Tuesday 25 January Frustration

Our dues are due in the form of payment for our stay at the Viaduct. Having bikes to zip around on are a real boon. Our berth is only a quarter of a mile across the water from the marina office, by land it's a mile. Today's serendipitous moment was discovering that the Oracle America's Cup team were launching their prototype 45' racing catamaran. It's entirely carbon fibre and the 'sail' is a computer controlled fixed wing – a mast that pivots and a 'sail' which looks like an aircraft wing made out of clear plastic. The crane was attached to a point at the top of the mast and a team of handlers had lines onto each corner and guided it from the car park, over cars and into the water. Impressive. And I'd forgotten to put my camera in my pocket.

Auckland scenery

David is so frustrated with not being able to solve the fault with the chartplotter that he's finally succumbed to calling an electonics company and paying for a Raymarine expert. In our limited experience many of the professional experts are scalpers, charlatans, frauds. Electronics Afloat (EAL) sent us their expert (see last sentence). Within 5 minutes of meeting Arlan it was clear we'd been given a bum steer. A nice young man who knew less about Raymarine than David. He spent one hour on the phone to another company out of town who are the Raymarine representatives. After our 'expert' had left David had an epiphany. Hallelujah! The chartplotter was disconnected and we still had the GPS alarms going off. If the fault wasn't the plotter itself and all the wiring was perfect the only other culprit was....the 5 pin cable that connects into the back of the chartplotter. We got a new one from another company and the nerve fraying, irritating loss of heading fix was fixed. It's been a month and many, many hours of testing the 9 units and connections in the integrated system and it comes down to the factory made connection cable. The biggest problem turned out to be the simplest solution. That's life! It's only a boat.....