The postman

Now I used to hate the post man, all he brought to me was bills and junk mail, never anything interesting or fun, but this week has been different, my chartplotter arrived, a little garmin gpsmap 451, today came the satellite phone, an inmarsat isatphone pro (bit of a mouth full there) and finally came most of the bits to do the bimini solar install (now that part is not going to be fun!).

On a side note, the little garmin draws virtually no power at all, less than 1/4 amp with the screen dulled down and about 0.8 amp at full brightness, food for thought Most of the power is consumed by the screen, so when you are admiring those large screen chart plotters, just think how much more power that screen is going to consume.

The laptop as a 24/7 chartplotter just consumes way too much power, now I would have been miserable and never bought a charplotter really due to the over priced charts, they are fine if you stick to local waters and only need one chart, but for going distances, deep pockets are required or some ingenuity... Pirate em ;) arrghh me harties!

I've never liked shopping much and ordering everything online is so much less time consuming , avoids all the queues and traffic and usually is far cheaper!

Plus recently its been feeling like Christmas every week, new prezzies/toys arriving, just a pity I had to buy them all myself!

The list of to do tasks to the boat is finally becoming fairly small, we sorted the mast head cable for the vhf antenna (this was lost down the mast on the delivery journey, shoddy riggers never tightened it up properly and it fell off in an f8 so no one volunteered to go up the mast to rescue it, eventually it chaffed through and was lost to the drink).

The garmin has been fitted and linked up to the standard horizon 2100e vhf with ais, all very painless, well apart from routing the cable to link the two, the ais on the standard horizon is useable but needs a gps feed from the plotter, the ais display on the little garmin is great, im sure you can use the dsc from the garmin but not sure how, more to be learned, I will write a little post on the gps/vhf/ais soon with some pics.

So whats left? fit the water maker, been leaving this till near leaving time as it is pickled and once I unpickle it  I need to either use it regularly or pickle it again, all at cost. The solar panels and regulator still have to get fitted to the bimini, the life raft cradle to be mounted, its currently taking up much needed locker space. Ah yes fix the gas pipe in a proper manner for the stove, its kinda kinked just now as the fitting was in a completely different place from the last one and for sure it will chafe through very quickly unless I add some extra pipe and a bend.

I have been toying with a cruising chute, but to be honest I really cannot justify the expense, for the limited use it will get I think extra diesel and jerry cans is going to be a far cheaper option, yes I know it's not sailing, but budgets are limited. I will leave this on the lets see how well the budget does and if I really feel the need for it later list.

I'm sure there are a few things i have missed.....

Great little unit!

In case of emergency!

It will run off the little Honda eu20i no problem

Memory foam for a better nights sleep!! I hope!