Andy the Electrician

Radio setup at our Navigation Station

I was trying to decide what to write about when Andy started losing his mind over our radio.  Which radio?  This time it was our radio we use to plug our ipods into.  Jake was wiggling the cord one day to get it to “work” and the end of it snapped off into the radio.  It worked for a little while if we stuck the broken piece in and wiggled it this way and that but eventually, it stopped working all together.  Overall, not a must have item for crossing the ocean, but it sure is really nice to have.

We’ve had lots of radio problems this year, the past few weeks in particular.   First we ordered some cables to help us hook our SSB radio up to our modem and computer so we can get weather faxes and send/receive email.  Well, the cables didn’t come in time (before I left CA), despite paying for 2 day shipping so we had to find them here in Mexico.  In addition to that, we were having trouble getting people to hear us on our BRAND NEW SSB.  We called a local radio guy over and not only did he have the cables but he fixed our tuning problem too.  Technically, I think Andy fixed it the day before, but Rob was able to make a few tweaks to our settings to get everything working together.  (Anyone in PV looking for radio help, call Radio Rob on VHF22 – great guy)  Needless to say, I’m thrilled as we’ve never had our email working and we’ve sounded fuzzy on the radio nets for the last 8 months.

Seriously?

When I came back from CA I brought a new hand held VHF because ours was crap.  As soon as we had that up and running, our main VHF radio decided to quit working.  After many hours of trouble shooting, two trips up the mast to install a new antennae and a few cocktail hours getting ideas from others, Andy finally decided the problem was in the wires leading from the mike to the radio.  Well, they don’t sell those separately.  The only way to replace that is to replace the radio.  So we have one on the way from LA where a fellow boater is flying in from next week.  But today, Andy got ambitious, took ours apart and now it’s fixed!  At the very least, we have a spare.

As I write this, he took the drill to our music radio as he announced he knew exactly what he was doing and well, lo and behold, we have a working radio!

He’s very close to adding electrician to his resume.  He’s even starting to fix things that aren’t broken (like our autopilot).  We have a hard drive that won’t power up…let’s see what he can do with that.

Watching movies aboard Savannah

We really have to come up with a different plan.  This is what it looks like to watch a movie on our boat.  Actually, this is one of the configurations.
For those movies that we brought with us, they plug in nicely to Jake's little DVD player and hook up the traditional way to our TV.  For those movies we've bought in Mexico, until San Carlos, they had to be played through our laptop because they're from a different "region" and Jake's DVD player won't play them.  We bought a new DVD player in San Carlos, hoping to fix these problems and now we can play our mexican DVD's but not our US DVDs (we still have to use Jake's DVD player).
Next we introduce a whole new problem.  We have some DVDs on a hard drive a friend gave us.  Those can only be played through our MAC laptop, for which we had to get a new cord to connect to the TV (previously, we had to copy a movie onto a flash drive, then play through our other laptop).  But we don't have just one hard drive, we have two.  The second one has AVI files that we are unable to read altogether until we download the latest version of our movie player.
Regardless of the configuration, we have to pull out the cables, plug it all in, get the generator out and started (or turn on the inverter), every single time.  We can't just leave it out due to lack of space and the fact that it drives me batty.
It seems like a trivial problem, just buy the right cables, download the right software and boom, there you go.  But as I've said before, nothing's as easy as it seems.  We're working on it though, I don't mean to sound like I'm whining, but we don't get to watch "TV" in the traditional sense so movies can become pretty important.  Particularly when we cross the pacific... I figure 5 movies a day for 30 days...Jake should be good :).  For all of you mom's out there who just had a heart attack, calm down, I'm kidding.... sort of.