The beating heart of the new pilot boat’s electronics is Raymarine’s LightHouse 3 operating software, powering two Raymarine Axiom touch-screen multifunction navigation display units, an Axiom 12 and an Axiom 9, with customisable home screens. The rapid quad-core processor and built-in RealVision 3D sonar, connected directly to the Axiom MFDs via a Raymarine RV-300 through-hull transducer, gives an enhanced view of what is beneath and around the vessel.

Bruno Tideman of Tideman Boats said, “Most of our boats are delivered with Raymarine equipment as standard. “The reasons for this are very simple. We know that if we install a Raymarine product it will work, and we also know that there is strong global support. Ninety-five percent of our vessels are shipped outside the Netherlands, so they don’t stay within our service area. Raymarine’s international support network means that we can rely upon their local service capabilities, wherever in the world our boats might be. We only work with global brands.

“We always opt for the Axiom touch-screens with our closed boats whereas we’ll specify Raymarine’s Element MFDs for our open boats, because the latter’s push-button interface is better suited to applications in which they are constantly exposed to the elements.”

The pilot boat is also fitted with Raymarine’s Quantum 2 CHIRP radar, an indispensable navigational aid as its Doppler target-processing technology can quickly identify and colour-code moving objects in busy sea areas where there is a great deal of vessel traffic, thereby mitigating the risk of collision.