We arrived at the boat on Friday afternoon, loaded with food, only to find that the fireworks originally planned for that night had been postponed until Sunday night. It was just as well because it began raining early in the evening and continued for most of the night.
Pooka is the official 2nd mate, he is sometimes referred to as "Kitty Buffett"
On Saturday morning, we continued our trim rehab project and taped all of the trim around the sliding door.
We applied a coat of Sikkens Cetol and, although it set up very quickly in the heat, decided to let it cure overnight. We took some time on Saturday afternoon to visit Defender Marine in Waterford to get the paint we'll need to go around the newly refinished trim. That color will match the deck so we expect it to give the cockpit a new, much cleaner and newer look.
Early on Sunday, we applied a second coat of Sikkens.
The plan is to apply three coats for now. After the second, it began to take on some color.
We also updated our list of things that we'll need to bring down to the boat for our upcoming trip to Block Island. Pooka, the boat cat, added his companionship.
At one point during the day, we needed something that was stored in the space under the lower helm. We picked up the hatch and Pooka, who loves to inspect any new space, jumped in immediately and gave everything an introductory sniff.
Pooka has taken to the boat and seems very happy there. Normally an inside cat with Frances at home, he now comes out into the cockpit, rolls over in the sun and sometimes climbs up on the side boarding ladders to check out, well, just about anything. Everything is new to him and he seems to love it.
Others on the dock were busy as well. Our dockmate Bob borrowed a ladder from another dockmate and climbed up to fix his anchor light. It's amazing how something as mundane as fixing a light can draw a crowd but, that's boating among friends. You can see what a beautiful day it was. That's our friend John, the guy who helped us bring Act Three back from Long Island two years ago, holding the ladder.
Since we were on a roll on Sunday, we decided to try one more time to put the boat's MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity) number into our Icom VHF radio. We followed the directions carefully but could never get the radio to successfully accept this simple nine digit number. Today, we tried one extra step that wasn't in the instructions: Turn the radio power switch off after entering the last number. Sure enough, when we turned the radio back on, the radio display showed the correct MMSI number.
Now, if we trigger the emergency switch on the radio, the radio will transmit our MMSI number on channel 16, which will tell the Coast Guard basic information about the boat and who we are.
But to make this really useful, we should also transmit our exact location as part of that emergency message. Sure, we could verbally say our location over the radio but if we were busy dealing with a real emergency, this might not be practical. Our Standard Horizon chart plotter has that information and all modern plotters make it available through a couple of wires coming out of the back of the unit. Also, all newer radios have a couple of wires that if connected properly to the plotter, will accept that position data and broadcast it automatically as part of the emergency message.
(A recent article in Soundings magazine pointed out that while VHF radios and even chart plotters are now widely used by recreational boaters, a relatively small percentage of boaters have bothered to interconnect these two pieces of equipment. Not doing so is fairly dumb, since since making these connections dramatically increases the Coast Guard's response time and the type of assets it deploys in response to your emergency.)
It is worth noting that although we have a pretty thorough knowledge of marine electronics and even understand how NMEA 0183 and NMEA 2000 work (these are the data formats that allow various pieces of equipment to communicate), we found connecting the chart plotter to the radio to be far from easy..
First, Icom (our VHF radio) and Standard Horizon (our chart plotter) didn't have matching color coded wires so we had to look up that data in the instructions to figure out how to connect them. Second, Icom, a company that we would consider a top-tier electronics manufacturer, provided data wires that were ridiculously short and of much too light a gauge to be able to add even the smallest crimp connector. Standard Horizon wasn't much better. The wires were much longer but they were also very thin and difficult to strip and splice. How much can it add to the price of this equipment to provide longer, heavier gauge data wires?
It took a while, but we made the connections and then tried the radio to see if we could see our position on the screen. "No position," was the only message we got. Then we plunged into the "advanced settings" screens on the chart plotter. This area is very poorly documented in the manual. We found that Port 2 (the port we selected to connect to our radio) was formatted to work with a Standard Horizon fish finder. We didn't even know that Standard Horizon made a fish finder. After some exploring, we found that we could re-configure port 2 on the chart plotter to NMEA 0183 data settings. Bingo! That worked. We saw our position scroll across the bottom of the screen on the radio.
While you can't see it in this photo, the radio displays a "GPS" message when properly connected. Nice, although we hope we'll never have to trip that little red "emergency" switch on the front of the radio and make all of this technology go to work for us.
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