We did learn a few things on the way: GPS is not infallible; diesel and water don't mix well; and my 45 years of experience playing crib wasn't enough to keep Bonnie from beating me rather soundly.
For all you boaters out there who have thrown out their paper charts and rely solely on GPS - beware! WaveGuide had three separate, totally independent GPS systems on board, and they all failed! First, the heading sensor on my Furuno system lost its head, and would let the display chart spin around mindlessly. So I fired up my laptop and used a CMAPECS system with a hand-held GPS unit plugged into a USB port. That worked fine until I had a freshly re-charged battery "explode" in the GPS unit, burning off the battery contacts. Then we used Bonnie's Nobeltec system, which really was the best of all until the ultimate Windows "blue screen of death" appeared. The computer never booted up again after that. Fortunately, I had replaced my handheld GPS unit in Port Hardy, so we went back to my CMAPECS system. We would have been fine in any case, because we had paper charts for everywhere we went, and Bonnie is a chart wizard.
Here's Bonnie lashing down her laptop to WaveGuide's dashboard. It didn't fit in the available slot quite as nicely as my Vaio does.
Speaking of good as new, I finally retired my SSYS burgee after four years and many thousands of miles on WaveGuide. I did find a suitable resting place for it - the pig roast tent at Pierre's marina in the Broughtons.
Here's Bonnie, with Pierre himself.I've already written about my water/diesel issues, so I won't repeat the sorry episode other than to say that 99.99% of the diesel odor is out of the water. After a couple more flushes, it should be pretty much as good as new, so no long term damage was done.
I didn't have much time for reading, but I did manage to finish Waxwings, a book by Jonathan Raban. It was an entertaining, very readable book about three people and their intersecting lives in the booming dot com era of the late 90's in Seattle. All the local Seattle references made it especially interesting. I'm pretty sure that Raban used to be a smoker. One of the most memorable passages for me was when the protagonist Tom, who was under a lot of stress due to the breakup of his marriage, started smoking again after several years. This paragraph describes his second cigarette.
Wondering if a cigarette would taste differently in the open air, he discovered it did. This time, when he took the smoke deep into his lungs, trapping it inside his chest for a few seconds before exhaling, it was as if the last five years had never been, and he was back - in a feat of pure magic - to being himself again, at home after a long spell abroad. There was a fresh ripple to the landscape now, a sharpness of focus he recalled from the past, but which had eluded him through all the fog-bound years of his abstention. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter-tip, marveling at the sudden, intense lucidity that had come to him out of the blue, an unexpected gift.
I haven't smoked a cigarette in ages, but if I did, I would experience something similar, I'm sure.
Some of you have been wondering if my Himalayan adventure is still on track. Well, for reasons I won't go into here, Megan and I canceled our plans. We canceled before we spent any money, so no damage was done, and everyone is happy.
Speaking of the Far East, daughter Megan is in China right now! Yes that China. On business. She's been there all week, and will be coming back on Friday or Saturday. I'm sure she'll have a tale or two to tell.
Well, it about time I got off of here. I've got some of my world-famous ribs on the grill, and the folks I'll be sharing them with should be arriving any minute.
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