Bobbing in Key West

Today we are bouncing a bit as the wind is blowing up the channel to the marina at 20-plus MPH. It will shift and slow tonight, but for now. one must be careful to ensure the right finger lands on the right key.

Tomorrow would be an excellent day to take off for the Dry Tortugas, but then the weather forecasts show us being stuck there for a week or so braving 20-plus MPH winds and seas in an anchorage not wholly protected. Not our idea of fun. This place is better for now.

We have gone to the Navy recreation office and bought a bunch of cut-rate tickets for various sights and sites around town. At full fare, I'd have to say most are way over-priced, as is everything here. As it is, we are paying about 2/3 for our chosen entertainment, and I am still not impressed with what we get for that. At $3.50 per car, I think the Fort Zachary Taylor State Park will be more to my liking. There they dug up a whole pot full of civil war cannon and munitions in 1968 - supposed to be biggest collection around.

I completed the installation of the new valve cover gasket on the port engine and expect no more messy oil leak into the drip pan. Will test later.

My Garmin chartplotter (the device I ad to buy to display the Garmin radar I bought in Clearwater) continues to provide tinkering fun. It has inputs for the Automatic Identification System (AIS), the VHF radio (to log Digital Selective Calling traffic), a depth sounder, engine instruments (if I had digital instruments), GPS, electronic compass, radar and maybe some other things I haven't thought of.

I finally got the AIS input working after some tinkering, and now ship which send that information are tracked on the laptop, chartplotter charts and the radar display on the chartplotter. Hooking up my electronic compass to it allows me to "hook" radar targets so the unit can track them for collision avoidance. Next stop is Radio Shack to get some more wire to connect my marine VHF radio to the thing. I still prefer the depth sounder to be separate and to have a laptop as my primary charting reference because it uses actual raster-scanned charts versus the "derived" electronic charts the chartplotter uses.