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Monthly Archives: February 2014

MarineAir A/C Unit

New MarineAir A/C unit installed in the Stbd side of the Saloon.

New MarineAir A/C unit installed in the Stbd side of the Saloon.

The main air conditioning unit in the Saloon has been non-functional since the boat was purchased. Since it has been so darn cold this winter, I thought it would be nice to get the unit fixed so that I could use it for heat.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the old unit was non-repairable. So I decided to bite the bullet and put in a new MarineAir Air Conditioning Unit. It works with the old controller and the old sea water manifold system, and only required some minor re-programming to get it functional. Now the Saloon can be heated up quickly on cold winter mornings.

The new Samsung 46" HDTV in the Saloon

The new Samsung 46″ HDTV in the Saloon

While I was working in the Saloon, I decided I was tired of the old 36″ TV that did not support HDMI. I went over to Costco and picked up a new 46″ Samsung HDTV. It has lots of HDMI ports and fits the front of the Galley Counter perfectly. It works great and now I have the DVR, Blue Ray, Apple TV and Xbox all hooked up and running.

I also ran some cat5 cable to the equipment closet and hooked the TV up to the router. Now I can stream High Definition movies without it dropping the wireless connection every ten minutes. Grrrrr!

We also took the boat out for the weekend and cruised over to Dockton. It was wet and gusty winds (~ 20 knots) that contained a little bit of snow, but it was nice to get out for even a short winter cruise.

Winter Boat Work

A new Simrad AIS Tranceiver is installed on Sea Eagle

A new Simrad AIS Tranceiver is installed on Sea Eagle

Sea Eagle did manage to get out and enjoy the sunshine over Super Bowl weekend with an overnight trip to meet some friends. However, with the bitter cold winter weather (9° F this week), I have been working inside the boat far more than outside.

I installed a new AIS trasceiver (Simrad) and really enjoyed being able to to see the commercial vessels and having them see me while cruising through dense fog on Sunday morning. I noticed a crewboat heading to a break bulk carrier that actually altered his course based on the AIS information that I was broadcasting.

The Simrad unit is much nicer than the old no-name AIS receiver that came with the boat. The old unit was only set up to communicate via 4800 Baud (NMEA 0183), which meant targets never had names and would drop off the Nobeltec display for ten minutes at a time. The new unit is hooked up via a simple USB cable and is set for High Speed (NMEA 0183), so displays near real time data, including names, positions, speed vectors, turning, etc. It makes running in the fog much less stressful!

Other recent projects have included complete dis-assembly of the Racor Fuel Filters, cleaning the asphaltenes that precipitated on the water separator and re-assembly with new gaskets, o-rings and filters.

High-Speed Wireless Internet Access was also installed using the free Click! Network Cable that is available at the dock. It makes getting work done on the boat much easier when manuals are just a click away!