Kaimusailing

The news was that a Catalina 30 similar to SUNSPLASH had gone missing while voyaging South from New Jersey to Florida. They had been missing ten days when they were spotted hundreds of miles offshore and rescued by a merchant ship. The sailboat was without power, food, or water. The two sailors were very lucky to have been found and rescued.
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The last contact with the sailboat was when it was leaving Oregon Inlet near Cape Hatteras. That is a clue that makes me think they were trying to go South under sail alone, that their engine was inoperative. Normally a boat like a Catalina 30 would take the Intercoastal Waterway from Norfolk to Morehead City and avoid Cape Hatteras, Frying Pan Shoal, Lookout Point, etc. My own ideas of taking SUNSPLASH South included the possibility of going engineless. Looks like that is not a good idea.
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Big Dave retu4rned from Texas and we began to build a navigation laptop computer. We were using a Panasonic CF-C1, same as what I’ve been using the past few years. I am also replacing my latest laptop which is exhibiting some wear and tear. We are installing Navigatrix 32bit non PAE. This is the distribution that seems to fit these laptops most easily.
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I had had problems with the 64bit version of Navigatrix in the past, but a more up to date version of it should offer faster operations with large files like navigation charts. The next day I downloaded the latest version of the 64bit program and dual installed it on the laptop. I had a thumbdrive with all the charts on it, all the NOAA charts of USA, CM93 vector chart of the world, NOAA ENC ROOT, vector charts of USA, DMA charts of Bahamas, Explorer charts of the Bahamas, Iolaire charts of Eastern Caribbean. I loaded all the charts on the 64bit system.
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Big Dave was eager to see how it worked and offered to treat me to dinner and I could demonstrate the program. We went to the gas station restaurant and had their Southwest Burger. The program crashed several times, but because it was dual installed I could revert to the 32 bit version. That ran without a problem. Dave started to have the glassy eyed look, he’s proficient at law but technology puts him to sleep. We quit for the night after making a sailing route South to the Hawk Channel near Miami.
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The next day I reinstalled the 32 bit Navigatrix, overwriting the 64 bit version. Big Dave received his new hard drive, drive caddy, and charger. I installed Navigatrix on his drive along with all the maps. The non-OpenCPN maps were put on his desktop along with the Chromium web browser icon. We went to Southern River Walk for dinner and I demoed the laptop. We looked at Lake Okeechobee and the canal that runs from Stuart, Florida, to Fort Myers. We found the chart directories for the non-OpenCPN charts were in an old document file type that wouldn’t open with the new Navigatrix word processor. Later I opened the chart directories on the old operating system and resaved them as .doc files.