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Fay Wrecks A Vacation

The owner of an Atlanta area car dealership had rented a condo on St. Simons Island and purchased a 22 foot Sea Pro in anticipation of a nice leisurely fishing vacation with his family before school started back up. He gave up on the fishing, what with Tropical Storm Fay beating down us, but he still asked me to check out his GPS problems, since he wasn’t able to get his plotter to work.

I sat through a nice squall for 45 minutes waiting for him to arrive, with a view of SeaTow firing up the engines and getting ready to bring in a SeaRay that lost engines in the harbor:
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Kudos to Morningstar Marinas for buying this joint recently and dumping some serious coin in upgrading the facilities.

Onboard, I found a Lowrance LCX-16 Cl plotter, dating back to an August 2001 purchase, as well as a West Marine branded Garmin 276c, age unknown. Both initially failed to read the map cards. While the Lowrance required a hard reset to bring it up to speed, the Garmin suffered from user error: the owner had slipped the map card in backwards.

Ever suffer from those DOH! moments, when a tech does something simple and then hands you the bill?

Giving Fay the Finger

Tropical Storm Fay is still beating us to submission, but I chose to hit the Golden Isles Marina today anyway. I took my wife, Leslie Brooke, along for the trip:gim-brooke-helps-300x225

The egrets were at play and didn’t seem to mind the wind:
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My friend’s 1999 Viking 56 sport fishing boat has the original Northstar 961x GPS system, which continues to work well for him, but the screen went out recently (for the second time in two years). Northstar has moved way past the 961 and outsourced the support to get it off their hands. Sad, considering some of the systems went in as recently as 2003 to the tune of $9,000. Lucky for him, I pulled out a full 961xd system last December with two working screens and updated computer.

After testing the replacement and removing the old screen, Brooke and I went to work laying the silicon down for the new screen. I’m grateful for the excellent factory wiring job, by the way. The used unit looked so good that the captain couldn’t tell that I had swapped the entire unit out:
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What “outdated” equipment do you stand by because it just keeps on working?