Vermilion, OH 6/22/2016

We are back in Vermilion, waiting for Mark from Parker Marine to arrive and save the day. The trip back from Leamington was uneventful, except for some pretty good rolling at the start. Kerry took her last Dramamine and slept most of the way. This trip took 4 1/2 hours at an average speed of 9.8 knots and covered the same 44.1 nautical miles. At one time Annie hit 17.3 knots, wide open and doing a little surfing on the waves. Imagine my thoughts when we arrived and saw May flies everywhere. They arrived just last night. Double Yuck!

I was able to communicate with Peter on Brillig when I was 15 miles from Leamington. This  seems to prove that the radio and antenna are both not the problem.

Mark from Parker Marine arrived shortly after we docked. He had a new oil pressure gauge that had been overnighted to him. He installed the gauge, checked a few other things and presto, we had charging. On hindsight, I don't think the charging system has worked all year. Annie has only been on one short trip and I just did not notice that it was not charging. One thing I did notice is that when I ran both thrusters at the same time, a  low voltage alarm came on this year. This did not happen last year, and it did not happen today when I had the starting and house batteries linked together,

Getting the AIS and radio to work together proved to be more troublesome, as I feared it might be. It took awhile to convince Mark that the radio worked significantly better when it was not hooked to the AIS. Some calls to the bridge tender in Lorain convinced him I was correct.

The problem is that I can either have AIS working and poor radio performance, or good radio performance and no AIS. After trying another antenna and after two calls with Garmin, Garmin offered to send me another AIS unit. They said the problem had to be the antenna or the AIS port for the antenna. The problem of a bad port was not common, they said, but has happened. So, Mark took the AIS unit to exchange with Garmin. When they get the new one, they will send it to some port I will be visiting for me to pick up. So, we are set to travel tomorrow with a working radio.

We took Mark to lunch at Rudy's after the work was done. We have fun with him. He is a really good electronics technician and we really don't like anyone else working on Annie. Mark took us to Rite Aid where Kerry stocked up on Dramamine. As always, Mark went away with a pile of bones for Huxley, Dick Parker's dog.

Peter and I will talk in the morning and decide where we will travel to. Boblo Island is the most likely port.