2023: Time Well Spent in St Martin

 AIS Coupler

We have had a GMC AIST120 coupler for some years and it works but not so well as I would have expected.  The antenna is mounted on top of the solar panel frames on the back of the boat and, I would have thought, send out a decent signal to the horizon.  On our Atlantic crossing from Portugal to Antigua, via Madeira, Canary and Cape Verde Islands, we found that some ships, on a heading to cross near us, would suddenly change course when only a couple of miles from us.  I concluded therefore, that we had not been picked up by them until they were relatively close.  So I decided to do something about it.

I purchased a GMC AISS120 coupler and installed it next to the VHF radio.  The idea is to use the VHF antenna for the radio, for the AIS too, as the VHF antenna is on top of the mast.  Much better range for obvious reasons.  You can’t use the VHF radio and the AIS at the same time but we hardly if ever use the VHF at sea so it didn’t matter.

The major challenge for WJ3 was to connect the AIS and the AIS coupler – the AIS is at the chart table and the VHF radio is on the port side of the companionway.  After looking at all options for the cable run, I ended up passing the cable from the AIS along the starboard side to the mast, then back under the ceiling liner to the coupler.  I needed about 40’ of cable rather than the 20’ I had initially purchased before I looked in detail at the routing options.  Fortunately it didn’t cost much but lesson learned again.  Time spent in detailed reconnaissance is seldom wasted.

The cable came with fittings which were supplied by a helpful salesman at Electec in St Marten.  Our elec techie Mike, who was working on a bunch of other elec issues (see below), soldered the fittings on the ends of the cable for me.  Next time I would look at a YouTube video as it didn’t seem particularly difficult when Mike showed me how I could do it myself.

Mike also supplied a ‘black box’ to link my Ipad with Navionics (located at the helm mostly) to the AIS via wifi.  Worked well in St Marten with symbols for each AIS/ship/boat shown on the chart but now in Trinidad having difficulties with it.  I’ll update as I progress and, if necessary, I’ll defer back to Mike via email.

New House Batteries

We found that our house batteries were not holding a charge very well.  As they were now six years old, plus we were experiencing all these charging problems, so it was time indeed to replace them whilst in St Marten.  We looked at the options and came up with four new Trojan 6 volt DC 225 to give total 450AH for USD 1066.