We have spent a delightful week here at Chub. This is a lovely resort with a great pool, nice beach and many excellent friends.

This advice comes from spending about 800 hours in the last year travelling to new places every day. It does not apply to leaving your home dock and cruising around your home waters for a day. These procedures are not really needed in the canals or ICW (which is why those places are like taking a vacation and offshore passages are like real work).

First of all I would only want my autopilot to steer a course I dialed in, I believe an interface to the GPS is dangerous for several reasons. The correct way to plan a daily run in unfamilar waters is to lay out course lines on the paper or electronic chart. Measure distances and bearings. Calculate travel times on each leg. Computer charts really help with this, and in my opinion is their only real use on the vessel. You write down the waypoints, course, and travel times in your log, with their name and number. You must be prepared for total electronics failure (though it never happened on our cruise, we did lose one of the 2 computers). You then enter these waypoints in your GPS, double checking all the coordinates. It is very easy to get the minutes reversed (ie. enter 21 instead of 12) or to make some other error. Very easy! Once I even entered the wrong degrees of lattitude (45 instead of 46 - but with the right minutes). Enter waypoints for alternate destinations you may use because of weather or trouble. It is almost impossible to take a waypoint off a chart, enter it in the GPS and steer to an alternate harbor/anchorage at sea in the middle of a storm. You will be nervous enough in these conditions. If you have preplanned your alternates you will be much more ready to make the decision to abort and head for one of them (we needed to do this literally hundreds of times).

You will not neglect this after your first unexpected storm at sea!

Now you have all your waypoints in the GPS and your partner has helped you double check when you entered them. We always did this the night before a passage, it is part of our standard drill for getting ready. It takes about 1 to 2 hours and, for us, was a duty best not left for the morning of the departure. We had a GPS chart plotter and that helped you check your common sense when entering the points. Even with all this checking, the greatest cause of error was in entering a bad waypoint, that is a sound reason not to trust the autopilot to steer you to the point. We also

learned to use the "Route" feature of the GPS. Most people don't do this. The reason to do it is because you are going to have lots of waypoints on your screen. You'll have your course plus the alternates. You'll have yesterdays. It is too easy to make a mistake at sea and pick the wrong one as your next waypoint. You end up approaching an alternate harbor or taking a shortcut through a shoal instead of around it, because you are steering to waypoint 122 not 121. That is the reason I also have written down in my log the waypoint names and numbers I am supposed to use (along with the distances, courses, and travel times). Each time we reach a waypoint and turn to the next I mark off the time in my log. Another reason is lots

of times I had entered a waypoint I never intended to actually go to. The waypoint was on the outer edge of a shoal and my plan was to leave it to my port (or starboard). I wanted to know the range and bearing to the hazard at all times as I approached. Given this, if we had a change of helm, I always told them what to steer magnetic, what waypoint, and what our strategy was (even if I was just going below for a minute). It is part of the cermony of handing over the helm.

Let me add to ALWAYS use the Mark function on your GPS to mark the center of the channel of the harbor as you are leaving! Using your own equipment is the most accurate way to enter a point. If you have to return, you can steer for this waypoint. Don't neglect planning for an abort. If you have to abort and return to port it will be at least in difficult, if not dangerous conditions.

We also use a highlighter pen to mark on the charts our course. I started out highlighting the course I planned to take for the day, but soon began only to highlight as we ran. When running a course with dozens of waypoints between islands, shoals, channels, and passages you have never seen before, it is VITAL to know exactly where you are at all times. We advanced the highlight at every waypoint, bouy, or recognisable landmark. This is very hard to do by yourself. Usually Karen had the charts and highlighter, me the helm. Other cruisers used paper stickers so they could re-use their charts but we figured we would just get different color highlighters.

In spending a year watching the GPS for 5 to 10 hours per day, I observed very high relability. I never noticed any freezes, but I did once in a while notice a big swing in my indicated bearing, and constant variability in my indicated speed. Ignore it. I always steer to the magnetic compass. The GPS only updates once per 2 seconds and if you steer to this you will be constantly "hunting" the course. Your magnetic compass updates constantly, and can not ever fail do to a power outage or some electrical problem. Every day, everyroute we were prepared to hand steer to the compass and make it safely. We have children aboard, we can't take any risks.

All landfalls and harbors must be approached visually, not on instruments. Once you get within 3 miles the GPS becomes less important. Now it is time to begin carefully scanning the land with your binoculars. Karen liked the 7x but I prefered the 15x. Anyways, you now have to take care of local conditions which are not on the charts and you can't 100% trust the guidebooks (although an aerial color photograph of the harbor is worth it's weight in gold). Watching local boats and reading bouy numbers and comparing them against

your charts is the best way to make your final approach. Plan for uncharted shoals due to dredging, rocks, and new or moved bouys. Plus call the harbor or marina and asking directions of course! By the way, so many do NOT answer their VHF but get the phone on the first ring. So in the approach, ignore that waypoint! It is not going to be in the actual correct position for entering the harbor. No matter where you got the coordinate. They are placed so that you can get close enough for a safe visual approach. Even if you got it off the chart or from the guidebook. (The only one correctly placed is the one you

entered last time you were in the approach to this harbor as I advised above).

On 90% of the Great Circle + Bahamas you would be hand steering anyways. The autopilot can steer better than either of us, but I can give a more comfortable ride by compensating for waves and wakes. It gives something to do, I take pleasure in controlling the boat, and you better be able to do it if the autopilot fails. On the long Bahamas passages the autopilot would be nearly essential. By the way, I always enter a waypoint at least every hour. It is too dangerous to have waypoints 20 to 50 miles or more apart because you may have overlooked something, and a run of that long a time may make you complacent. Having the waypoint alarm beeping every hour gives you something important to look forward to and adds to your sense of progress, plus forces you to update the log.

This got us 4600 miles through new waters with no accidents.

We have been home for a week and I'm ready to start a new job Monday. Even after only a year, it is not all that easy re-entering land society. Lots of things you take for granted are a shock for us: the violence, the agression of people on the road, crime and hatred, tension and stress, the price of gasoline. We are all trying to stay as we are and not turn back into the people we were before we left. One big surprise is that it is NOT summer here. We were just sweating in the tropics. Here it is breaking out in Spring. It is a bit of a seasonal shock.

I posed this question last night at the mexican food place in Escondido (which I have been craving for months): "What do you miss most about the boat and our cruise?"

Amy (age 11) said, "I miss my own little space with everything I need in reach." Well she could move into her closet. This was a great surprise for me to hear!

Heidi (age 9) said, "I miss playing on the beach every day." I'll try to get the pool fixed.

Karen (first mate) "I miss walking my little dog twice a day." Well, he gets to run around with the other dogs now.

Duncan (the dog) clearly misses the walks, he sits by the door waiting in the morning and after dinner.

Jim misses meeting new people and making new friends. Me, who never thought he needed people and new friends before, has discovered just how lonely a deserted anchorage is.

"So what's the best part about being home?"

Amy and Heidi said together "Having lots of room to play in, being able to go outside!" I expected them to say being with their old friends, but the two of them are still in their own little world. It's hard to explain. You can see it if you watch them for 5 minutes. I've never seen 2 human beings closer together. That doesn't mean they were not really happy to be with their friends. They both elected to finish home schooling rather than go back to local school for the last month of the year.

Karen said "Being home is the best part, plus not having to put everything away all the time". It's true. While on board we were NOT your "ship shape and everything in its place crew", yet everything did have a place, and it was unthinkable to leave tools out or leave the kitchen not cleaned up and put away.

Jim said "Having a large kitchen and plenty of room to relax and eat!"

We can all think of a million things we miss, and a thousand good reasons to be home. No one said "TV" or laying on the couch or their bigger bed.

Much of our trip is fading and already seems a million miles away, but other parts burn brightly and we'll never forget.

I am finishing up my "CJs Log" which will be on the web page later today. You'll all be able to read our cruising notes from the Bahamas and other entries you missed because we had no way to send them. I will send another email with the URL when that is done.