Episode 50 The Worst Forecast Ever, and the Fuel Tank Strap

Few modifications paid as much for as little time and effort as this one. All it needed was the screwing of two eye-saddles to the base of the starboard locker and a cargo strap from my collection of things-that-I-had-bought-for-a-previous-project-that-I-then-forgot-to-do. Until now, the plastic fuel tank for the outboard simply slid about on the floor of the locker, restrained only by the flexible fuel line. This arrangement was adequate for the gentle sailing in mild breezes that I planned regularly, but was found wanting, thanks to the worst forecast I had ever made.

For a while, I had intended to take a friend for a casual sail on Moreton Bay. He, like me, usually had busy weekends. I was owed an additional day in lieu of overtime I had worked before Christmas. His day off was on Thursday, so we had arranged to take the boat out then. Not having taken him out before, I anxiously checked the weather forecasts in the preceding days, which consistently painted a rosy picture of a day starting with a westerly 5 knots, followed by a lull, then building to a north-easterly 10 knots in the afternoon. Oddly, the offshore wind was a strong northerly, but conditions in Moreton Bay appeared benign. Wind and tide suggested a leisurely trip northward around St Helena Island in the morning, followed by a moderately faster downhill sail to Manly around lunchtime. It seemed perfect for a sail with someone who had not sailed with me before.

What I had missed was the reason for the shift in wind direction, which was a front moving up the coast, and its interaction with the prevailing northerly. Apparently, this had prompted a strong wind warning in Moreton Bay, which I had overlooked.

Blithely, my friend and I rigged the boat and set out from Manly at about 0830. We were a little surprised to feel a fresh south-westerly that sped us northwards above six knots on the westward side of the Islands. I grew a little anxious about some dark clouds to the south. Upon hearing something on the radio from Southport Marine Rescue about a front that had passed over, causing white-caps, I checked the wind speeds reported at Hope Banks and other weather stations around the bay. They showed a rapidly rising wind, so, on the northern shore of St Helena, I decided to put in a reef. On climbing up to the mast, I changed my mind and put in two reefs, which proved a good decision almost immediately. I also reviewed my plans for rounding St Helena and heading into the bay and decided to return the same way that we had come, in the hope that the Islands might give us some shelter. The wind kept building, the boat heeled dramatically, and the jib was quickly furled. We were now beating south, against strong winds and a steep chop. In previous outings, I had taken water over the gunwales, but this was the first time I took a wave over the cockpit combings.

My friend, to his great credit, found it wonderfully amusing. Presumably, he had some misguided confidence in my abilities. He had learned to sail dinghies in Auckland Harbour, so was used to getting wet. He later told me that anything calmer would have been much less interesting. He teased me for earlier saying that if I got my feet wet during the launching of the boat, I would count the trip a failure. I was now soaked from head to foot from the water coming over the sides. The cushion I had arranged for a comfortable seat became a waterlogged sponge.

After a couple of hours of beating and slamming into the chop, we found ourselves approaching Green Island with the wind dropping off. My friend then noticed the sickening smell of petrol coming from the starboard locker. On closer inspection, we found that the plastic fuel tank had been knocked about so much that some of the fuel had leaked from the open air tap in the cap. Knowing how much the smell of fuel can ruin anyone’s day on the water, I decided to find a way to secure the tank properly. I also remembered that I had made a mental note of doing so when I had bought the boat a year ago. That previous mental note went the way of so many others into the memory hole.

As far as the lull in mid-morning went, the weather stations at Hope Banks and Manly recorded winds of 25 knots, gusting to 30 to 35 knots. Later, the Admiral asked if I had gone sailing if I had known, to which I answered reluctantly but firmly in the negative. I found, again, that the boat could take more than I could.

It took a couple of eye saddles, four screws (each sealed with a blob of butyl) and a strap to fix the problem of the fuel tank wandering about in the starboard locker. The bonus was that the fuel tank now sat nicely in a corner, enlarging the usable space in the starboard locker for the other stuff I would throw in there, like the fenders. I only wish I had done it earlier.

Fuel tank and strap in the starboard locker

Episode 49 The Ballast Pump and the Boat’s First Hole

 It took about three hours to drill the boat’s first hole. 

Not all of that was drilling, of course. There was a lot of measuring, then re-measuring, both inside and outside the cabin with significant sessions of boat-yoga as I got in and out of position. Then, with much fear and trembling, I drilled a 3mm pilot hole to see if it came out the other side where I thought it would. It did, or, near enough. Then there was a great deal of further chin-scratching and arguing with myself about whether the pilot hole should be moved up or down or left or right, followed by a majority vote to keep it where it was. Then, I reamed out the hole with progressively larger drill bits to get to the 12.5mm diameter the hole needed to allow the lugs on the wire to get through.

I used a piece of wire inherited from somewhere for no better reason than that it was there, and it was, coincidentally, almost the right length at about 2.6m. I think it was 13Amp wire, which was oversized for a pump that said it needed a 5Amp fuse. My electrician friend assured me that oversized wires were unlikely to cause problems, unlike undersized wires that could overheat and, possibly, set the boat on fire. Oversized wire is good, especially when you don't have to buy it.

The switchboard got connected to the wire, which got connected to the pump, which produced a highly satisfactory whirring noise when I flipped the switch.

I couple of days’ later, when I had recovered sufficiently from my extended sessions of boat-yoga, I filled the ballast tank again and tested the pump’s ability to empty it. This it did, with some further, satisfying noises of water steadily dribbling out of the outlet, followed by visual confirmation and the obligatory photos (just to prove to everyone, including myself, that it worked). Before it would pass water, the pump needed to be primed, which was easily done with a crank or two of the hand-pump lever. I’ll need to remember to re-prime it if ever I drain it in future. This consequent operation, which included the addition of some labels, took about an hour.

Whilst pumping, the pump drew up to about 1.2 Amps (according to my digital readout) and emptied the partially-filled tank in about 10 minutes. The printing on the side of the pump says 11 litres per minute, or 3 gallons per minute. The capacity of the tanks is 250 litres, but they usually don’t get filled to capacity. According to these numbers, it should take no more than about 23 minutes to empty the full tanks, which equates to a little less than 0.5Amp-hours. The capacity of my battery is 12Amp-hours, which means it has plenty of capacity to drain the ballast. This is good news as it means that, whatever I use the battery for a day-sail, there should be enough juice in it to save me hand-cranking the hand-pump. It also gives me the option of emptying the tanks whilst under way and sailing solo, which could save time when I am returning to the ramp.

First hole through the bulkhead for the ballast pump cable

The ballast pump works!

Switchboard and meter for the pump in operation

Episode 48 Port Cockpit Locker

 It takes a lot of effort to make things simple.

The simple version is to flip a switch to pump out the 250-or-so litres of water ballast when packing the boat away after a sail. But this means electrics and a 12V pump. I already had the battery and switch-board, and a pump that had been salvaged from a warrantee replacement on our caravan. Even if it did not work perfectly, I could use the pump to plumb in the connections and get everything working before getting a "proper" pump. However, I needed somewhere to put the pump, and screwing it down onto the sloping, curved hull was not only difficult, but it also meant drilling holes into the hull, which, I had decided, was strictly forbidden.

So, the first stage was to fit a floor into the port side locker, where the current hand pump was fitted. Having watched plenty of social media videos of boat-builders, I first made up a template using thin strips of scrap ply and other assortments. Then, I cut another template using MDF from an old door skin. Incidentally, if you have ever wondered where that musty smell in old houses comes from, just cut up a piece of ancient MDF door-skin. MDF is horrid stuff and should never go anywhere near a boat permanently, but it is useful for cutting templates.

Having made a flat template for the floor, the next challenge was finding a way to fix it (without drilling holes) from underneath, which was inaccessible when the floor was sitting where it should go. I got some 30x40mm softwood from the Big Green Shed and formed it into shelves and wedges that the floor would sit on. These, I jiggled into position and poked and prodded until they seemed to be in the right place. I formed the wedges in two layers, the bottom layer being glued to the hull with Sikaflex 291, and screwed the top layer onto the bottom. This proved a good decision, because I removed the top layer and adjusted its height by about taking off 10mm with my stupidly cheap Aldi Bench Saw. I finally cut the “real” floor from 6mm plywood. The floor took two to three part-time days – nobody said that boat-work was quick.

The next stage was to plumb in the pump. I wanted to keep the hand-pump fully operational for when (not if) the electrics went AWOL, which was doomed to happen at the most inconvenient, life-threatening time possible. The hand pump not only emptied the ballast tanks, but it also pumped out the bilge which is an operation I have never performed, but was essential nonetheless. So, the electric pump needed to be plumbed in such a way as to keep all the current bits working, but with the option of bypassing the hand-pump.

The Jabsco hand-pump (which has the blue ring in the photos below) and connecting pipes were 1½-inch, but the Shurflo electric pump accepted ½ inch. The Chandlers had 1½-inch to 1-inch reducers and 1-inch to ½-inch reducers, but no 1½-inch to ½-inch reducers. The Chandlers also had a selection of tees, elbows, stop-cocks and hose-clamps. This amounted to a grand assembly that cost about $280 and had the following.

• 2 x 1½-inch tees with 3 x 1½-inch hose-clamps each
• 2 x 1½-inch to 1-inch reducers with 1 x 1½-inch and 1 x 1-inch hose-clamps each plus short lengths of 1-inch pipe
• 2 x 1-inch to ½-inch reducers with 1 x 1-inch and 1 x ½-inch hose-clamps each 
• 2 x ½-inch stopcocks with 2 x ½-inch hose-clamps each
• 4 x ½-inch elbows with 2 x ½-inch hose-clamps each
• 2 x ½-inch screw-in connectors with 1 x ½-inch hose-clamp each
• About 0.25m of 1½-inch pipe, 0.25m of 1-inch pipe of 2m of ½-inch pipe

Cutting and fitting the pipes took about three part-time days with more boat-yoga than I would have liked (I don’t like any boat-yoga, by the way). The photos below indicate, deceptively, more space than what is available. By the time you get your head and hands into roughly the right place, you find there is little space left for your rib cage, or legs, or other essential body-parts. It also needed more trips up and down the ladder between the boat and my workbench than I would have liked, especially as I usually forgot to get the one thing that I needed most from either one or the other. 

The assemblies of reducers, elbows and stopcocks took up a surprising amount of room and needed the relocation of the two-way valve (to the left and below the Jabsco hand-pump) and the hand-pump handle. After tightening the final clamp, I filled the tanks with a garden hose to check for leaks. I found none, until I tried the hand-pump, only to find an annoying drip directly aimed at the electric pump, caused by a split in the elbow connector that had developed from my cack-handedness. I went back to the Chandler for the third day in a row, ordered a new one, and bodged a repair on the cracked elbow with some glue and another hose-clamp. The repair worked, and I pumped out the tanks by hand, noting that it took about 160 hefty cranks of the handle, which fully justified my attempts to install the electric pump. The next step will be to wire it in, but I think I’ll go sailing, first.

Lower layer of wedges and shelf glued in place with white Sikaflex 291

Upper layer of wedges and shelf screwed onto lower layer

Completed locker floor

Plumbed-in pump

Top view of pump assembly

Episode 47 Stove Box Mark 3

Stove Box Mark 1 was large and heavy. I had built it for the Austral 20 because it had no galley. It was made from 12mm ply, lined with cement board and had a compartment for a twin-burner stove and a sink. The disadvantages of its size and weight became apparent when I maneuvered it through the companionway hatch and into the tiny cabin. Maneuvering one’s own body in the tiny cabin cramps everything to a shuffling crouch, which, when adding a heavy, cumbersome weight, almost guarantees a lower lumbar injury. At least the cement board would have never caught on fire.

Like my old Austral 20, Sandpiper has no galley, so I constructed Stove Box Mark 2 - a new, lighter version from 4mm ply with aluminum sheet lining. I needed means to cook tea and breakfast for the Moreton Bay Raid in September 2024 (see Sailing Kate Louise Moreton Bay Raid Part 1 and Sailing Kate Louise Moreton Bay Raid Part 2). It worked well and did not give me a back injury, but it was still too big. It was too big to fit into one of the cockpit lockers, so had to live in the cabin on a spare bunk. This required further maneuvering to get it into the cabin for stowage and out of the cabin for cooking. I decided this was too hard, so set about constructing Stove Box Mark 3.

Stove Box Mark 3 was much more difficult than the previous two versions, because I wanted it to fit into the port-side cockpit locker. The locker itself is spacious and it has a seemingly large hatch. However, the hatch has a fat L shape and the dimension from the inside corner of the L to the outside corned determined whether a rectangular box would fit, or not.

I also wanted the Stove Box Mark 3 to accommodate my methylated spirit stove, like Stove Box Mark 2. The stove fit through the hatch nicely, but getting the stove in a box through the hatch proved a challenge. It took me about three days’ work of cutting, assembling, fitting, further cutting, further fitting etc. to get the stove box to the minimum dimensions. Even so, the fit through the hatch was millimeters tight. Reluctantly, I filed off a tiny part of the inside radius of the hatch to ease the passage of the box in and out. I also had to grow my collection of tools to include a small bench-saw and a drop-saw, both of which could cut to the kind of sub-millimeter accuracy I needed. The box now squeezes in and out of the hatch, and the stove squeezes in and out of the box.

I designed the front and top with battens, which serve two purposes; they provide something to grip onto when lifting it, and they also lift the covers off the underlying surface, which, I thought, would provide some handy landing-spots for the putting-down of very hot pans or kettles on the boat. I dread getting burn-rings on the boat or its furnishings.

Today, I tested it on the rear deck by making tea during some wild, rainy weather. I am glad to say the sides shelter the flame well and my wife says the tea tasted good. I call that a success.

Stove Box Mark 3 in operation

Stove Box Mark 3 stowed

Episode 46 Electrifying Sandpiper Part 2

The completion of the electrical panel took lots of putting in and taking out, refitting and adjusting. I added three more tee-nuts, because it is better to over-design than to have the whole thing fall off the bulkhead and make a mess. I found the Sikabond 145 Supergrip to be too unreliable in setting and curing, as it seems to need access to the atmosphere, so I resorted to 2-part epoxy to fix the tee-nuts to the bulkhead.

It took some trial-and-error to fit the display panel for the Lowrance fishfinder/depth gauge (I'm not interested in the fishfinder function). I settled on mounting it on a hinged arm that swings in and out of the companionway. This means that it does not need holes drilled into the hull and it is quickly stowed and secured inside the cabin when not in use. The angles took some time to figure out because the axis of the hinges needed to be vertical, but the bulkhead they are fixed to is not. When in use, the panel needs to be face down slightly, to cut down the glare and reflection from the sun and sky. I also needed to ensure that the assembly would clear the trim on the companionway, without intruding into it too far. I gave myself a little slack, in case I replace the current display with another one with slightly different dimensions. I knocked up a couple of toggles from some spare aluminium angle to lock it in the "stowed" and "out" positions. I have now used it several times and it seems to work quite well, though I now wonder if I should fit a hood to make the display more readable.

Once the panel had been fitted, I added the battery. The battery sits on another plywood plate or battery tray that has two square holes that fit over the lugs that hold the rear water-ballast tank in place. The battery tray is not fixed, as the square holes hold everything in place. I also bought a small AGM battery that would fit into the small space available and made up a small box to hold it to the plywood plate. Having taken the battery in and out several times to charge it, this seems a neat and unobtrusive arrangement. When I made up the connecting wire with an Anderson Plug, I made the rookie error of cutting it too short, rather than too long. It seems than, no matter how long you think the wire should be, it always needs to be four inches longer.

After I had taken the photos shown below, I re-routed the wire for the depth-sounder puck behind the headliner, which made it less intrusive than appears in the photos. The depth-sounder puck sits on the inside of the hull under the porta-potti.

I initially fixed the depth-sounder puck with blu-tack, but found it does not make a good bedding-material, probably because it has stuff mixed in that interfere with the sonics of the depth-sounder. I found a better solution was to use a blob of butyl. I had previously used Sikeflex in a previous boat, but the bond was so strong, I broke the puck whilst trying to relocate it.

Fitted electrical panel. The red toggle on the lower right leads to the battery, which sits on a tray on top of the rear ballast tank.

Electrical panel fixed to bulkhead

Depth-sounder swung out into companionway

Episode 45 Electrifying Sandpiper Part 1

Sandpiper came without electrics (not counting the battery-operated cabin lights). There are good reasons for this, other than keeping the price down. There is less to go wrong, and there is a lot of fun to be had on boats without electrics. People have been sailing boats for millennia before the likes of Willam Gilbert and Sir Thomas Browne discovered magnetism and electricity in the 17th Century. (Benjamin Franklin’s later experiment with a kite in a thunderstorm seems to have been embellished, which would have helped his political ambitions). 

Also, there is a lot you can do with small battery-powered bits and bobs. The cabin lights have been mentioned. I now have a battery-powered radio. Other owners use battery-powered outboard motors. But, the list is limited. What about a depth-sounder/fish finder (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or an auto-helm (like the one sitting in my drawer)? Or the occasional trip with a portable fridge (like the one sitting in my caravan)? Or some electric pumps to pump out the ballast, or to pump freshwater to the tap? True, these latter items are on the nice-to-have rather than must-have list, but the list could expand endlessly with an electrified boat. There are also good reasons to install electrics.

Like other Cygnet owners, I have thought long and hard on this topic. The very last thing I intend to do is to drill a hole in my shiny new boat, which is exactly what I would need to do to install cables tidily. My strategy, then, is to put off this fateful day as humanly possible, if ever I were to change my mind. I need to develop the electrics in a reversible way, being as unintrusive as possible. Further, the Admiral would never forgive me for making some horrible alterations to the pristine Sandpiper (and she has first-hand experience of my capabilities in this regard).

The strategy I have decided upon is to make a demountable plywood base plate that could be bolted and unbolted from the starboard bulkhead (the wall between the cabin and cockpit on the right hand side). 

But, how can you fix bolts to the bulkhead without drilling holes? I’m glad you asked. The answer is to use stainless steel tee-nuts glued to the bulkhead. They are small and don’t need holes. The worst that would happen, with this approach, is that I would be left with the tee -bolts glued to the bulkhead.

The first challenge, then, was what glue to use. I could have used epoxy resin, thickened with a filler to make a gooey paste. Epoxy resin does not flow fast, but it does flow far. I wondered if the epoxy resin would form dribbles and snots on the bulkhead, which leant at an overhanging angle of about 10 degrees and seemed perfectly oriented to create these unwanted features. Also, I only wanted a small amount, probably less than the smallest cans of resin and hardener. After staring at the big shelf of Sika products in the Bug Green Shed for fifteen minutes or so, I decided to buy a tube of Sikabond 145 Supergrip, which promised to glue anything to anything with a rigid bond. I did not want something that would flex and creep.

Before taking the glue anywhere near the boat, I gave it a trial. Not having a suitable piece of fibreglass to hand, I glued a tee-nut to an aluminium square tube, after roughing the surfaces with an angle grinder. I hung some weights off it, using plastic bottles filled with water for the weights; 1 litre being 1 kilogram. 

On my first attempt, I found that the glue had not set in the centre of the tee nut. It seems the Sikabond 145 cures with exposure to the atmosphere, like Superglue and other C3 glues. As the stainless steel of the tee-nut and the alumium proxy for the fibre-glass formed perfectly hermetical seals, the centre of the glue blob took longer to cure than the rim. I tried again and waited three days instead of one.

This time, the glue blob had set, so I started attaching weights, working all the way up to 11kg (I ran out of plastic bottles and buckets) and then left it. A week later, I was pleased to see the assembly still holding the weight with no sign of sagging or creeping. The glue worked as I had hoped.

The next step was to cut a plywood plate to shape. I used a tick-stick on a piece of cardboard salvaged from the greengrocer’s bin and worked on a blank. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could cut the bulkhead plate and the battery tray (more on this later) from a single piece of 6mm plywood that I bought, again, from the Big Green Shed. With a little trimming and shaping, I formed the plate to fit snugly onto the bulkhead with its port side tucked beneath the companionway trim.

I drilled holes into the plywood baseplate where I wanted the tee-nuts so I could use the baseplate to hold the nuts in position as the glue cured. I had to invent some Heath-Robinson struts to push the baseplate against the bulkhead, using some scrap strips of ply and an extendable broom-handle.

With a wire brush, I scuffed the spots of the bulkhead where the tee-nuts would go. I stuck packing tape to the plywood to de-bond the cured glue, applied my blobs to the tee-nuts and set the thing in place to cure overnight. I did not want to leave it until the glue had set completely, as it might have bonded something to something else more permanently than intended.

I was a little too hasty in removing it the following morning. I had not covered the whole surface of the plywood with packing tape, so wherever the glue touched the plywood, it set. The glue also did not fully set between the tee-nuts and bulkhead, causing some tear-out on the rear face of the plate. The overall effect was that the glue had fully set where I did not want it to set, and it had not set where I wanted it to set, causing me to knock the tee-nuts out of alignment. 

I decided to nudge the tee-nuts back into alignment, only to find the glue setting as soon as I moved them. Thankfully, I got everything back to where it needed to be. After re-assembling my Heath-Robinson struts, I left it, again. A week later, I took off the baseplate and found the tee-nuts solidly set in place, needing some trimming of excess glue.

The bolts were made from cut-down button-head bolts from the local nut and bolt shop. A tip for cutting down bolts with a hand-held hacksaw is to fit a nut between the cut and the bolt head. This provides a flat, adjustable surface to cut against, protects the thread you want to keep, and helps knock off the inevitable burrs when you unwind the nut. If you have ever attempted to thread a nut onto a cut bolt, you will know the fiddly nuisance those burrs can be.

Finally, in this episode, I roughed up the sides of the boxes that I will fit onto the plywood baseplate and bolted the assembly in place. If it survived the road trip to the boat club, and a Sunday afternoon race, it would probably last a while. Thankfully, it did. 

Now, the magic of my demountable system truly starts. I took the baseplate home to work on it further whilst leaving the boat in its parking-bay at the club.

Carboard mock-up made from a mango box

Testing how well the glue holds the tee-nut

Battery tray and bulkhead baseplate, cut to size

Holding the base plate in position while the glue sets

Tee-nuts glued in position on the bulkhead

One of the glued-on tee-nuts

A cut-down holding bolt with its washers

Roughed up assembly bolted onto the bulkhead

Episode 44 LROCP AMSA MMSI ICOM M94DE

This jumble of letters and numbers can be explained by my decision to get a radio for my boat. To the uninitiated, the process is as complex as making sense of all these letters and numbers.

Let me start with the legalities. In Queensland, it is illegal to operate a VHF radio without a license. For safety reasons, however, the Water Police would rather see Moreton Bay filled with unlicensed boaties with VHF radios than unlicensed boaties without them. So, the law is rarely enforced. 

Apart from legalities, another good reason to get a license (properly, a Certificate of Proficiency) is to get a Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) code, which is free and is administered in Australia by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA). Your MMSI inducts you into the world of the Automatic Identification System (AIS) and Digital Selective Calling (DSC). When combined with your coordinates from a GPS-enabled device, the MMSI can be used to send distress messages with the push of a button. If there is one lesson I have learned about sailing, it is that things can go to custard very quicky, and they often do it all at the same time. The prospect of hitting a distress button, rather than going through the rigmarole of a Mayday call including knowing and relating your latitude and longitude when everything is going wrong all at once, is irresistible. 

In 2016, long before I knew much about MMSIs and GPS, I attended a day-course that qualified me for the Australian Maritime Safety Authority’s (AMSA) Long-Range Operator Certificate of Proficiency (LROCP). At the time, it was useful for my volunteering efforts with Sails at Bayside, as I could (legally) operate a VHF radio for the day’s activities.

The course taught me some useful fundamentals; for example VHF works (almost) on line-of-sight, thus limiting its range.  The course also taught me some other interesting, but less useful things; for example, methodologies to measure the specific gravity of sulfuric acid in a lead-acid battery using a hydrometer. I am sure this latter technique was widely used by U-Boats in WW2 but I cannot see myself drilling holes into the sealed batteries of today’s world to insert a free-floating hydrometer to find out what remaining charge they might hold. Also, what about lithium-iron-phosphate batteries? A colleague who volunteers with Marine Rescue told me that as radios are electrical devices, the course designers needed to include something of an electrical nature, hence the inclusion of WW2-era battery technology. Maybe it tells us something about the median age of the people who designed the course, but I digress.

I sold my previous VHF radio with Bolero, my previous boat, so I was in want of a radio and in need of a new one. I knew this day would come, but I had been putting if off trusting in the law that says electronic gear doubles in power and halves in price every 18 months or so.

My new boat, Sandpiper, did not have a radio. It did not even have batteries. I was hoping to find a hand-held self-powered unit that had GPS (for position) and AIS (for distress calls). The reputed quality of the brand was important. I settled on the ICOM M94DE. The fact that it had DSC was a bonus. It even had some rudimentary navigation capabilities in that it could point you to preset waypoints. Whitworths had one in stock that, at $499, was $6 cheaper than the best offer on-line, so I set about buying it.

Actually buying it involved some to-and-fro. Whitworths advised me to get an MMSI before buying the radio because you only get one opportunity to code in the MMSI. This might seem draconian, but it prevents the MMSI system, which is run out of Geneva, from getting clogged up with spurious MMSIs. It also discourages theft.

However, when I started my on-line application for an MMSI, it asked for the serial number of the radio. As I did not yet have the radio, I could not complete the application. I called AMSA who reassured me that there was no other reason for me to not get an MMSI, but it might take up to two weeks. I also called ICOM who reassured me that if I stuffed up the MMSI, I could send the unit back to the manufacturer to get the wrong MMSI erased. I then bought the radio from Whitworths and entered the serial number into my MMSI application. I was pleasantly surprised to find the MMSI in my email the following morning and, with my wife keeping careful watch over my shoulder, entered it into the radio, finally connecting all the dots, letters, and numbers.

Before taking it out, or even entering the MMSI, I had to charge the battery. In its first charge, the screen showed a “charging” icon, but gave no indication of progress. This might be because it had not been booted up, did not know its MMSI, did not know what a full charge looked like, etc. I simply left it for  a few hours and returned to a blank screen. Trying the "on" button, proved productive, as it actually turned on. Once set up, the screen showed how full the battery was (without the use of a hydrometer, I hasten to add), GPS position and, when I had typed it in, the MMSI. Incidentally, ICOM told me that I could have used the unit as a MMSI-less VHF radio by pressing the clear (CLR) button when it asked for one. The written instructions in the manual were obtuse on this important point.

On my first outing this week, I found that the radio worked as advertised, but it needed some adjustment.

As noted earlier, VHF works (almost) by line-of-sight. Because of this, I could not contact Volunteer Marine Rescue (VMR) Raby Bay from Manly Marina. There was some higher ground in-between. I had to get to the eastern side of Green Island to talk to VMR Raby Bay. It was reassuring to do a radio check, even though my transmission was weak. It is also worth remembering the line-of-sight nature of VHF when put the radio down, somewhere handy. Leaving the radio on a seat or on the floor lowers its visibility and limits its ability to receive. I found a useful function for the belt clip by clipping the radio onto the handle of the sliding companionway hatch, which was as high as I could get it without holding it up in the air. 

An alternative was to get a fixed radio with an aerial. However, there are no obvious out-of-the-way places to mount the aerial, and it would also need a house battery and full electrics, which the boat did not have. The cost of the fixed radio plus aerial would have been close to the cost of my hand-held radio, not counting the installation of the electrics.

Another issue was that I had not yet dialed in the collision alarm properly. The collision alarm goes off when another AIS-equipped vessel will enter the prescribed radius for closest point of approach (CPA) or time to CPA (TCPA). My alarm went off almost continuously, which was maddening. It went off in Manly Marina, likely because some of the moored boats had their AIS turned on. It went off whenever another boat was travelling parallel to mine, even though it was 1.5nm (about 2km) away). More than once, I wished I had my binoculars so that I could find the converging boat in an apparently empty bay. High on the list of priorities when I got home was to dial in a smaller radius for CPA, a smaller time for TCPA and something called Slow Warn, which is described in the manual with the same lack of clarity as the opportunities to code in the MMSI.

Overall, my VHF radio gives me confidence that it will do what it needs to do when everything else is turning turtle (it is worth mentioning at this point that the radio is waterproof, and it floats and flashes when dropped in the water). My next road test might be a Sunday-afternoon race. 

Radio clipped onto handle of companionway hatch cover