We had another great weekend on the boat. We arrived and reinstalled the bimini and treated it with a water resistant spray. It looks great after being cleaned and the water beads on top now during the rain. After that was installed I created a continuous line splice to fix the main sail furler line I snapped last time we were down here. I then moved on to fixing the stove. After running checks on the system and cleaning the supply hose I reassembled it all and now we have fire. We didn’t bring anything to cook this time, but I’m looking forward to trying it out next trip. We also took the stove apart so we can give it a good scrub down at home. It should be all nice and shiny next time we come down.
I finished the installation of the remote hand mic for the VHF radio and checked all the features between the radio, chart plotter, and autopilot. The chart plotter will display the AIS hits from the VHF and it will send information to the autopilot so we can now create a route, press track on the autopilot and it will drive us around the world. Unfortunately there is one hiccup. The chart plotter is not able to listen to the VHF and talk to the autopilot at the same time. I have the Standard Horizon GX2200 VHF, Standard Horizon CP180i, and Raymarine ST 4000+ autopilot. The VHF and chart plotter talk on 4800 Baud and the autopilot works on 3400 Baud. This requires me to switch the chart plotter to 4800 to get AIS info or 3400 to send info the autopilot, but I can’t do both at the same time. I may look into upgrading the autopilot depending on the cost. At least for now everything works. It just requires a few more button pushes than normal.
The sail this weekend could have been better. It was around 90F all weekend and Sophia wasn’t having any of it. She probably wouldn’t have been too bad, but there wasn’t much wind either. When we were on the water, it was between 2 and 7 knots variable all day with periods of dead calm. So we were only out for about 4 hours then pulled back into the slip and started cranking the AC. Sophia was very happy with this course of action. We decided to pack it up Sunday night around dinner time. It worked out perfect. As soon as we were in the jeep and driving away a thunderstorm moved over Oriental. We finally had good winds, along with lightning and rain though. We didn’t get much sailing this weekend; however, a lot of things were checked off our list.
We won’t be able to make it back down to the boat for quite awhile. We’re heading to Cincinnati to see family and celebrate the 4th of July. It should be a good time, but we’ll miss the boat.
I finished the installation of the remote hand mic for the VHF radio and checked all the features between the radio, chart plotter, and autopilot. The chart plotter will display the AIS hits from the VHF and it will send information to the autopilot so we can now create a route, press track on the autopilot and it will drive us around the world. Unfortunately there is one hiccup. The chart plotter is not able to listen to the VHF and talk to the autopilot at the same time. I have the Standard Horizon GX2200 VHF, Standard Horizon CP180i, and Raymarine ST 4000+ autopilot. The VHF and chart plotter talk on 4800 Baud and the autopilot works on 3400 Baud. This requires me to switch the chart plotter to 4800 to get AIS info or 3400 to send info the autopilot, but I can’t do both at the same time. I may look into upgrading the autopilot depending on the cost. At least for now everything works. It just requires a few more button pushes than normal.
The sail this weekend could have been better. It was around 90F all weekend and Sophia wasn’t having any of it. She probably wouldn’t have been too bad, but there wasn’t much wind either. When we were on the water, it was between 2 and 7 knots variable all day with periods of dead calm. So we were only out for about 4 hours then pulled back into the slip and started cranking the AC. Sophia was very happy with this course of action. We decided to pack it up Sunday night around dinner time. It worked out perfect. As soon as we were in the jeep and driving away a thunderstorm moved over Oriental. We finally had good winds, along with lightning and rain though. We didn’t get much sailing this weekend; however, a lot of things were checked off our list.
We won’t be able to make it back down to the boat for quite awhile. We’re heading to Cincinnati to see family and celebrate the 4th of July. It should be a good time, but we’ll miss the boat.