It’s funny how one thing leads to another and you start pulling the thread and everything falls apart.
I follow two broad rules: “picking it will only make it worse” and “it’s not going to get more broken if it’s already broken”, and I interchange them as I see fit. In this case, however, I had to make up a new rule: “It’s not quite broken, so let’s pick at it and make it worse — but not so much that it actually gets broken".
Yesterday we noticed the AIS screen on one of the instruments said “No AIS”, which was a bit of a head scratcher as it had been working a few days ago — we had seen traffic, so we knew it was working.
A bit of troubleshooting showed all the wiring was good, but the AIS wasn’t showing on the network menu of the chart plotter. Something must have happened when we reset the chart plotter, and this was the thread that started to get pulled.
It ended up with us having to stack the small stools from the saloon on top of each other and climb 3.5 meters into the roof cavity behind the helm. We then had to remove the AIS, undo all the wiring, mount the AIS on the other side of the panel so we could see what lights were coming on, rewire it, install an extra GPS antenna because apparently the two the system already has aren’t enough, add an additional power cable from the stereo and, boom, we instantly saw two yachts behind us.
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| 1 of the stools used to climb into the roof. |
So part of the issue was that it wasn’t getting enough power. It would come on in port and we would see all the traffic, but by the time we got out to sea, where there was no traffic, it would essentially run out of juice. And of course we didn’t notice because there wasn’t any traffic for us not to see!
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| Crew pulling threads |
We averaged 151 nm yesterday and, while the weather remains gloomy, the breeze gave us a good push towards our destination. The sea also settled down and we had a pretty comfortable ride, which also made climbing into the roof cavity slightly less ridiculous.
We had to put one engine on shortly after sunset as the breeze wasn’t giving us quite the push we need to get to Port Vila, which is 249 nm away, in time to clear in and leave on Saturday. Plus we are hoping to creep ahead of the other yachts as they must be heading to Port Vila and I am pretty sure the authorities are going to struggle to clear in 3 boats on the same day. So they are in for a big disappointment when I tell them I want to clear out at the same time.