Covers and New Toys

Despite several distractions, including some work loose ends, I have still managed to be a busy-bee with the sewing machine.  It has taken several hours over 3 days but the outboard motor now has a new beige cover.  Making a cover for such an obscure shape takes time and is a bit fiddly but having a close fit stops the cover from flapping about in the wind when the engine is stored on the pushpit.  It's good to have finally finished the cover.  We will now be able to take the outboard down to BV this weekend and  I'm hoping the cover will protect the engine for several years so I won't have to make another one too soon.

Next task is the cover for the dinghy itself but I'll need to get hold of some more canvas before I tackle that so probably a job for next week.  We can then fix the pad-eyes onto the deck to lash the dinghy down and that will complete the changeover to the new dinghy and outboard.

A nice parcel arrived yesterday which was the AIS transponder.  This will both tell us the position, heading, speed and callsigns of any large ships near us, and it will also transmit the same data about us. That should stop us from being run over by mistake by a big ship!

The AIS comes with its own GPS aerial so fitting that will mean threading another long cable.  That means I'll have to spend some more time scrunched up in lockers... joy!  This AIS also acts an NMEA0183 Multiplexer so it can feed all of the various instruments data through a USB cable to a computer. As part of wiring it in I'll take the opportunity to trace all of the NMEA0183 cables and get rid of the existing legacy computer serial port cable which we don't use; essentially a bit of wire housekeeping.  If I can get all of the different bits of electronics 'talking to each other' properly it should be a very useful bit of equipment to have onboard, particularly when we are crossing shipping lanes.