A Lucky Swap’N’Go

“Use it or loose it” is a common enough saying but when it comes it plays out in wicked ways. Leaving the boat unattended in a marina is asking for trouble so returning from a month away visiting the family on both sides of the continent (by plane) left us very exposed. What woukd we discover this time?

OK so the front heads looked like the joker valve may have been a bit leaky. We’ll swap it out with a spare to stop ‘back leakage’. On the face of it, Zofia was pretty clean. The waterline couldn’t be described as a scum line. Topsides weren’t covered in bird poop. So far so good. 

Waiting first pick-up with Coles crossed off the list.

A day spent re-provisioning with the help of cruising friends George and Gail (SV Southern Belle) saw an efficient conversion of $1,000 to a pile of goods. 

Now to stow it all away - groan!

We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. We planed to cast off the lines on Wednesday after a water top up and last minute wash. Fuel could be obtained at RMYC en route to Coasters retreat. Phew, how good would that be?

The Bloke fired up the motor. Looking good. Switching on the navigation equipment however delivered a different message. “Computer says NO!” Our Raymarine C80 Chartplotter has been a bit temperamental, occasionally displaying white lines and ‘snow’. No amount of rubbing, squeezing or blowing with compressed air would make a difference. B U G G E R! We’ve already costed the replacement of our original and ‘now superseded’ system. I’ll say it fast ~ $15K . Youch.

It does rather pay off to get to know your neighbours. The Bloke took no time befriending Jon and Prue from a larger Jeanneau further up the jetty before we’d even abandoned Zofia to her deterioration. Over sundowners he’d learned that they were up for significant rewiring after a nearby boat took a direct lightening strike. Their own boat was in the highly charged fallout zone. A Raymarine technician was on our jetty attending to their boat at the very moment we discovered that the computer said “NO”. After obtaining permission to speak with Prue’s technician, it turns out that our C80 problem was quite common. Who knew? We could wait until next week for their electrical guy to take a look and fix ours or we could Swap’N’Go with a reconditioned one they happened to to have at the workshop. 

 

Testing all the input signals - the radar sweep in purple. 

Aquatronics took our old display back to base, transferred our waypoints and returned with the replacement. There were only a few settings to reinstate via the Presentation/Chart layers menu:-

• - Radar. ON
• - AIS layer ON
• -Baud rate adjustment for the AIS display because our AIS is a Simrad via the System setup/ System integration menu.
• NMEA port settings value = AIS 38400

Happy Days are here again. From the look of it: Job done!

You don’t get much luckier than that and $325 sounds soooo much better than $15,000. And better still, just a 2 hour turn around and we were on our way! 

Michael
Aquatronics Marine

Mobile: +61 418 441 140 

Office Tel: +61 2 9905 5655

Michael@aquatronics.com.au

www.aquatronics.com.au