Saturday 02 Jul 2011

Saturday 02 Jul 2011
Saturday morning my daughter Julia drove me down to Shoreline Village in Long Beach where Second Chance had a temporary berth. I figured that I would use the afternoon to meet the other crew members and help provision the boat. We arrived around noon and parked next to the Long beach Aquarium. On the walk over to the docks we came across an Alfa Romeo car show hosted by a local Alfa Romeo Owners club. I considered this to be a good omen since Alfa Romeos are my favorite marque and they’re not that common. Seeing some of the models that I previously owned (e.g. ‘74 Spider, ‘73 GTV, ‘87 Milano Verde) and those that I lusted for brought back fond memories and put me in a great mood.

We had lunch at the Yard House which was right down from where Second Chance was docked. After lunch I gave Julia a tour of Second Chance, introduced her to the crew members present, and said our goodbyes. I asked Harry how I could best help and he suggested that I work with Ed, a ham radio operator, to figure out how to make the single side band (SSB) radio and new computer work so that we could send our daily position reports and get weather reports. Harry figured that since I work with computers (I’m a systems analyst at a biopharmaceutical company), I could figure out how to make the SSB work. Harry’s a real optimist!

Although I had never even seen a SSB radio before and had no idea how they worked, I gladly accepted the challenge. Fortunately, Ed came well prepared with full manuals for the SSB radio, modem, antenna, SailMail and weather report service, etc. I requested some time to review the manuals before tackling the project.

After reading the manual, I had a pretty good idea as to how the equipment was supposed to work. Ed described the symptoms and showed me what was and was not working. He also found the phone number of a support tech at the SailMail service in San Diego. The support tech was a real godsend! He was familiar with our equipment (Icom IC-M700 Pro SSB, PACTOR PTC-IIe modem, AT-130 tuner), walked us through some of the basics, helped diagnose the issues, and suggested a couple of common root causes and fixes.

Our other challenge was that the original computer that came with the boat was old, had a dead battery, and didn’t work well. Consequently, Ed wanted to connect a newer PC with larger screen for displaying the weather reports. I suggested we first try to get the equipment to work with the old computer and then replace it with the new PC once we confirmed that it worked. So that’s what we did.

Ed and I worked on the equipment until 10:00 PM only taking a brief break to attend the Aloha Class send off party for some appetizers and drinks. We went to Phil’s hotel room to download device drivers for the com port adapter. Although we got the equipment to work, we had a very weak signal. The SailMail support tech suggested we check the antenna ground strap for corrosion and replace the pig tail connector behind the radio. We had to disassemble several beautiful wood panels above the nav station to get behind the radio to access the connector. Although he never said anything, I suspect that this made Phil a bit nervous since he really didn’t know us and we really didn’t know what we were doing. We eventually got behind the radio and confirmed that the connector was indeed faulty by wiggling it when using the radio and noticing a change in the signal strength. Since it was late and we were tired, we decided to call it a night and replace the connector tomorrow.