Road to Departure - a few small successes

We're now almost through our 'must-do before leaving' task list. There have been a few small successes.

The boat has been registered and renamed. The AIS has been reprogrammed and the epirb serviced.

We examined the rigging and made a few changes. One that felt good was getting rid of a boom extension that looked like it just wouldn't be able to handle any kind of accidental gybe without a potential structural failure. It also caused the main sheet to be angled well away from the traveler which weakened the connection between the two. The extension was originally necessary because the main sheet was unable to clear the bimini frame. Our solution was to chop nine inches off the frame. Sounds simple, but, it was actually a three day job as there was stainless to cut through and we had to shorten the fabric top on the bimini requiring restitching etc..etc...

We removed lots of old wire and aerials. Removing an old, unsealed, GPS aerial from the deck resulted in a rather large hole right through to the interior . Our temporary solution was just to bung a wooden plug in it. We'll have to get it welded properly later and watch our step in the meantime.

We installed new, deck-level navigation lights. The boat actually didn't have any, which was quite surprising. We prefer using deck-level lights inshore and a tricolour at the masthead when offshore. This job also took a few days to complete as we had to run wire from stem-to-stern. The lights are temporarily mounted on wooden panels. This will need to be redone when we can weld some aluminium mounting plates and get drill bits that are up to the job to finish it properly.

We installed an external Iridium antenna and cable. How hard can that be? Well, we measured and ordered a 10m cable (all the way from Seattle). When we installed it, there were so many twists and turns necessary to get around structural items that it ended up about 1m too short. We had to order another one.

We went through every nook and cranny. There were a few surprises, like the intact Hershey chocolate bar with a best-before date of 2003 and a few other long-forgotten food and toiletry items.

The boat came with newer (2015) electronics: two Raymarine chartplotters and a new radar that were networked together with older Raymarine nav instruments and autopilots. This sounds good, but, I knew I would have difficulty with the chartplotters as they were touchscreen-only models. I find touchscreens to be incredibly frustrating to use at the best of times. A lot of our sailing seems to involve cold and wet fingers covered with gloves. They just aren't going to work with a touchscreen. Even in the Raymarine manual, they reference "Erroneous Touchscreen performance" and recommend, in wet weather, "locking the touchscreen and using the physical buttons instead". Our model of chartplotter doesn't have any physical buttons. Locking the touchscreen means making it inoperable! After some research, the solution seemed to be to get a remote keypad, so, we ordered one, at a very large price.

When the keypad arrived, it did do the job and we were pleased with our solution, but, we had created another problem. There are only two 'network' ports on the back of the chartplotters and we now had more devices than ports. The solution, buy more hardware! So, we ordered a high speed network switch (router) and connected everything through that.

We like to keep it simple, but, unfortunately, we have now ended up with our very own local area network (ethernet) to maintain. It seems to be working ok, for the moment, time will tell.

We also ordered a printed paper manual for the Raymarine plotters as I like to have one available for quick reference. The products don't come with one anymore and I can see why. It arrived at 412 pages and was the size and weight of a brick.

The Lighthouse operating system is full of "feature bloat". Documented in the manual is how to operate connected thermal cameras, fishfinders, 3d downvision sonar, wifi, audio and media player and more. Installing and operating all this "stuff" wouldn't leave much time for sailing. In reading through, though, I couldn't help but be seduced by the availability of two features that looked possibly worthwhile: sailing laylines and AIS target interception graphics. Our installed software was an older version of that documented in the manual, so, a dreaded software update was required to get the new features. Actually, surprisingly, it went off without a hitch.

Our last Raymarine purchase was their Voyage Planner software. Inexpensive, but, clunky to use. However, it allows you to quickly create routes and waypoints on your laptop. Then, the laptop can be connected directly to the router to load the information to the chartplotters.

There were, of course, also a few stumbles along the way, one of which, our Aquadrive installation, almost derailed our plans for starting our cruise at the end of July. More on the "stumbles" in the next post.