The next two days were dedicated to boat maintenance, oil changes and such and rain. Happy to be at a nice marina with skilled boat techs so we can get this necessary stuff out of the way before we head out again tomorrow. The weather is supposed to improve too so it all works out well.
I'm sitting here buried in paper charts, cruise manuals, strip charts, an Ipad with Navionics and the boat's gps/plotter trying to get a handle on these 30,000 islands we are in. Dave calls it Thousand Island on steroids here. (sorry A-Rod). Looking for the next anchorage.
Our goal is to be somewhere east of Killarney next Monday so when John, Karen and Brandon meet up with us to join the cruise, it will be easy for them to get on the boat. So happy they are coming with us!!
But, having been spoiled by the easy boat electronics through the years, I have become very complacent with old fashioned paper charts. Time to get on it. They never fail you.
That reminds me of 11 years ago; we took our boat from Boca Raton, FL to Pt. Lucaya in the Bahamas. Beautiful trip. On the way back to Boca our electronics lost their fix and went dead. They refused to come back on. As we were out to sea and could not see land yet, Dave and John got us home by using the old fashioned compass. Lucky for us they did their homework each night and plotted out the next days journey on the gps AND the paper charts. Very good habit.
We got back to Boca and there is a very small inlet there. We had to literally surf back into the harbor. Pretty scarry but we made it just fine.
A few weeks later, back home, we were watching a Discovery Channel show on the Bermuda Triangle. They showed a map and darn if we weren't in the Triangle when we lost our electronics! I'm glad I did not know that at the time!! Lucky we didn't join the number of lost ships and airplanes there.
No comments:
Post a Comment