We're looking for the trash fence...

Everyone in Neah Bay's Makah Marina seems to be either a recreational or trade fisherman and as such the Marina and its facilities have that well worn trawler look and smell. ;-)

We're using the Marina for its shore power connection to fully charge, fill and equalize the batteries. Today we'll doing the equalization so we will have most systems offline. There is also no ATT Wireless here, and only place has WiFi which works (Linda's Wood-Fired Pizza), although even it is spotty. This means we're not our normal webFoursquareFacebookTwitter updating selves.

We're looking at the weather and maybe going to head offshore Thursday or this weekend depending on the battery equalization and how the weather looks.

With the HAM Radio we can still update the blog and get weather forecasts. I LOVE the radio!! I've still yet to make to a voice contact, but probably will call in to one of the nets tonight for my first contact.

All is well here and we hope the same is true with you!

When we were still on the dock at Shilshole we'd get asked all the time "when you going to be done?" And I'd always say, "never!" Well, in that spirit you should know that we're not done yet!

Today I worked on adding six new switches to control some functions of the AIS and power on/off various components of what we call the NavSystem. The new switches will allow us to turn off the transmit portion of our AIS to save power or avoid being tracked by CB. The other switches will allow us to turn off the PC, WiFi Bridge, LAN/USB Hub, and the NMEA 2000 network (instruments). All of these things used to come on or off all at once, now we can more granularly control our power usage, which us very good thing!!

I just made my first contact with a winlink post office via HAM Radio. This will be the first post to the blog directly via HAM Radio. All I can say is WOO HOO !!

We are relaxing at City Pier in Port Angeles working on projects and waiting Yi go to Neah Bay. No Internet on the dock and still working out ssb/ham kinks so use the AIS tracking link we sent over twitter yesterday for following along info.

We spent today hanging around Port Townsend and waiting to meet up New Found Metals (NFM) to get a new gasket for one of our portholes.

Richard (the owner) was gracious enough to come down to the boat and meet us personally to help replace one of the gaskets which was sticky and hard to open. Cutting out the gasket, cleaning up the frame and glass and putting in the new gasket took about 45 minutes of actual work time I’d estimate. A very simple repair and we were impressed with the personal service.

Richard is the kind of guy who always has a great story to tell and we heard about a slew of products he’s working on and the very cool plant in China to build them. If you order portholes and have the option to pick them up in Port Townsend and meet Richard I highly recommend it. New Found Metals is a company recommend fully!

We left behind our step and some words of encouragement for those who asked how could we do this, the “inscription” reads:

The first step is the hardest to take

s/v Deep Playa 2011

We love this town!

This post is the last from J31 at Shilshole Bay Marina. Next stop TBD!