November 2008: More equipment before departure

I spent the second half of November installing a few more items before our departure. The first item was a single sideband radio that will allow us to have long range communication with other vessels at sea, get weather reports, and also chat with other cruisers on "nets". These "nets" are a great way to gain knowledge about cruising grounds, ports of entry and other basic information about the cruising life from other people that are out there cruising.

There was a radio to install, antenna that will be mounted to the back stay (the wire that supports the mast from falling forward), a antenna tuner that needed to be near the antenna at the back of the boat as well as a ground plate that would have to be mounted on the bottom of the hull. After lots of research and reading I decided to try and install the unit myself........

This is me trying to figure out what I have gotten myself into as well as the final installation of the antenna tuner underneath the aft cabin bed.

This is the radio installed at the navigation station. After a week of running wires throughout the boat, the radio was finally installed and we talked to people here in Marathon as far away as New York, North Carolina and a couple of people already in the Caribbean!

The second project I worked on was to make our hatches more secure. Since we will not have the luxury of AC all the time in the islands, as we do now in our slip in Marathon, our hatches will be open most of the time. To prevent the unlikely intruder from just slipping down a hatch in our boat I designed some bars to go in the openings. Each bar has locks on it that are keyed the same and the keys are hung in each cabin, just in case someone from inside needed to escape in a emergency.

The image to the left is the new hatch bars in the salon hatches. The right photo is the bars in the v-berth......Skip you will now be safe when you come to visit!