Sure enough Sylvia called on Monday to tell us our part was in and would we be available Tuesday for the install. We opted not to break India's groomer appointment and scheduled it for today. We drove up with another load of stuff last night and celebrated the Captains 65th birthday with prime rib cooked on board.
Josh arrived mid morning with the part and began the repair. It took him a couple of hours to get the new connector in place and complete the wiring. The autopilot can now communicate with the chart plotter and should we choose we could have it auto navigate to a route. I doubt we would do that unless we are out at sea during the day with no traffic in sight. It does help the radar overlay to point in the right direction for our heading. The radar array uses the flux gate compass that is part of the autopilot. With everything working and playing well together Josh gave us a brief tutorial and said his good byes, and was off to his next task. He is definitely an asset to the RJ Marine team. I played with the new toy a bit and we headed off to Stuart to pick up our rental car. We have a mid size car reserved for 3 days, This should give us enough space to load up the remaining things to go aboard from the condo.
The rental guy could not have been nicer we had a 2016 Hyndai Elantra with fold down rear seats and what seems to me to be a cavernous trunk. We went through Triple A to rent the car and got a great discount, in addition we could add Scott as a driver for no extra charge, and they will fuel it for us at 1.85 a gallon. We can't beat that price so we signed on for that too. Cool. The car drives like a tank but then we are used to a two seat Miata. LOL I drove the rental to the condo while Scott brought the Miata back. Tomorrow we will clean the Miata and put her to bed for the winter. It's getting close to shove off time.
See that black squarish thing in the middle of the photo, that is the part we waited for so long. Inside it there are screws which connect the NEMA 0183 interface between the autopilot and the chart plotter so they can talk to each other. Looks innocent but its not you know what they say about those details.