A Pleasant Wednesday Evening

There were a couple of outstanding maintenance issues I needed to take care of on Seas The Day (on where it might be nice to have extra hands in case things didn't go so well), so I called John and made arrangements to secure his help.  His girlfriend, Gabby, joined us and since Vicky was working from home today, we made it a group outing.

The first order of business was to program our MMSI (Marine Mobile Service Identity) number into our radio.  The VHF radio on Seas The Day has been making this screeching alarm each time I turned it on since we purchase the boat.  Pressing the "clear" button reset it each time, but I finally aimed my bifocals in the right direction so I could see what it wanted.  (I'm still working my way through all the owner's manuals.)  It wanted to be programmed with an MMSI number which is a sort of digital telephone number for our boat.  So I found my way onto the right website and registered with the coast guard.  Now we can press a "Distress" button on the radio and it will automatically transmit our distress and location without having to go through the "Mayday Mayday Mayday" call and response routine.

There's a reason we did that first... the second order of business was to clean our transducer.  This basically involves pulling a 2-inch plug out of the boat - yes, a 2-ft fountain of seawater will gush in, I'm told.  Then we replace the plug which has the transducer on it, with a dummy plug while I use a toothbrush to chase out all the copeapods and other marine life that decided to take up life in my log (speedometer) wheel (for the last cruise or two, our speed was reading zero).  The gusher wasn't too bad (but I didn't have a 3rd or 4th hand to take a photo), and everything seemed to clean up OK... Seas The Day remained floating (which is good).

So with everyone on board and sunset at least an hour away, we quickly motored out around the #1 buoy for an evening outing.  We then retired to Drews Bayshore Bistro for dinner.