Sunday – 17 June 2018

Another day of recharging the batteries.  We ran again on the same route as yesterday.  We would have done more but I think I am getting a cold and was not wanting to push too hard.

While we were in the UK, Equinox has had a refit of her electronics, with a new chart plotter, radar, instruments and PC amongst other things.  Most of this has worked really well during the crossing and the difficulties we have experienced have mostly been down to us not knowing how to use some of the facilities. The radar in particular is impressive, being able to work out which targets are stationary, moving towards us or moving away, and colour coding them on the display. Very helpful.

Prior to leaving I had not had time to do as much setting up of the new PC as I had wanted, and today I had the chance to move this forward.  I initially thought that there was a problem with the computer, but it turned out to be the keyboard, and I resolved the problem by using a spare.  (The computer commissioning issues are also part of the reason we have been running a few days behind with the blog, hopefully we can now get everything caught up and resume our normal blogging service.)

The one part of the refit that has not been fully successful straight away is around the AIS. We know that it is both transmitting and receiving, but it seems that its range is not as great as we expect. As a result, those of you who try to follow our progress on the internet have not been able to see us.  We know that the shore stations have now picked us up now , but there is still a lag in this. We have been in contact with the yard that fitted the electronics, and they have suggested some potential methods of diagnosing the specific cause of the issue. We will spend more time looking into these over the next couple of days.  At least we know that we are getting short range coverage, up to about 3 miles, so this is reassuring.

Distance covered today	0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	622	nautical miles
Distance covered 2018	1342	nautical miles

Steve (and Tricia)