Wednesday, November 19, 2008

For the last couple of weekends, I've been trying to get the boat in shape to take it to Two Way to have it hauled and the bottom painted, a much needed procedure.  

I've noticed that the temp gauge has not been really accurate since I've owned the boat.  Since it has (had) a white face, and all the other gauges have black faces, I reasoned that it was a replacement and maybe the sending unit and meter were not a matched pair.  So I replaced both.

In fiddling around in the narrow space in the pedestal I apparently dislodged a wire going to the oil pressure gauge.  When I turned the ignition swich on, the oil pressure  gauge went to full scale and stuck there.  I found the ground lead of that meter had rotted off.  

So I pulled that one out and found the internals of the gauge were pretty much trashed too.  Time for a new oil pressure gauge.  I tried to get the sending unit out of the block but that wasn't to be. It's rusted in permanently.  I bought a gauge hoping that the the sending unit was  a standard unit, and for a change I was pleasantly surprised.  

I now had a working oil pressure gauge and a working water temp gauge, or so I thought.

Down a few slips from me, I met Ty Goode.  I hope I spelled his name right.  He was restoring a 27' catalina that had been neglected for years.  His plan was to sail it to the Keys for Thanksgiving.  I traded him some advice and work for helping me get Wind Angel to Two Way.  A friend of his, Mark, blew into town a couple of days after Ty and I met and was helping him.  They were going to travel together.  

I cleaned up the boat a bit and had Steve clean the prop so I could actually propel the boat through the water and we set off about 0800 Tuesday.  We had earlier shuttled a car to Two Way for the return trip.  

This was probably the most uneventful trip I've taken.  Other than the newly installed temp gauge not working, we steamed up the ICW and S. Altamaha river without a hitch.

Last summer I purchased the DVD from freenavcharts.com after multiple unsuccessful attempts to download the NOAA free charts. I've never been on the water since then to check them out. I also downloaded the SeaClear (http://www.sping.com/seaclear/) navigation software and installed it on the laptop. I connected my Garmin GPS-72 and it just worked. Amazing, but it all works quite well. It has none of the fancy 3D stuff that some more advanced solutions (hardware and software) have but it's quite affordable.

Next week I hope take her back to St. Simons.