In the last two weeks I’ve been out on the water twice, once only for a short sail (about 2 hours) and today for about 4.  Last week it never got above 40 degrees, and there was ice on the deck when I left.  Today it was a little warmer, but still only got up to 50 degrees.  As I always do when I’m sailing, I used my SPOT Satellite Tracker to send notes to my crew on shore to let them know I was OK.

My Tacktick wind instrument isn’t working, and I’m working to get it repaired, so I ended up having to spend a lot more time paying attention to the wind and steering more manually, which is fine with me, at least every once in a while.  At one point there were some sustained winds of at least 25kts for about 45 minutes – very fun!

The new Nauticast AIS transponder is working great – I removed my SR 162 AIS receiver and took it home (more on this later) and directly wired the Nauticast into my chartplotter and multiplexer a few days ago.  I’m hoping others are seeing me too – the whole reason for broadcasting it in the first place.

Hopefully I’ll get some more chances to sail even in these cold months!