B.J. Porter

Yeah we're off to a slow start. But seriously, you could have the Madden 18 "Coaching Assistant" calling your plays from a book of four choices and do a better job as Offensive Coordinator than Ken Zampese. Who the hell marches it down to the six yard line in a 2:00 drill with the clocked stopped at :06 on third and goal and DOESN'T take one more short pass into the end zone? The last play they ran took like 3 seconds off the clock... Don't get me started. This team has mountains of talent everywhere but on the O-Line...

"Antifa" isn't a group, you fascist dipshit. Do some reading off Breitbart.

Glad to see you're finally out of the closet in the white supremacist/Nazi camp. Either that, or you are one gullible, stupid sonofabitch. Which is it?

Antifa = Anti-fascist Anti-Antifa = pro fascist Just saying...

Last year, by the time we left QLD in early December it was getting hot. Of course, NSW was also Really Fucking Hot for a while, too. During the week we took my parents out to wine country after New Year's, we recorded 114° on the rental car's thermometer. Parked in the shade... I think one tropical storm came through QLD last year, which we were happy to be south for.

We're giving Tassie some serious thought. We actually hadn't intended on staying in Oz at all past our Sept 13 Visa expiry. One year here in Oz was the plan; we were supposed to sail to New Caledonia as soon as Will got here. But...the batteries ran late - they were supposed to be DONE before my son arrived in July; the cells didn't even arrive until he'd been here a couple of weeks. The install took longer than expected for a number of reasons. We realized that we'd be pushing it dangerously to try and get them done in time to leave, and leaving by that date was causing us undue stress and risk. The idea of being forced to leave without a proper shakedown into possibly dodgy weather was not a happy one. Of course, renewing when you're already on the ground in Oz is mad expensive, whether it's for a week or a year. The only difference is that for a stay less than a year we could probably have skipped the utterly useless doctor's visits and x-rays...but we wanted to make sure we had time to shake everything down. But then you may putting out another $345/person to renew when the shorter visa expires in less than six months...and you will still get dinged for the doctors. So once you've spent the money (close to $2K AUD by the time all is said and done...not including the Tourist Rebate on the batteries I won't be taking...) you might as well stick around for a bit longer. Now we'll probably strike out for NZ some time after the new year, depending on how things shake out and where we are. Our plan is to put the boat on the hard in NZ before we fly to Europe next June for Will's graduation. I don't have much on the boat to shoot a croc with. Wasp spray and foul language are my harshest tools.

Starting to get too hot to head North...when do cyclones start up?

It's not now, unless they released it in the last 20 minutes.

JUst tried to find out about iNavX for the Android. Seems to be a non-starter.

There was a very similar program for indentured "East Indian" (as they were called in Trinidad) workers in both Trinidad and Fiji. Specifics vary, but in some cases, the deal involved a plot of land at the end. But both countries ended up with large Indian populations. The Indians in Fiji tend to be on the two large islands though, since the archipelagos and villages tend to be owned by the native Fijian population. There is also a substantial Muslim population in Fiji. Diwali is a big holiday in both countries, though Fiji seems to take pretty much everyone's holidays off (Christmas, Easter, Diwali, Mohammed's birthday, etc.), and friends across faiths seem to enjoy swapping celebrations as everyone seems to do something on those days.

Fiji has a very significant population of Indian (as in from India, land of Ghandi & curry) descent. A number of Indians were brought in as workers generations back.

Which radar do you have? Do they still sell a dedicated radar-only display instead of an MFD? Using MaxSea I've got no issues with radar on my ship's PC, but MaxSea is essentially another NavNet node on the network. I've not tried other devices since I don't have any other devices to try.

I don't disagree with your analysis so much as your definition of "extensive". You're not really doing a lot of offshore work with this stuff, though what you are saying makes much sense for a lot of coastal applications.

Sorta like this? When I re-did my electronics in 2009/2010 I had to decide between two approaches - 1) Completely integrated single vendor or 2) "Best of Breed" and integrate them all together. As you can see from this pile, with the exception of the radios, because I like Icom, I decided to go with the Single Vendor solution. I figured integration would be simpler, and it would all work together more nicely. In hindsight, this was a mistake for several reasons. Furuno FI-50 instruments suck. For a lot of reasons they suck, but I've never liked them. What they lack in accuracy, they make up for with the inability to actually show the data you want to. Since they are N2K, I could have used ANY N2K instrument displays with a better result. They made me miss the obsolete end of life ST-80s I pulled off. That Navpilot? It's fucking NMEA 0183, with a proprietary connection to the Furuno compass. Boy was I pissed when I figured that out. You'd think by 2009 Furuno might have managed NMEA 2000 in their autopilot. What that means is that it integrates with NOTHING, and the only way it does navigation from the other instruments is with special NMEA0183 communication setup with the chart plotter. And it's not by any stretch of the imagination the best autopilot out there in terms of sailing a straight line, or, deity forbid, trying to actually sail by the wind like the manual says it should. Don't try that one unless you like autotacking and constant beeping about course errors. Because the PG-500 compass is propriety and connected to the Autopilot, it's useless as a compass unless the AP is on, and it doesn't communicate with everything. I ended up adding a Maretron N2K compass as well. I added a Furuno RD-33 multi data display, mostly because it included an anchor alarm and I wanted it near my bed. Of course, we find out later that 1) the drag alarm requires an MFD to be running and 2) it doesn't support all N2K sentences. I ended up putting a Maretron DSM-250 next to my bed anyway, and moving the RD-33 to the nav station. That HUB-101 is a POS overpriced ethernet hub. I've since replaced it with a $50 Netgear hub I bought in an office supply store. Kudos to Furuno for making the move to ethernet on connectivity, but this piece of crap had...issues...maintaining connections if you shut your instruments down and didn't turn the hub off and let it sit for a while. Note the Airmar sensors. Yup, when you order a Furuno instrument set, you get a 3rd party N2K transducer anyway. It's not single vendor sourced at all... That AIS receiver works well, but is completely proprietary. I can not get it to send data to 3rd party software or devices, which is annoying as hell. For all the "integration" a single vendor solution gave me, I could have gotten better instruments, autopilot, and data displays from other sources. I like the chart plotters; they are rock solid and work well with MaxSea, though the interface feels a bit primitive now it works. I like the radar, I picked a kayak up with it once. SO some of the solutions were quite solid and I've been happy with them. But going single vendor to achieve ease of integration was just stupid. I could have gotten better instruments, better AIS, better data displays, etc. etc. with the exact same amount of integration hassle.

Wow, I bet you weren't even smart enough to get a few bucks from the Russians for posting that stupidity.