GPT what might be the cause of this - it asked some questions to guide its response and eventually suggested we eased the topping lift. We have a gas kicker so we don't really need a topping lift for holidng the boom of course - so I couldn't see why that would help. I went to clutch and eased it open - it was under quite a bit of tension! So that fixed it - another win for Chat GPT. I think our rig tune before leaving must have had the guys put it on for some reason...

  4. Problem Diagnosis

    On our way back from the cruise last summer our AIS almost completely stopped transmitting our position. It would do it every couple of weeks - not much use for collision avoidance... The AI was really good in guiding me through the most important checks and the best order to do them in. A web search would have given me most of that - but I like the style of talking it through and have the AI constantly update what could be the most likely cause. In the end B&G lent us a GPS antenna, bench tested our AIS unit and gave other guidance. I also checked the VHF antenna with a SWR meter. All the tests came back as everything was OK - really odd. In the end, out of desperation, I coughed up the money for a replacement AIS unit regardless of how unliklely it was that it had a speceific minor fault (it was still receiveing AIS perfectly). That did the trick - we were back on again! Chat GPT was pretty good at helping reason through the problem - so that was a win. You do have to watch it of course - it came up with a credible bug report on B&G software for my version - all totally made up and completely un true! But again - you just have to be ready for these things and search on specifics on the web to check important facts.

Overall I really like using Chat GPT for various sailing questions. I've had so few negative experiences (given I tend to double check important things) that I will be carrying on! I'll try and take more care to note down some of the best prompts I find and put thos in another post...