Day 6 - Much Ado About Nothing


Today, we spent the day at anchor in St. Mary's Bay with Kent on the iPhone calling marina's in Florida looking for a place to keep the boat (he had one when we left but they sent him a note saying they'd not been able to repair the damage from Hurricane Irma and he needed to find another place).   We knew that Irma went though here but it was supposedly pretty spent when it got this high... from the trees around here, I'd hate to have seen what it did to Key West!

While Kent was working on finding a place to keep the boat until he and Iris make it back down here in December to start cruising the Caribbean (they are going to Mozambique for three weeks in the interim), Steve and I tried to figure out what was going on with the new AIS that Kent had had installed (professionally) the week before our departure.  While we could hear things on our VHF, nobody ever responded (we could hear ourselves on the handheld) and we knew that the AIS sent on VHF so suspected there was some tie in there.  

Turns out that the VHF antenna goes into a new AIS splitter that sends info to the AIS and the VHF.  When we traced the wires, the installer had wired up the output of the splitter into the VHF antenna and the VHF radio into the VHF antenna input.  No wonder we had radio and AIS problems!  We hooked it up correctly and began to see ships on AIS up to 14 miles away but we still couldn't get anything on the VHF (we could hear the weather station but nobody would respond to our requests for radio checks).  We figured that when we tried transmitting on the VHF we probably sent 25W into the AIS splitter output and may have fried something in the splitter.  We had a choice... AIS or VHF so we decided to go with the AIS as we still had two handhelds.  (We also had two satellite phones).

I did up my Spicy Sausage with Bow Tie Pasta dish for dinner which went down well with the two beers we allowed ourselves and then called it a night as we wanted to leave for Jacksonville at 7am the next morning with the tides.  The winds were still forecast to be out of the north east at 20-25 knots and the guys asked me if I was OK to go and I said, "no worries!"  (I was a tiny bit concerned but I'd told myself that no matter how sick I ever got, I'd pull my weight as I'd asked for this).  I needn't have worried...

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