Electronics..

AIS going up and down the shore so far has been pretty darn good. I'm receiving coordinates from ships as far away as 30nm right now up there in New York. So far unlike the bay I haven't seen wrong information passed as of yet and maybe the additional scrutiny of going through a controlled port like NY is what does that. What does bug me though is that almost none of the big commercial fishing boats had AIS, it would be nice to know that info when going out and maybe get info like in the act of fishing whatever. I did see so far 3 sailboats with AIS, one big old boat I mentioned earlier and one 34 and the other 50 ft sailboats. It's probably a wise idea with some of the commercial fleet going up and down the coast and since it seems that many of the sailboats pull all nighters.

So far my combination of Furuno(GPS Plotter/Radar) and Simrad autopilot are great. I do wish you could select a AIS target on the plotter and not have to be looking at radar overlay or radar. Another item on my wish list is that the radio get populated of the MMSI info and name from the AIS, it's nothing but a sentence string and just makes sense.

I'll probably eventually add Max Sea software on a laptop and connect it in. I think the benefits will be higher resolution then the current VGA quality I currently have with the black box solution, it shares EVERYTHING with the Furuno(course, fish finder, radar, etc), and you get a really fast redraw rate.

It seems as though the wish list is growing for Satelite radio and TV. It's nice to read out here and all, but you do begin to feel a bit disconnected. We have now stopped at two marinas and both offered cable that just didn't work.

Well thats it for now..

John

40 18.2971n
73 56.9536w
8.8 knots at 1800 rpm's
Seas 2 to 3 ft, waves from the south rollers..