Out Of Office Living

  We got the Seakeeper Ride on Out of Office. If you have one you have no doubt discovered the Seakeeper Ride Nite Lite. The control panel, at least on ours, is hooked up to the House Battery, so it is always on lighting up the cabin. One can pull the fuse for it, but that would be too easy. Those that want to make boating more difficult by doing unnecessary improvements install a switch instead! The switch came from New Wire Marine. Wiring wasn’t hard but requires a lot of crawling around. Completely unnecessary, but now we can turn off the nite lite!

 Many boaters seem to monitor only channel 16, or even not that. However, you may want to monitor a few extra channels, especially if you travel to Canada. A few weeks ago we were transiting the Strait of Juan De Fuca to Victoria. There was a large Canadian navy ship patrolling up and down the border. Some pleasure boat got to close to her for comfort and the radio operator tried multiple times to hail the pleasure boat. However, they hailed them on 68 not on 16. The pleasure boat never responded. It seems like non standard practice and perhaps it was a mistake but every modern marine radio should have a scan function. You probably want to monitor at least 16, 9 (the new hailing channel), 13 (commercial hailing channel), 22 (US coast guard announcements), and apparently 68 if you are in Canada.