We share our neighborhood with gopher tortoises. They are these large turtly looking things with massive front legs and sharp claws. They get their name because they like to dig. A lot. They can dig tunnels almost 10 feet deep and 48 feet long. Environmentalists like to note that these tunnels then provide homes for 100s of other species, I’m sure farmers would like to think of them as dinner.

Unfortunately, that’s not possible since the species is “threatened” west of the Mobile river, and is a “threatened” wannabe east of it.

After living with these creatures for the last 2 months, I can understand their survival difficulties. This is the only animal I know that when it sees me driving down the road will actually dash toward me and I end up stopping the car and moving his sorry self off to the side of the road to help avoid any carnage.

We used to have AIS (Automatic Induced Screaming) on our boat. We used the black box USB version from Milltech and hooked it to it’s own antenna and to the computer. All the ships in the vicinity would then be represented by red, yellow, or green icons right on the chart. Green meant that they were not a threat, yellow stood for “could be coming too close so keep watch “, and red was so aptly followed by the words “Collsion in x minutes!”

The only time we had a red ship on the screen it was really unnecessary for the AIS to yell at us. The behemoth had his horn blaring as we stared at his red and green lights inches from our bow. (Well, not really that close, but you get the idea. Scary close.)

This winter the AIS crapped out on us. It said that I was connected, but when I could see a ship cruising 1/4 mile off our beam and the instrument couldn’t , there’s a problem.

Another messed up electronic this winter was the VHF radio. We could hear people just fine, but they complained that we sounded muffled. Probably explains why the big boat who was determined to run us down didn’t answer our calls.

With this dual failure, I felt that we needed to get the AIS working for sure so I can at least see which boat out there is going to totally ignore us. Consequently, I’ve been doing research on getting cheap AIS on Kittywake for this winter. I don’t really feel like shelling out another two to three hundred dollars for a device that will only last a season but without it, night shifts are just a bigger pain in the butt then they already are.

AIS broadcasts on VHF channels 87B (161.975 MHz) and 88B (162.025 MHz),and requires some sort of computer program to decode the messages. I fussed and studied how I could get my charting program to speak to my portable SSB radio receiver or the VHF and give me the data for free. After all, Fugawi can interpret AIS signals and display them on the chart already. All this sent my eyes into a fixed cross eyed configuration and I felt for sure I was going to end up buying another stupid black box from Milltech.

Until I saw a little something on Amazon, that bastion of all things worth owning. Yes, Standard Horizon makes a VHF radio with integrated AIS. Too cool.

It even has a DSC button that if my boat is in trouble, I can pick one of the big ships on my screen to send an emergency message to so they know I need help. Oh, and I almost forgot – it’ll blast your ears off with it’s built in loud hailer.

So I think Standard Horizon it is for this winter.

In 2009 we bought an Iridium 9505A phone on ebay. It was pretty cheap plus came with 400 minutes. The clincher was the minutes would expire in June. It was May. In order to not lose those minutes, we had to either a) subscribe to a monthly plan which cost $60/month and we got 10 minutes each month, or b) purchase another package of 500 minutes for $700.

We picked option b. Except in 2010 the same thing happened again. We had a boatload of minutes left that would expire.

Now what? I balked at spending another $700 since the phone hadn’t really proved it’s usefulness yet. So we went this time with option a and shelled out $60 monthly to keep from losing our stockpiled 900 minutes.

This spring in the Bahamas we put the phone to the test. We used it almost every other day to get the grib files. That is, until I got this nice notice from All Road Communication that we now owed them $150 for going over our minutes.

WHAT!!! In two months we had burned through 15 hours of satellite time. How could that be? I knew it was taking a while for Jeff to get the gribs because he kept getting disconnected. What I didn’t realize was that the charges just kept accruing while he was redialing.

Iridium works off from 60 low lying satellites. They are constantly rotating and theoretically the phone can only be latched onto any one satellite for 4 to 15 minutes before it will disconnect and pick up the next one. That’s okay for voice, you don’t really notice the glitch, but with data, the stream stops and when the computer fixes onto the next satellite it starts downloading the package all over again. On a moving boat this can use up a lot of (expensive) time.

When we got to Florida, I paid my bill and turned off the phone service. Something needed to change. I don’t feel that Iridium was the right choice for us, but I don’t want to go through the expense of an SSB radio with modem either in order to get the weather data that we like.

So now I’m looking at the new ISat phones from Inmarsat which work off from 11 higher level satellites. In theory, the chance of dropping the data call should be less.

Does anyone have experience with one of these phones?

Did you ever feel like you made a great decision, only to find out that it came with horrible consequences? Like having a baby. What could be bad about that? Until the contractions start and the realization hits that this huge object has only one way of exiting.

Well, yesterday I met my waterloo. I’ve been forcing myself every day to sit in the passenger seat while Lisa practices driving. For hours. I’ve even managed to go to my own little mental “safe house” so I can avoid long term drug therapy from the stress of it all.

She actually does quite well and the “OMG we’re going to die!!!” moments happened less and less. In fact she got so good that she signed up to take the road test. And passed.

Relief flooded over me. I was actually kind of giddy that I finally was successful in getting this boat kid licensed not only to drive a car, but also a motorcycle. I was really looking forward to being back in charge of the vehicle and not sharing the driving seat anymore.

And then I had that epiphany, that moment when I realized the terrible mistake I just made. We ran out of milk, I was tired and told everyone to wait until tomorrow. This child of mine declared, “I have a license. I’ll go get it.”

Pure hell.

The latest edition of Boat US electronic magazine mentions various “alien” fish that we should be sure to eat.

I was glad to see that they included the Lionfish. Every little coral outcropping we snorkeled at contained at least one of these beautiful fish. Unfortunately, these guys have been cited as eating the baby lobsters and grouper that are important in the economy of both the Keys and the Bahamas. And they have no known predators.

Every time we saw one, Jeff would get his spear and nab it. He kept it dangling from the spear until he could get on board, then, using a pair of scissors, he’d snip off the spines. Once those are gone, the fish is no longer poisonous.

The flesh of the Lionfish is white and firm. We’d dip it in flour that had spices and salt mixed in, then drag it through a beaten egg before flipping it into the frying pan. The girls loved it.

So, please, if you see one of these fish while swimming, be sure to consider it as a delicious meal instead of an alien.

I know Jeff alluded to this is an earlier post, but the Kindle is great for traveling. And I’m not talking about reading books.

Amazon fitted it with 3G for the purpose of transmitting books to the device without being connected to wifi or a computer. But they also put a basic web browser in the Kindle which we’ve been able to use in the Bahamas without any problems, and for free.

I’m not sure why, but we seemed to anchor out in the boonies for the majority of the time. That was where the pretty beaches and snorkeling areas were. The other boats were all anchored by the towns. Rarely did we have someone as a neighbor for the night.

Being out of touch wasn’t a problem, though, as we could still get our email and check the weather from the Kindle since there always seemed to be a Batelco tower nearby even though we might not be able to see it.

So now Jeff went and bought his own Kindle for this winter to use as his own personal web browser.

Maybe I can get him to actually read a book on it.

My baby boy got married today. Too cool.

We’re headed to Michigan for my #3 sons wedding so decided to bring along a load of stuff from Kittywake for storage in our barn.

Not that she’s fat or anything, but it would be good for her to lose a few pounds. We were noticing a decrease in speed that was getting irritating. A year ago, I’d get upset if we weren’t averaging 6 knots, this year our average was around 4. Marked difference.

Granted, there was so little wind during this voyage that we were often going knot for knot with the wind speed indicator, but still, I want speed. We didn’t hit the 8′s and 9′s until the ICW between St Andrews Bay and Pensacola. That’s pitiful.

When we left Marathon in March, we were powered by the old Johnson 50hp 2 stroke on the starboard, and the Yanmar D27 on the port. We had originally sold the Yanmar on Ebay and bought a used 15hp Honda to replace it. The diesel deal had it’s problems though. The purchaser didn’t pay, and didn’t pay, and didn’t pay…Every time we tried to call off the deal, he or his son would plead for a little more time. Three weeks passed and we get an email from the son telling us that his dad (the winning bidder) had passed away. Guess that this motor was his last dream purchase and they were clinging to the hope as long as possible. So…Jeff decided to keep the diesel and go with it.

After much prop adjusting, the motors did pretty good until the Johnson threw out it’s lower unit in Nassau. We hauled it up through the cockpit seat, dropped in the Honda, and in a hour were ready to go.

So now, we have the diesel and the Honda. The Johnson is happily esconced somewhere in Black Point, Bahamas basking in the sun and being used as a training tool.

The diesel does great, using half a gallon of fuel per hour and pushing us around 4 knots. The Honda actually can move us faster at 5 or 6 knots, but consumes a gallon an hour at those speeds. The other problem is the Honda has a tiller so any adjustments in speed have to be done hanging upside down from the cockpit seat.

That will get adjusted this summer .

A couple years ago I bought the Navionics Caribbean SD card to use with the Fugawi charting system on my laptop. I thought it was a deal. For $175 I got coverage of the the East Coast of Central America as well as the Bahamas and islands all the way down to Venezuela. Well, it wasn’t such a great deal. In the Exumas we had quite a few instances where the paper charts were showing coral heads and shallows, and Navionics just told us to sail on through. Since we could see the big black spots in the water, we pointedly ignored their crappy advice.

This winter we would like to sail in some of those elusive areas that I don’t have paper charts for, and now I’m back at square one with which map source to go with.

This is what Navionics chart looks like for the Windward Passage. Notice the lack of depth info around Cuba. And the traffic separation area is just one big blob – it doesn’t show the north or south bound lanes.

This is the same area as depicted on the GSA charts that are available freely online for planning purposes. These charts are really good at showing depths and the separation scheme.