Yesterday, Saturday, January 8 was a busy day aboard JonNe'. Renne' has been cooking meals all week to be frozen so we will have prepared meals on the crossing. She has chili, smothered pork chops, grilled pork chops, eggplant parmesan, spaghetti with meatballs, broccoli and rice. Tonight she asked if I thought it was enough. Well at this point I see a few more dinners we can prepare, but honestly, I hate to see her work so much.
I on the other hand spent yesterday installing the new Standard Horizon GX2100 with AIS. I think this is the only VHF out there with AIS installed. AIS is for Automatic Information System. It is a transponder on commercial vessels that works very much like a transponder in an airplane. Under normal circumstances, AIS is installed with a chartplotter or radar to receive a visual location of a commercial vessel in the vicinity of your boat. This system is in the radio, has a screen to see the relative location and identity of the vessel, your geophysical location and is a VHF radio. In addition, I had to mount a new GPS receiver antenna (also from Standard Horizon) to feed information to the radio and a VHF splitter which allows us to use both the cockpit radio or the cabin VHF for communication using the same antenna on top of the mast.
Installing this radio required running antenna lines above the ceiling liner which was a time consuming effort - easy to get down, a bugger to get back up. Then I discovered I have to rethread the GPS antenna wire - That will be done on Monday!
Hard to comprehend the party is on Saturday. Wow time is going by very fast!! We are also continuing to debate which route we are going to take. I am interested in going straight across and Renne' is interested in heading for Venice, Louisiana. both routes are of interest. I just hate going through the offshore rigs at night and dont like being in shallow water. Waves get really ugly sometimes when waves are building.
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