As we headed north from the Saints to Deshaies, Ken uttered a curse. Our "go to" chartplotter, a 7 year pole Garmin, had gone blank. We quickly ascertained that it was still doing chartplotter things, but the display had died. Yup, curses, indeed. We still had our other one, initially bought because it could work with our AIS unit, but we really don't like it for navigating. It's is okay, but the venerable old Garmin was comfortable. Kind of like the old comfy slippers versus the new ones. Yeah, the new ones are okay, but you really wish that if the dog was going to chew on a pair, it picks on the new ones...

We checked around Antigua's offerings for boat electronics. We even hopped the bus to go to the Budget Marine main store on-island. Nobody had anything to actually look at, but Cap at "The Signal Locker" had some good info for us.

We (we being mostly Ken) spent much of the evening researching online. We wanted something that may be compatible with our current depth sounder transducer from Garmin (we like the redundancy of another form of depth sounder), and that would still "talk" to our other electronics, such as the VHF radio. We were not excited about our prospects.

Ken decided to take another harder look at the plotter to really ascertain what was wrong with it. Digging down, he found a miniscule fluorescent, a thin cold cathode fluorescent, complete with a 90 degree bend, that had died. Great, like THAT will be at Radio Shack.... But, wait, didn't Cap at "The Signal Locker" have a whole lot of "stuff" kicking around? He may have an old Garmin with the right sized screen...

He did. He didn't charge us for it immediately, as he had no idea if it worked or not, or whether would work for us. We returned home and Ken got to work. He stripped down the 5 inch LCD display and did some meticulous transplanting.

We set it all back up and Ken threw the switch....sounds more dramatic than pushed the button, doesn't it? And IT WAS...ALIVE!!!

We have bought ourselves some time to analyze the replacement chartplotter situation in greater depth, but we do know that something will have to be done eventually. Ken saved the day again!