All systems go!

Been enjoying a few day sails lately at last !!! bit of warmth sun and wind, something magical about the first sails of the season, what’s more everything is working! Been no farther than a few times around the lake, the intrigue was would the AIS I installed in the winter actually work without some extra tweaks, and delighted to confirm I can see all the ships in the vicinity and beyond, apparently I can call them directly by selecting the list on the VHF radio, haven’t experimented with that yet though, the VHF is the Standard Horizon unit with the AIS and what I didn’t realize was you can actually set the alarm up to warn of approaching shipping, could be very handy crossing the north sea in the night, this eliminates having to run the plotter if you wanted to conserve a little power, you can also set up the alarm on the plotter to warn of ships, as it is there easy to see and the data is available should you want it.

Really I prefer to keep things fairly simple but if you have a look at the density off shipping in the Netherlands and on the North sea it’s considerably safer and re assuring if you can see the ships and more importantly they can see you, should your family want to follow your progress they can log into www.marinetraffic.com and enter the name of your boat into the seek function, and see how slow and erratic your course has  been and would automatically know to expect you a day or more later, should you wish to make any unscheduled stops not cleared with the management you better switch it off for that bit of the journey, otherwise it will be apparent exactly how long you were anchored off the Dog and Duck free house, as well as the even more erratic course line having commenced with the journey, so it’s not without its risks but on the whole a very worthwhile upgrade.

Force 6 + and one reef!

it’s either a lot of nothing it seems !

My son Thomas at the helm.

 

Now looking forward to planning a trip to Zeeland ( the south of Holland) for a holiday with my family aboard in the company of a number of friends on their boats at the end of July for a couple of weeks, it will involve passing through Amsterdam and heading out to sea via Ijmuiden and down the coast across the entrance to Rotterdam before entering the Haring Vliet for the begin of the cruise around the Delta area, never done that before so looking forward to seeing some new places and waters, shall keep you posted .