Our New Toy

Kent and I have a lot of electronics on our boat. Most are for navigation, safety and communication, and some are for entertainment. Our current electronic inventory:

Lowrance chartplotter
Raymarine radar
Raymarine chartplotter
Raymarine auto-pilot
Raymarine depthfinder and knot meter combo
Raymarine wind gauge
Raymarine AIS receiver
Furuno Navtex weather telex receiver
Navicom VHF radio
Iridium satellite phone
BadBoy wifi booster
4 solar panels
2 laptops
2 iPads
3 cellphones
2 Kindles
UE wireless speaker
AM/FM radio/CD player

Our newest addition is the Lowrance chartplotter. As of today, we now have a chartplotter at the helm as well as on the navigation table inside.

Here it is. Kent installed it himself, of course.

Have to have all the right tools...

"Paula, quick, hand me the wire cutters!"

"Let's see. Blue is black. Blue is black. That's the ground wire, right?"

"Paula, turn on the electronic switch on the nav table. OK, now turn on the auto-pilot. OK, now turn off the auto-pilot. OK, now turn off the electronics. OK, turn on the electronics. Turn on the auto-pilot. OK..."  

"Easier than it looked! The hardest part was getting out of the engine room."

A new toy to play with now :-)

Many of you have asked if we have internet and TV on the boat. Our BadBay wifi booster picks up wifi signals within a five-mile radius of our boat, but there isn't always an unsecured, free signal out there. Sometimes we pay for wifi if we need to. But we don't have TV. If we have wifi, we watch shows on Netflix. If we decide we want TV, we would need to invest several thousand dollars in a "mobile dish." Our neighbors from Texas, anchored next to us in St Thomas Harbor, have TV. Their mobile dish is that big white ball on their stern.

We'd love to have TV, but we'll skip the investment for now. 

So, far, we're doing just fine watching our favorite show, Lilyhammer, on my iPad!