May 13, 2008.

Well, there’s big news. Ours friends on Packet Inn left this morning and later in the day Solitaire arrived in port bringing Nancy and Jim back into our lives. While that was nice, it’s not really the BIG news.

The big news is that the refrigeration guy was here this morning and it seems that our system was just low on refrigerant. The last time it was filled was 8 years ago so it may just be a slow leak (thinking positively). If it proves to be a quicker leak it may signal the purchase of a new refrigeration system in our immediate future. So after the technician was done I loaded him and all his stuff into the dink and took him over to the Hearts Desire as they were also having a problem with their fridge.

So with the refrigeration problems in the rearview mirror we’ve made a couple of trips into town hitting more stores than I remembered being here. We hit the local dive shop and we were able to pick up a pair of spear points. Now we’ll be ready to once again assume the role of hunter/gatherers when we get back to the Bahamas. After we bought shoes, shorts and a few reference books we felt ready to once again head back to the boat.

We've been here for about a week since I wrote the above. We’ve been to dinner with friends a few times. Enjoyed a few happy hours and received several things that we ordered in the mail including our new AIS receiver.

AIS (Automatic Identification System) is a technological miracle in a box. Its just a pair of tiny boxes that you wire to your VHF radio and your chartplotter. The AIS utilizes your VHF radio antenna to receive packets of information that large commercial ships are required to constantly transmit. This information includes the name of the vessel, his exact position, whether he's at anchor or underway, his speed, course and destination. The information comes in a burst transmission that takes a nano-second with no interruption in your VHF reception. It appears in text form on your chart plotters screen.

So the AIS “sees” a vessel by using your VHF antenna and displays him as a target on your chartplotter. So now if we see a large ship at night we can call him by name if the need arises. No more exchanges such as “large scary dumpster at approximate position blah, blah, blah please don’t run us over”.

When we crossed from the Bahamas, once again it was pitch dark with no moon. We were tracking up to 8 vessels on our radar trying to determine who was going where and how fast. With the new AIS at least 4 of those vessels would have been sending us their speed and heading info along with their name in the event we might have needed to contact them. AIS should take a lot of the stress out of traveling at night. It can also detect a ship behind an island, behind headlands or around the corner in an inlet, places where radar just can’t help.


Another big advantage is that since it uses VHF as its receiving medium we can see ships long before they’re visible on radar. Our radar is great but it can only see about 16 miles, the AIS can easily see twice that distance.

Its funny how you keep running into friends as you leap frog from place to place. In the last week we’ve said good bye to the crews from Packet Inn, Solitaire, Sapphire and Hearts Desire as they’ve individually left and started heading north. We’ll be underway tomorrow and had the chance to say so long to Scandia who just arrived in Vero this evening.

So we’ll hit the fuel dock in the morning to pump out our holding tank and top off the water tank. Our insurance policy forces us to be north of Savannah, Georgia before the June first beginning of hurricane season. So it’s out the Fort Pierce Inlet and pretty much north for 165 miles to Saint Augustine. If we stay inside and make the trip up the ICW it will take 4 days to get there. If we go outside on Saturday morning we should be there by noon or so on Sunday. Another plus is that by going outside we can still move north without dealing with the weekend ICW buffoons. After that we only have to make 2 jumps of 80 and 90 miles to reach South Carolina. So we should make the deadline and still have the ability to sit out bad weather. We’ll see how it works out………

Cruisers Dictionary entry:

Touron- It’s a combination of the words “tourist” and “moron”. Kind of self explanatory, very descriptive and yet not too vulgar. A delightful word.