New Zealand means great friends, beautiful country, delicious food, amazing activities, and lots of boat work. This third trip is no different – did a lot of little upgrades and lot of big upgrades that will have a huge impact to our daily lives.
This blog post will focus on the “little but powerful upgrades.”
Chart plotters at each Helm
Over the past 15 years we’ve sailed 70,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. We’ve visited over 35 countries and truly love our boat/home.
However, we have never had a chart plotter at the helm. We’ve had a handheld Garmin 73 (with satellite and tracks), but no chart plotter. We’ve had to either zip into the salon to see the multitude of charts on the navigation station or rely on Navionics on the iPad. Not ideal, but it worked for us.
Finally, it was time to upgrade the helms. The first thing we did was fabricate a new pedestal extension at each helm. Each helm station has a pedestal and an additional small extension where our Garmin holder, Raymarine gauge, stereo remote, (2) anchor controls, a small control panel, and the IridumGo antenna lived.
Matt disconnected all of the gauges and instruments first. Then with loads of patience he removed the 5200 holding the back extension.
We cleaned up the front and back and removed the 5200 excess.
Our friend, Ian on Tavake (a Catana 431) told us to use fabricator Scott Banks. Super nice guy!
Scott came out, took a bunch of measurements, gave us a reasonable quote, collected the pedestal extensions, and told us he’d be back in 2 weeks.
Unfortunately it took way longer than 2 weeks, but we are very pleased with the final product (see below).
Chart Plotters
We purchased (2) B&G Zeus 9 Chart plotters from Marine Deals. It took 6 weeks to get delivered and cost approximately $1400 USD each.
The other controls (small control panel allows us to turn on/off 6 items, stereo remote control, and (2) anchor controls will go on the new pedestal extension.
We had to move the existing Raymarine P70 gauge to a new Marine Pod mount which will sit to the side of each helm.
Marine Pods for Raymarine Gauge
We could have made the pedestal extension large enough to accommodate all of our equipment. However that would block the view from the helm seat.
In order to keep the view we went with a smaller pedestal extension and a marine pod mount for the gauge.
We purchased (2) marine pod mounts to move the Raymarine Autopilot (ST60) gauges to the sides of the pedestals.
The pods are called Seaview SP1BOX Marine Pod Kit . We bought them on ebay for $95 USD each
LC Hydraulics (Phillip) fabricated two mounting holders for the new PODs. It took about 2 days and cost $855NZD.
The white square is the pod and the two holders are for each helm.
The new upgraded helm stations are amazing!
With the new helm extension holding our chart plotters and our new pod’s holding our gauge!
Purchasing and Contact Info:
- Scott Banks, Fabricator, Whangarei, NZ +64.22.380.3972. Fabricated the helm pedestal extensions and the window rain flashing
- Chart plotters purchased from Marine Deals, www.marine-deals.co.nz
- Raymarine gauge mount : Seaview SP1BOX Marine Pod Kit New Open Box Accessory Mount for GPS VHF Display purchased from eBay
- Marine Deals +64 09 281 3150, www.marine-deals.co.nz, Auckland, NZ
- LC Hydraulics, www.lchydraulics.co.nz/, +64.21.0285.5072
Design specs of the chart plotter that we used as a base for the helm pedestal extension.
Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind actual events.
We started working on these little upgrades as soon as we arrived in New Zealand (Oct.2025-Jan.2026).
These are just a few of the massive projects we completed.
See our full list on our “Hauling out at Norsand Boatyard” blog post.