Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

Not had to do any in the last few days and I should be a way off my second round. But here’s a link to a fellow Lagoon 420 owners record of genset maintenance.  Hope you find it as funny as I did.

I feel like I’ve been at it all day. I practically have, with the exception of going out shopping for bits and pieces for future chores. Helen managed to do some sealing to prevent some long term damage to woodwork. We did look for a replacement wireless router here but found them to be over twice the price than they are in the US. Need to figure a way round this one.

In Island Water World we bumped into Brian from Avalon who we shared the Indian River trip with in Portsmouth Dominica 6 weeks or so ago. It was nice to catch up on each others stories.

The bananas have almost all gone now. Helen plied me with a large banana dacari a short while ago and it’s pancakes (with bananas) for supper. The rest will go in the bin because they are now overripe and we can probably face no more for a while.

Highlight of today was speaking to Ben and Sam on the internet phone which works really well now that I’ve sorted out a lot of the problems.

I am not finished, by any means with our taxes, but at least we started today. And there’s yet time to do more work. However, fearing how gremlin prone declaring success can be, I think I have made big inroads into the quality of our internet access aboard.

Having spent 2-3 hours scanning documents, etc., to send to our CPA I decided it was time to send off three emails I had built up. This meant trying to get the internet going yet again without the wireless hub. As expected I ran into immediate problems which would only resolve if I first connected to the older XP machine. When trouble shooting I often have a ‘continuous ping’ running – this is a means by which I get a near real time read on connectivity.

This time, the screen was visible when I was messing about with the computers. I spotted an odd coincidence which I simply didn’t believe at first – putting it down to a freaky coincidence. What I saw was my Vista machine suddenly getting worse when the XP machine completed it’s shutdown. To add to this wierdness the Vista machine connection came back to life the moment I turned the XP machine back on. It was only luck I spotted this. I even pointed out the observation to Helen saying I didn’t believe it but would follow it through.

More tests later and I established that it was overall load on the A/C system while on the inverter that was the factor. If I ran the microwave, traffic would flow. With just a little load on it would not. When powered by the genset instead of the inverter there were no issues at all. This has been a real distraction as I’ve got used to the idea that the issues are sometimes resolved when I used the second laptop not realizing it was overall load on the house A/C that was affecting things. It wasn’t just that though. There was some Vista crap to work through and the wireless hub is still a bust.

Turns out I had a spare 400W inverter kicking around back from our Timeless days. I hot wired it to the forward fuse box to test things out and hey presto things are working. Each time. Every time. I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone based on the levels of success I’m experiencing. I did try the wireless hub with the backup inverter but it still exhibited the same issues so I’m declaring it defunct and will look for a new one at a decent price.

I have now put proper ends on the wires to the second inverter and fused it properly. Now it’s permanently installed although I need to put longer wires on sometime and move it as it’s in an awkward place right now.

Note of thanks to the tech folks at Demarctec who are always quick to lend a hand with questions I have.

Now that I’ve written this I’m going to be touching a lot of wood to keep the luck running. So far, so good. Time outs are very few and far between – an improvement on prior best.

This afternoon – more tax work.
This evening – second attempt for local curry. Something to celebrate.

We figured we’d share the photos of our working on the boat as we go. Check out the following pictures of hard labour. We’ll add to this album as we go.

Mixed news on the internet front. I have fixed the network port settings on my laptop and am able to use the internet without the wireless hub. The wireless hub has definitely gone dodgy so we no longer can use more than one laptop on the internet at once. On the upside we now have blindingly fast internet connection. I can download at over 300k/s which may not be great by broadband standards but is colossal based on recent performance. It’s been worth the effort troubleshooting and fixing the various weaknesses in the system. Pity it wasn’t working while our guests were here as they seemed a little in need of being connected.