Always onboard

Oil Spill Response - Use Case

The Western Canadian Marine Response (WCMRC) is the Transport Canada-certified marine spill response organization for Canada’s West Coast. 

Their mandate under the Canada Shipping Act is to be prepared to respond to marine oil spills along all 27,000 km of British Columbia’s coastline and to mitigate the impact when a spill occurs. WCMRC called upon Barnacle Systems in order to find a remote monitoring device that monitors existing alarm panels onboard their ships. 

WCMRC wanted to primarily monitor their vessel’s shore power connection, GPS position, and the status of fire and flood alarms on their vessel 24/7 and have any alerts sent out to all the necessary individuals. 

Now, after having the systems installed onboard their ships since early 2020, their team is able to check on their vessels from their smartphones, tablets, and computers.

Canadian Coast Guard - Use Case

The Canadian Coast Guard called upon Barnacle Systems to develop a self-powered remote monitoring solution for a large ship that needed GPS tracking and pitch/heel/list monitoring. Their team needed to receive an alert in the unlikely event that the vessel broke moorage or began to sink. The BRNKL Rapid Deploy was the ideal solution. The product’s core features include a global cellular connection to enable remote monitoring, GPS monitoring with a geofence, and pitch/heel/list monitoring to monitor the state of the vessel in the water. In addition, four high water switches were connected to the BRNKL Rapid Deploy system’s inputs, which were then run by cable down to areas of the vessel that were susceptible to taking on water.

A concern from the Coast Guard was that this platform would gradually list at its mooring and sink and cause a local environmental disaster. By using BRNKL’s graphing capabilities in the mobile and web applications, the Coast Guard is able to see the gradual trend of the vessel’s pitch and heel in order to see if it’s slowly sinking.

The BRNKL Rapid Deploy comes in a portable and non-portable solution. The portable solution is a Pelican-style case that contains a folding solar panel, battery, and all of the required remote monitoring equipment – the solution can be placed on a barge and monitoring the platform in less than 10 minutes. The non-portable solution is in a NEMA 4X electronics cabinet and a rigid solar panel that can be secured to the platform for a more permanent solution. Both the non-portable and portable solutions can be customized to suit your remote monitoring requirements.

For more than four decades, Archipelago has helped fisheries, coastal communities, and industry regulators to implement sustainable practices through at–sea and dockside observer programs, electronic monitoring technology, and marine environmental services. 

Archipelago has partnered with Barnacle Systems to develop an Electronic Monitoring Lite product (EM Lite) that allows smaller fisheries to take advantage of the new electronic monitoring technologies that promote sustainable fishing.

EM Lite not only provides at-sea monitoring and automated data transmissions to Archipelago’s EM Interpret software during fishing trips but also allows the ship’s captain to remotely monitor the health of the vessel when it’s alongside using the BRNKL mobile and web applications.