Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2016

This morning my brother Joe drove us to Demopolis and after a Walmart run we started the final prep to get the boat ready leave tomorrow.

We filled the water tanks, got ice, tied the dinghy to the back of the boat and did some temporary wiring of a new radio that has a built-in AIS reciever.

The dinghy is an 11' "Spinthrift" model rowboat thay I bought from a man in Georgia. It's a little big to store on deck, so we will pull it behind Genesis. I had good intentions of repainting it and renaming it Exodus (it comes right after Genesis), but that's another project that will have to wait.

The AIS reciever on the new radio is a neat safety feature. All the big commercial boats and many cruising boats have AIS transmitters, which send digital data messages several times a minute. The data typically includes the vessel's name, direction, speed, etc, and can be revieved from several miles away. So instead of meeting a huge towboat pushing barges in the middle of a bend with no warning, my AIS receiver will alert me to his position, speed and direction  while he is still miles away.

I still didn't get the new radio wired correctly to communicate with my chartplotter, but that can wait for another day.

We met this afternoonwith several other boaters who are heading south in the morning. There should be 5 or 6 of us, and we'll all go through the Demopolis lock together, hopefully around 6:00 am. It was really great to get to meet the other boaters and get to know them. Everybody has a story, and it's amazing how frequently God blesses us by letting us cross paths with people who stregthen our faith.

We will try to post at the end of the day tomorrow - if we can get internet sevice.