Race Practice

With the Small Craft Advisory ending in the morning we hit the bay again! The goal was practice tacking and rounding marks. Steve took the helm for most of the sail guiding us out of the harbor. Finding a low traffic area we looked at the chart to setup a course. We sailed a simple 1.43 NM windward/leeward legs rounding the marks four times before heading back into port. It was a great sail to close out the long weekend! 

Brought the new battery out to Nauti-Dog and installed it in it’s box. I purchased a West Marine Dual Purpose battery as the house battery for the electronics. While I was under the cockpit I measured all the wire lengths required for the second battery and switch. Also started the Yanmar for the first time in 10 days. It started fine and pumped plenty of water. Also did some general tidying up too. One of the other things I tried today was to find a way to transfer waypoints from the laptop to Raymarine MFD. Unfortunately I did have any success so I manually entered a few to start.

Download2

Packed up all the gear headed to Nauti-Dog. “Insert the card with the downloaded charts into your compatible Raymarine chart plotter. In the chart screen, select Menu > Presentation > Chart Selection. This will show the list of available charts. Select your downloaded chart to open it.” Then nothing…. Back shore and back to the house to start “Troubleshooting: ....Re-download your chart(s).” Returned back to Nauti-Dog and plugged the MicroSD back into the plotter we had charts!

Chart downloading

5. Initialized the Micro SD card by inserting it into plotter and power it on

6. I thought I was smart by bring my laptop to the docks but the download was really really slow

7. Back at the house downloading the charts

Digital Charts

Going to give the Raymarine Lighthouse Charts a try. They are $9.99 for a 1 year subscription.

1. Pick your chart type and area
2. Create an Raymarine account
3. Pay Raymarine
4. Then learn you need to “initialize” a Micro SD card

The MicroSD card needs to be initialized in the plotter. So the means a trip out to Nauti-Dog.

Upgrade

Upgraded to v17. Originally I was going to upgrade over Wi-Fi but the file was over 700MB and would crush my cell data. Next time I might try moving Nauti-Dog closer to a dock or marina offering Wi-Fi. But just used a flash card this time. Also mounted the i70 display. The most difficult part was removing the only displays.

R15

Uneventful upgrade to R15. Looking forward to the WiFi updating so I don’t have keep downloading the update to a card then bringing it out the boat.

Also downloaded the Navionics Boating app. More to come on that...

New-New GPS Update

R15 was just released today by Raymarine. In addition to the other fixes and improvements “R15 allows users to connect their MFD and Raymarine network to a Wi-Fi hotspot and download and install future updates direct from Raymarine.” This will making future updating easier! Now I just need Wi-Fi on the boat (winter project).