Final Preparations

Fizzy Logic
Ciaran Geoghegan
Fri 23 Nov 2007 19:13
Well it is Friday night and we are about to head out to an ARC social event. We have had a busy few days mainly focused on provisioning the boat but doing other boat jobs: like wiring up the freezer, connecting up the earth for the SSB radio and trying to set up internet access via HF radio – therein started our troubles.
 
I connected up the kit to the radio this morning and as part of the setup I needed our Lat/Long so I asked the Ciaran to turn on the GPS. Quelle surprise: It was not working – no antenna signal. This is a piece of kit that has been working happily for 4 years without problem. We were in something of a panic. Two guys from RayMarine (Mark & Chris I think) called by at about 4.30PM and between us we took the boat apart tracing wiring. The removed all of the instrumentation and eventually found a broken connection in the cockpit. They fixed this and BINGO we were operational. Tons of thanks to the guys ant RayMarine. The have been going from boat to boat all day fixing problems. They had a long call list to attend after leaving us.

Except for vegetables we have all of our food delivered and stowed. This is 200 Litres of water, about €400 of meat the nice people in El Cort Ingles froze it and vacuum packed it for us and about €900 of other food. I managed to buy 12 Kg of flour in a local bakery so we should have fresh bread en route. Our vegetables get delivered tomorrow morning. We bought mostly unripe vegetables (Tomatoes, Mangoes, Banannas  etc ) so they should last a good while. Tomorrow we will rinse these in a mild chlorine solution to help preserve their boat life.
 
The wind is up around 30 knots as I write this,
 
More later,
 
The Fizz guys.