Any project that requires EIGHT holes to be drilled through the hull deserves the term BIG.  And so it was that my good friend Jon Eberly and I spent last Sunday installing the new Monitor Wind Vane on Charisma.I have to say that while the project was a bit intimidating, the instructions provided by Monitor are/were excellent.  The main thing that made this an all day project instead of just a couple hours was the fact that we checked, double-checked, and triple-checked each and every hole to make sure it didn’t go somewhere it shouldn’t.  The total time to hang the vane: about 5 hours.  We started at 9:30, with an hour for lunch, and we finished “hanging” the vane at about 3:30.  Another hour or so the next day putting the wheel adaptor on, leading the steering lines and attaching a double-turning block to lead them to the wheel and it was done.   (OK, it wasn’t quite that easy; I torqued the head off one of the bolts and had to back the stub out of the vane mechanism and put in a new one before we could finish).  Here’s a couple pics of us hanging the mechanism and getting it bolted to the boat.  The first one shows the use of the spinny pole to help hang it while were squaring it to the boat and drilling the holes.  The second shows the final “at the dock” install.                                  The Monitor install guide has lots of caveats about giving yourself time to learn how to trim the boat correctly to use the vane.  They say to give yourself a couple weeks or more to learn how to use it, so I was worried that sailing with it wouldn’t be so easy.   However, it worked like a charm first time out.  Aim the boat, set the wind-vane, lock the wheel; that’s it!  If it’s not exactly going where you want, there’s a fine adjustment where you can rotate the vane (see the picture below) to adjust the final wind angle.  Great stuff.                                  At the end of the day, the install was easy.  Monitor is a great company and very helpful with any questions you might have and very supportive.  Best of all; it’s really fun to sail with the vane.  You do have to trim the boat properly, but once you do and you set the vane, you now have a whole new sailing experience ahead of you.  And you don’t have to worry about amp/hours! Many thanks to Geoff Byrne for many of these pics (he took the good ones).  He is an excellent photographer and was gracious enough to let me use his pictures of our first day sailing with the Monitor.  If you like great photography, I encourage you to go see his work at www. gmbyrne.com.  Thanks Geoff!   

Well, almost.  Can’t quite see through physical objects, but now we CAN see through the fog.  RADAR!   (Specifically, it’s the Furuno 1723 C/NT    We now have a radar system for Charisma.  Also, as long as we made the fairly significant effort to put in the radar, we added GPS and AIS to the mix (all Furuno).  The bonus is that all three overlay on a single 7 inch chartplotter display.  Very cool to be able to see the GPS depiction of where you are–which we’re all fairly used to at this point–but in addition see an overlay to the chart of where radar says you are along with the “blips” that depict “returns” (boats) moving across the screen.  Again, something that’s been around, but only fairly recently available as an integrated image on the same screen (overlay).  The new addition though is to have the AIS display showing large ships (generally over 100 tons like ferries, tankers, freighters and the like) along with their name, course, speed, MMIS frequency so you can hail them on VHF by name, and much more.   The nice thing about this feature is that it’s broadcast over VHF frequencies, so you can “see” ships 20 or 30 miles away!   The install was fairly complicated and I’m glad I had it done at a boatyard.  Pulling the radar cable down the mast requires the mast to be unstepped.  This meant the radar cable had to be cut as the plug wouldn’t fit in the mast conduit and then re-wired via a junction box where 12 very tiny wires had to be connected and again the same 12 wires had to be attached to the plug at the chartplotter end.  Not too difficult but tedious and ripe for error.  Then a fluxgate compass had to be integrated into the system so the radar/gps/AIS all had the same heading data to ensure correct orientation on the chartplotter overlay.  The GPS antenna had to be run and finally an extra “add” was a switch that allows us to determine which GPS information to display at the helm (I left in the “old” Garmin 396 for backup/redundancy).  Lastly a VHF splitter so we could run the AIS on the same antenna as the VHF.The tough part of the whole set-up turned out to be the fact that the 7″ Furuno only has three ports.  One was used for the fluxgate compass input.  One for the data out to the B&G system at the helm.  One left to combine the GPS and AIS input. Problem is both of the latter two have different data transfer speeds, so integration is tricky.  In fact, we first tried a non-Furuno AIS because it was less expensive.  Wouldn’t work, so we had to opt for the more expensive Furuno proprietary solution.  As a side-note for the techies who might read this: I think it could have been “forced” to work, but it would have required dropping the baud rate on the AIS from 38,000 to 4,800 to “match” that of the GPS.  A big data transfer penalty.All the work done by KKMI in Richmond, California.  I have to give them huge kudos.  Very responsive.  Highest integrity and great to work with.  Also very proactive.  When a problem arose (the AIS integration issue), they were very quick to identify and solve.  Huge difference over other yards I’ve worked with and I highly recommend them.  They gave a detailed estimate up front and invoicing was comprehensive and accurate. Now I just have to learn how to use the damn thing.   Just look at all the new buttons to learn!