How SPICA Helps Ships Navigate Through Ice?

Ice waters navigation can be a tough task for the ships, as it results in smashing and cracking through the frigid and frozen seas. When moving towards the subzero temperature covered with ice waters, the ship’s captain needs to be very cautious and should pay care to the kind of ice, exact location, and thickness in subzero navigation areas.

Suppose there is any misjudgment during the ice navigation, detour from this navigable route will lead to fuel wastage & can get their vessel stuck in the thick ice and leading to the dangerous situation & damage. Here is where advanced passage planning software will come to their rescue in many different ways.

Also Read: Site Builder Software to Set Up Your First Website

Wind, currents and waves, and ice cover are important factors in selecting the sea route. Advanced navigation systems are introduced in shipping and sailing, and it results in a skipper making the right decisions about their route. Avoiding any rough weather & having the advanced route passage planning software will minimize damage and precise arrival times. Selecting the right route lays the primary foundation for decreasing fuel consumption.

If you are looking for such advanced software, then SPICA is offered better software solutions made to improve the management of data and ensure you’re up to date with your route. The primary goal of SPICA software is making workflows onboard easier, decrease mistakes and human mistakes. Thus, it is one of the most helpful software out there, let us go ahead and check out some important features that this software comes built with:

Features to Consider

• Supper performance display with fast, clear, and uncluttered details and simple and touch-friendly UI that makes using this software a breeze.
• Charting tools that will overlay your chart with proper lines, areas, points, and routes and also exchange the routes with ECDIS. It provides easy and powerful management.
• Generated routes automatically – The integrated routing engine makes use of the database of many different ports all over the world.
• Chart management to download, purchase, and display charts. 
• Tides & Radio Signals: Chart provides data from Digital Products and you can buy, download & display the updated information.
• Route monitoring AIS & GPS inputs.

Ice is one big obstruction that needs to be handled carefully by the captain. But, ships can navigate successfully over the ice-covered waters in the sea.

Navigation During Night-Time

Make sure to avoid navigation over ice at night. It can “heave to” as leads and lanes are not visible. Most of the ice navigators stop their vessel all along an edge of ice & leave their vessel drifting all along with its pack.

During nights, seawater lubricated shafts are an incomplete danger to get frozen. So, to avoid freezing, the vessels with one single screw must have the aft peak tank get filled with water & kept warm by steam hose injection, and alternative ways. This vessel must keep engines running with the propeller at a low RPM to avoid any seizure by ice.

So, the first law of successful ice navigation will be maintaining proper maneuver. When the ship gets trapped, the vessel goes wherever ice travels go. Thus, ice navigation needs patience and will be a tiring business with and without the icebreaker escort. Open water around the difficult ice whose limits are quite known is the safest and fastest method to port, and to open sea when you are leaving the port. To help ship navigation & decrease any risks, ships must get a warning for any compressive areas. Basic ice charts will be very general for use in ship operations. The current operational models offer a forecast of ice motion, thickness, concentration & ridging.

Also Read: 6 Best Construction Management Software

Final Words

SPICA is one of the versatile tools for vessels, engineers, consultants, and shipping companies as their services are consolidated on a single platform. This platform offers individual vessels complete control of every voyage & allows optimal fleet running through improved planning, analysis, monitoring, and capabilities. Thus, it is very important that you invest in good software that will prove very helpful when you are out in the sea and have to handle thick ice. This software is very useful in each possible way.