This morning we awoke to frost on the deck and temps in the 40s. Break out the long johns! Today was a planned short day, as we started into the marshes that line the approach to Charleston. We have reservations starting on Sunday in Charleston so we have a couple of days to kill before we get there.
Despite the occasional alarms from the depth sounder, we both really like this part of the trip. The view across the twists and turns of the marshes is spectacular and the cool breezes this time of year mostly keep the mosquitoes at bay.
Jim’s project today was to finish installing the AIS system we had ordered to replace the one killed by lightening right before we left. We shipped a replacement to Calabash and picked it up during our visit. Plug and play, they said. Just attach a few wires and it would start right up, they said. It will work perfectly with your existing equipment, they said. Hah. We messed with it last night until after 11:00….way past cruiser’s midnight. Jim wired it per the instructions, no joy. He wired it several different ways, trying to isolate the problem, no joy. We were having some fun, let me tell you. Today, I said I would take the helm through the marshes, not my favorite because of the low spots, to avoid working on the AIS. Jim worked all day and finally gave up. The supplier was less than helpful, as I think all he knew how to do was plug and play and knew nothing about debugging if it didn’t work. Finally as we pulled into our anchorage, I noticed a boat showing up on our internet-based AIS. It isn’t a very good real-time system but sometimes shows surrounding boats. Well, this boat was coming right into our anchorage. We fired up the new system and amazingly all the little lights that had been silent started blinking away. We hailed the boat and they were able to see us too. Partial victory. We still saw nothing on our chartplotter, which is required for the system to be of real use. Jim finally called Raymarine and they spent a good half-hour working with us to debug the system. It was not their AIS equipment, nor their interface equipment, but they pulled up the other vendors’ websites and worked it through with us. Gold stars for Raymarine. We were finally able to isolate it to the NMEA output of the interface equipment and decided that lightening must have damaged it too. Jim and Raymarine figured out a workaround and SUCCESS, AIS targets on the chartplotter. These boat toys are fun when they work and useful tools too, but sometimes…….life was simpler before!