08/13/2008 West River

08/13/2008 Today we had another trip scheduled to West Marine. We were roused out of the bunk a little earlier than expected by a local fisherman. He set out a crab line Tuesday after we were anchored real close to the boat. During the night between a wind shift and tide change, the boat was parked on top of the line marker and he pulled in next to my hull and allowed diesel fumes to drift into my open hatch at 5:20 AM. With that we pulled anchor and headed down the Miles River using the chart plotter through the dark. It worked out great. We had calm weather and motored all the way over to Deale to pick up the replacement antenna.

When I brought the antenna back to the boat, we found another crack in the new antenna at the same area as the shipping package was damaged. West Marine is trying to get a new antenna in for me by tomorrow possibly. There was no good local anchoring areas in Deale so we headed north again to the West River to spend the night and will head back down to Deale if the antenna is available. We looked for anchoring south as something to do, but it appears that there is no areas until you get to Salomon Island.

As for entertainment in the evening we have been able to watch PBS for news and the Olympics. We are using my laptop with a Pinnacle TV Tuner that plugs into an usb port. We have played with different antenna options including a set of rabbit ears, the vhf antenna for the marina radio and the best option so far has been to hook a piece of antenna cable to the mast using an alligator clip. I am picking up both analog (old style) and digital TV stations.

The boat does feel like it is all coming together and we look forward to heading north. The projects are again getting smaller and it is more about fine tuning.