Finnish Sailors Refit Their Boat With Raymarine Gear for Arctic Voyaging

Raymarine ambassadors Rami Hanafi and Enni Rukajärvi have refitted their small cruising yacht 'Yasmila' with a new suite of Raymarine navigation systems, preparing for an expedition to the furthest northern reaches of Norway where they plan to sail the fjords and snowboard their wild slopes.

The equipment choices aboard Yasmila were driven directly by Arctic operating conditions. At the helm, where the chartplotter faces full exposure to the elements, the pair installed an Axiom 2 Pro S with HybridTouch. The rationale was straightforward: the combination of touchscreen and physical keypad means the display remains operable with thick gloves on. Rukajärvi put the cold in concrete terms. "In early January, as we were driving back to our boat, the temperatures were down to -32'C just before the coast," she noted. "These kind of temperatures combined with strong winds can be brutal on your fingers."

The second chartplotter, an Axiom+ 12", sits in a more sheltered position under the sprayhood. There, the keypad was unnecessary, and the unit's slender profile solved a practical fitment problem: it slotted cleanly between the halyards and the windscreen. The two-chartplotter setup gives Yasmila redundancy between an exposed primary station built for gloved hands and a protected secondary display sized for the available space.

Rounding out the navigation instrumentation are Raymarine's Alpha 7 and 9-inch Performance Displays. Raymarine positions these as the latest in boat instrumentation, with portrait and landscape mounting options and a single data and power cable, which simplifies the installation run considerably.

That ease of installation mattered to the crew. Rukajärvi had no prior marine electronics experience coming into the refit, and the work was completed with help from a knowledgeable friend rather than a professional yard. "I think the work itself was surprisingly straightforward," she said. "We had a good friend helping us with that; then we just needed some hard concentration and a bit of time." Beyond getting the gear fitted and working, the process delivered something less tangible but arguably more valuable for high-latitude sailing. "The best part of the refit process with the Raymarine navigation systems was actually that we learned so much more about the instruments, the cabling, and the boat," Rukajärvi added. "This knowledge is priceless in the pursuit of being able to fix things underway, a vital skill."

That ability to self-diagnose and repair at sea is not a minor concern when the destination is Arctic Norway. For any crew heading into remote high-latitude waters, the difference between understanding your electronics at a systems level and simply operating them by touch can be the difference between a manageable fault and a serious situation. Hanafi and Rukajärvi walked away from their refit with both new hardware and the wiring knowledge to support it if something goes wrong far from a marina.