Interesting!

I have been trying to contact some folk on the HF bands for some days now and have been unable to enter the freq on our new iCom m802 in spite of carefully following the directions in the manual. Yesterday I broke down and called iCom tech support and, lo and behold, apparently the radio is delivered from the factory with the vaious channels pre-tuned and locked into the radio. Your average yachting SSB user is not to be trusted with entering frequencies it would appear. However, once they discovered that I was also a liscenced Ham, they decided that I could be trusted and told me how to unlock the keyboard. Now I am able the wreak havoc across the airwaves. I still have to hook up the radio's second DSC antenna and hook it to the GPS, but that is relatively small potatoes in the great scheme of things.

I have been able to almost complete the soundbox around the genset and build the replacement removeable cockpit table. The latter is going to be pretty nice once completed - made of oak 20" x 18" with fids around the edges, it will make a very pleasant spot to have dinner topsides at an anchorage or on a mooring.

We still have to install the watermaker. That's the next project, but I don't anticipate it being a huge thing. The major work has been done while NELLEKE was up on the hard, namely installing the through hull for the water intake. We have set the space available for the install - the PUR 160 takes up a fair amount of real-estate, and we have the intermediate water tank to pump the filtered water into for testing prior to pumping it into the main tanks. With all three tanks full we will naw have a 130 Imp Gal fresh water capacity aboard. Assuming a gal/pers/day that means that if we are strict we would have 60 days of water aboard. Of course, with the knowledge that we can replace water as required I rather expect that we won't be so stingy - we'll have daily showers without having to wait for the next marina, we'll drink the Canada's Food Guide recommended amount of water, etc.

In addition to preping the boat we are also still preping ourselves and our itinerary. At this point the only "line in the sand" is our requirement to be in the Tampa area in time for the Christmas season. This is based on our plan for our son and daughter to fly down to join us for the holidays. Kayt will arrive from Halifax and Chris will fly down from Alberta. We chose the Tampa region for the rendez-vous for a variety of reasons: first because there are many direct flights from Canada, but mostly because we have friends there. Bob and Hilde are US folk that we met while they were up cruising in our part of the world. We have visited them in their home in Clearwater for a holiday and they were kind enought o show us enough of the area to whet our appetites for more.

The really great news is that Bob has uncovered a spot where we can reasonably tie up without having to pay someone a couple of hundred dollars to sleep in our own bed. I have checked out the marina on the website and it looks wonderful. I just hope they have space for us when we get there. If they don' apparently they are happy with visitors anchoring and coming in to their docks by dingy.

In addition, we have a good friend from AYC, Paul, who has a condo in Clearwater that he will be visiting for Christmas and we have promised to join him for some part of the holidays. The younger Turney's know both sets of these friends and are looking forward to the visit almost as much as we are. The only fly in the ointment is the small matter that our son, Chris, is one of the junior corrections officer at the penn where he works. This means that it is very likely that we won't be able to get Christms off. In one way this is good as he will be getting triple time pay, but bad, obviously, as he won't be with us for the big day. Kayt, on the other hand, will be getting 3 weeks so with any luck we will be able to schedule it so that Chris can fly down after New Years and there will be at least some overlap.

Keeping our fingers crossed!