Been keeping VERY busy on Banyan this past week, which I suppose, kind of makes us Busy Banyan-ites?

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Now that we're in the land of Duty (but not) Free shopping, it was seriously time to Seize the Moment and spend oodles of Boat Bucks we don't have.

We had ourselves a list of things to buy, end resulting quite obviously in chores that needed tackling. And since we knew the winds were going to be blowing a holler and a stink all around us, we figured that this was the perfect time to get at it.

Back in Jolly Harbour, our Outboard pull-cord broke. Snapped. Like WTF?



And thus needed immediate fixing or we weren't getting off the boat. Phew, one unanticipated job done, check.

One of the pelican hooks on our lines broke way back when. We were able to snag a replacement pin from a similar pelican hook from Martinique last year, and fixed it, and then the other one went. So when we got to Martinique last month, the cashier promptly told us that they don't carry that item anymore. Merde !

Of course our boat being genetically French, the hook corkscrews in a counter-clockwise direction, which makes things impossible difficult to find. Being on a walk-a-bout of Sint Maarten we thought we would stop in at FKG and enquire about one of the items on our To Buy List when up on the wall, above the cashier's head, what do my beady little eyes spot? Why, a pelican hook. Wouldn't hurt to check it's corkscrew direction, would it?

It worked. We promptly bought it. And the salesman laughed and said he only had one left in his inventory.

Guess what? We promptly bought that one too.



And then we proceeded to fix that pesky problem!!



Budget Marine is always a place where one can spend too much time, and too much money n'est ce pas? And not necessarily in that order.

Cap't'N Dave now has not only a new idea, but a new "heart".



We love these Navisafe lights. It gets attached on the Capt'N's ball cap with a strong magnetic clip, and brightly and easily lights up our way when dinghy-ing home providing a 360 degree white light so that we are indeed seen at night!

We got ourselves stocked up on Spectra Water Filters at Electec. We wash and re-use our old ones, getting about 4 cycles out of each set. We have tried the cheaper filters, but they don't re-use as well, so in the long run, they end up being more expensive.



And of course Napa is the place to go for Oil, and so guess what job the Capt'N had that needed doing?

We found a new plug for our Windlass Remote,



as well as a few more odds and sods,



that kept us Busy Banyan-ites for the better part of a week while it blowed a stink all around us.

The biggest job though, was to get a new GPS antenna. Banyan's systems, when we bought the boat, were all wired in a good, but a tad of a weird way, and well, we made it all work. At times though, it had the Capt'N shaking his head...

Our chart plotter, has, in the last couple of months, been doing funny things, which has had the Capt'N puzzled and perplexed. Eliminating possible causes of problems, one by one, we started to evil eye the GPS Antenna.

And then finally, on our passage from Antigua to here, about 2/3 of the way across, our Chartplotter tells us we're travelling at 12 knots in the wrong direction, and then, we've, um, look... mysteriously disappeared.

Thank goodness we'd been in this area before and knew our way around, and our anchorage, so with our iPad we made our way to St-Barts, safe and sound. And our way to Sint-Maarten, safe and sound again.

The iPad, albeit a good tool to have, won't compensate for set & drift... just so you know.

So we got a hold of the Raymarine Tech, at Atlantis Marine. He promptly showed up that same day, with suitcases of tools in hand, as did the Capt'n, with a new GPS Antenna in hand. And together they both got to talking the talk, and dissecting the lines.

The tech confirmed what the Capt'N knew, that the antenna was crap. But Lo and Behold, the new GPS antenna is Seatalk NG (Next Generation) and our system is Seatalk1. And so, some more clams needed to be spent to buy a (Seatalk1 to Seatalk NG) converter.

The good news is that with the converter, we now have the first building block to convert to Seatalk NG when other instruments go U/S. (Unserviceable)!

And then comes the fun of getting it all installed, which means getting out some tools.



By the way, if yours come in convenient canvas zippered bags, the zippers do, with time and salt air, seize, so make sure you grease all your onboard zippers, as regular preventive maintenance procedures. Another job added to The List.

The Capt'N spied the wiring cables behind inconvenient to reach places,



to find out what's what, or more precisely, where's what?

"Nope it goes through there, and does it go here..." wondered the Capt'N?



And oh what a jumbled mess of wires to be found...



However, the investment was priceless. All wiring is now nice and neat and labelled, just the way we like it. The GPS antenna was indeed dead to the world, as when we took it off the rail, more water poured out than holds all of Simpson Bay.

Best of all, we no longer have to use a complicated choreography of switches on our control board to turn the auto-pilot or the instruments on. Score.

And the new antenna, is now housed down below, safe and sound from the outdoor elements.

But of course, since we were in the lazarette compartments, with all the stuff that they hold strewn down in Banyan's below decks, we also re-wired The Wirie, greased up the steering cables, cleaned and wiped and inspected... and so on, and so forth.

Although it's been mostly work, work and more work, with more to come, we did manage to teach our friends Jeff and Debbie, on Sea Sparrow the game of Wizard, and celebrate the winner afterwards,



with some Beers in a Bucket, while watching the plans fly overhead at Maho Beach.



Busy Banyan-ites out just having some fun, for sure.