20/05/10

We were blest with Sun ALL day!.  Last night I sent an SOS to my New Zealand Electronics guru who did the updating of the boats systems and got back an extremely helpful reply.   All I had to do was to assign a different baud rate for the NEMA port to get the AIS back and the heading vector was simply hidden under some buttons I hadn’t quite understood.  This all happened because I did a factory reset on all the gear, tomorrow will be the proof in the proverbial pudding but it looks like  everything’s back to normal.  I even managed to upload navigation routes from the  PC with no problems and that hasn’t happened for months. 

This morning was for laundry and taking on 150 gallons of diesel and general pottering about.

I tried to top up my US cell phone both by texting and on line and gave up in the end because if you haven’t got an American Postal code you can’t pay.  They accept an English address but  no way an English Zip code.  St Michael’s is such a small and sleepy place there are no mobile  phone support services at all.  It’s a toy town really, with lots of tiny houses apart from the  big mansions on the seafront. Steve thinks its the town in “The Truman Show.”

This afternoon I wandered over to the Maritime Museum which contained a working boat yard for small craft, lots of historical boats used in the bay and a complete wonderful lighthouse which had been moved from its place on a reef 5 miles from land and was furnished exactly as it had been when occupied by a keeper and his family.

Tomorrow we’re off to Annapolis for the weekend. It’s only a 30 mile run so we’ll be in early afternoon.  I’ll attach a few snaps from today’s wander in two batches.