WOW! It's been awhile since I wrote that. Anyway, here's what happened since. So we continued east from Houma. The knotlog is erratic which I think is due to age of the instrument. The depthfinder is always erratic. We have always cussed it because it goes offline whenever it feels like. It would show us 2 feet of water when we are in fact sailing in a channel dredged to 35 feet. I have a fishing rod set up with a cork and a weight so I can cast ahead of the boat to check if the depth is above or below 5 feet. The anemometer has been repaired twice already and is showing speed but not direction. So we decided to replace the entire instrument group.
Garmin and I have a love-hate relationship. They love my money and I hate their customer service and their lack of support for their products. "Oh, you don't have our new $10,000 chartplotter? Sorry, we can't help you." "You need a new map for your car GPS. It's $65 and it won't fit on your GPS and we won't refund your money, either." So I looked elsewhere for my new chartplotter. And at West Marine, I found a B&G Vulcan 7 with an instrument package and WIFI. And I ordered it to be delivered to the house so I could get familiar with the system. The WIFI allows us to place the chartplotter inside the boat and use an Ipad in the cockpit to duplicate and control the chartplotter.
I waited for the system to arrive but instead I got an e-mail from West Marine saying my order had been cancelled. So I called WM to find out WTF? The system has been removed from WM. What was in the stores is all that is left. So I called around and found a system in Clearwater FL. I called the Pensacola store and had them arrange for the system to be shipped to them as they were closer to the boat than anyone else.
So the system arrives in Pensacola and I pick it up from the store. Two boxes. Ok. One box has the display and the other box is big enough for the anemometer and the DST sensor. DST is Depth, Speed and Temperature. So I'm fat, dumb and happy and go back to the boat. The next morning I open the anemometer box and that's all that is in the box. No DST, no mast cable for the anemometer and no N2K nmea backbone. So I call the WM store back and the manager at the Pensacola store takes all the information about what I received and calls the manufacturer about what I was supposed to receive. Bryan calls me back and gives me a list of what I should have found in the box and that the manufacturer is shipping the missing items out today.
So the missing parts arrive and with them is a new thru hull with a flapper. Hmmm. Well, the bottom paint on the boat is bad so the Admiral and I decide to kill two birds with one stone. We get the boat hauled and have the thru hull replaced and the bottom paint applied. We also pulled the old instrument heads out of the cockpit and had the holes glassed over. We splashed the boat and put her in her slip.
A friend of mine had a new anemometer installed on his boat and it only cost him $150 to put the masthead unit up. I think this is a great deal because it means I don't have to climb the mast. So I get the riggers to come over and install my anemometer and they quote me the same price. So let's go. I've disconnected the old wind instrument wiring from the base of the mast and laid in the N2K backbone to the junction area so all the riggers need to do is pull the wire. So they pull the wire up with a messenger line attached. The guy at the top of the mast yells down that the wire won't come out the hole because there was some cloth cover on the wiring. So they pull the wire down the mast and there is a cloth cover on the wiring here, too. The riggers fiddle with this for a while then call it a day.
The next day the riggers decide to do the replacement VHF antenna first. My old antenna was falling apart and rusty chunks were hitting the deck.
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Old VHF Antenna.jpg [ 2.04 MB | Viewed 0 times ] When they pulled the antenna cable, they found that the hole for the cable had been drilled in the wrong spot first. The first attempt hit the internal support for the mast sheaves and there was a small hole in the center of the mast. So the riggers pulled the anemometer messenger up the small hole which allowed them to widen the hole for the anemometer wiring. They could then pull the messenger line back to the original hole and pull the old wiring completely out. What they removed was a manual cable splice with clothbacked electrical tape covering the splice. This splice was inside mast and completely hidden from view.
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Anemometer Splice.jpg [ 1.19 MB | Viewed 0 times ] The riggers finally got the VHF antenna and new cable and the anemometer installed. And it only cost me $900 but not my marriage. I really was glad that we had the riggers do the job because I would have gotten really really frustrated trying to figure out the splice in the mast. But we fired up the system and it recognized the DST and the anemometer and we were ready to go.
Since then, we have used the new chartplotter to make several trips and the Admiral is quite happy with it. She especially appreciates that the depthfinder always reads the depth.