2000

ELECTRONIC CHARTING

So it’s 2000, the fabulous Ulla, my crew/mate for 6 yrs and I are returning to Thalia where I’d left her in Mario’s Lagoon Marina at the village of Jose Pobre near Isla Linton, on Panama’s Caribbean coast. Mario’s was an interesting place, for small money Mario would look after your boat, in a fashion, after you tied it to everything you could find in his rock/reef strewn lagoon, after he’d guided you through a rock cut that I suspect he’d blasted himself. Ulla and I had sailed into Cartagena, Colombia from another work gig in south Fl intending to enjoy the lovely city, provision and return to the San Blas Is for a little R&R before transiting the Canal and entering the pacific, we wanted to explore the west coast of Panama and Costa Rica before heading across the south pacific. We were heading for Airlie Beach, Australia where we would catch up with our cruiser friends. You see our friends were boat builders, Bill and his wife Gemma Mae built cold molded Adams 40s, well respected cruiser/racers, in fact one of his boats won the Sydney – Osaka race. He was in demand and claimed we’d need 2 yrs to build 5 boats 2 at a time in his shed. At the end we’d each own one free clear and finished. Plus he really like the way I’d done the energy systems on Thalia and figured it would be a huge draw. Gotta have dreams. Right? Unfortunately just as we were about to clear out of Cartagena for Panama Club Nautico got an emergency telephone call from Denmark, Ulla’s mother had died unexpectedly, she immediately flew back to Copenhagen , it’s now end of Aug. So I promised to find a way to stay in touch via email, Pactor 1s were starting to become common and with a bit of luck I’d find someone with one in the San Blas Is. It’s only 200+ mi to a beautiful anchorage with great spearfishing in the SBIs and off I went. I discovered some old Dutch cruising friends had a pactor system and I was soon in touch with Ulla. She’d decided to do a work gig as she was already in Denmark, Ulla is a nurse with a lot of specialties and never has trouble finding work, she was suggesting that I come to Copenhagen for a few weeks and we’d have Christmas together with her family. I tried to keep the email abuse short for my friends sake and just before I left the SBIs for mainland Panama to find Marco’s Marina my friends, who were about 75 mi away got a last email, we were on an 8 meg net when they told me. “Ok, talk to you at the end of the net.” I suggested, I waited for them to come up and they told me that I probably didn’t want this read on an open mic net. “It’s a little personal, possibly insulting” they cautioned. “How else am I going to hear it.” I reasoned. “Ok, but after this conversation everyone will be listening in.” they stated. “Yeah, I know, but if they don’t have lives of their own, they’re welcome to hitchhike on mine.” My friend read it, Ulla was mad at me and it was personal and definitely insulting. For a couple of days I had other folks calling me up after the net to say how unfair they thought Ulla had been. Man, I was the talk of the SBIs, these are people who leave their VHFs on the calling channel and when someone proposes another working channel get up to change freqs and follow the conversation. I imagine they bless the inclusion of automatic scanning on virtually all radios these days, they don’t have to get off their fat asses to change freqs, it’s just like the old party line phone systems, except there’s no quiet click when someone picks up.

I got into Mario’s about mid Oct and started cleaning, now I’m normally a pretty indifferent housekeeper , I’m sure a lot of friends would say that’s kind, but I knew I was leaving Thalia for 10 wks at the height of Panamas rainy season and if Ulla was pissed at me now, she’d be livid to come back to an interior that looked like a fungus farm. I took the poor old girl apart and cleaned things I didn’t even know were there with soap and bleach then finally wiped everything down with white vinegar and flew to Copenhagen. When we got back there was no mildew, unlike now in Costa Rica’s rainy season, everything was spotless and she smelled sweet.

Denmark was a blast, an expensive blast, but nonetheless Ulla was making good money and we stayed with her brother, a senior accountant for Deloitt Touche, nice place, nice family, nice town. We travelled to Stockholm so she could catch up with her sister, another fantastic town as wandered the town in the snow I kept marveling at the age of everything. “Ulla, look, this cornerstone is from 1791.” I’d say excitedly. “Get a grip it’s a warehouse.” Was her retort. We even went downhill skiing, I knew that Ulla is an Austrian instructor and Austria is fussy about conferring the ticket to non-Austrians. But lord, can that girl ski! “Elles es ermosa.” Was the only superlative I know that surpasses gorgeous. I used to live to ski when I lived in western Canada and I used to be pretty good, but it’d been 8 -9 yrs since I was on skis, we both loved it.

Ulla’s brother got here a pretty cherry used Windows ’95 laptop to replace her now dead 386 and we dragged it back to Panama with us in mid Feb. On our return we asked on the net if anyone had a weatherfax program they could help us with and a guy in the Panama Canal Yacht Club in Colon came up. “No problem, give me a call on the radio when you get in, we’re at the dock.” We thanked him and set out on the 50 mi to Colon, we were going there anyway to provision. Yes, here comes the charting part. Our computer God booted up the computer and said “there’s nothing on here but the operating system, it’s a virgin.” We didn’t know if that was good or not so we kept our mouths shut, hell, I’d just gotten an email address and only seen Windows ’95 on the computers of others, never heard of ’98, but there was no point in fessing up, besides I think he knew it. “Do you want me to put the Captain on it?” he asked. Neither of us had any idea what he was talking about and said so. “ When did you leave to go cruising?” he asked “92” I answered “Ah, that’ll do it, you might consider a reality check, the Captain is a chart plotting program, you know what a chart plotter is? It’ll make your computer into one, just plug in a GPS signal.” “Oh” I ventured “But that means chart Cds, we don’t have a CD player.” He pushed a cleverly concealed button and out slide the CD platter. “We have a CD player, we have a CD player” we both exclaimed delighted. “So want the program?” he asked again. ”Sure but those Cds cost more money than God has.” I whined. He looked at us like we’d just fallen off the turnip truck “Ever heard of a CD burner?” He enquired. Apparently not. “But what about copyright protection?” I asked. He just shook his head sadly having decided the fall from the truck had been on the head. He installed the program, burned us some CDs and plugged his GPS in and initialized the com port (see I’m not a complete computer idiot, but it was a tough uphill learning curve and these days it still getting steeper, fast) then gave us a quick tutorial and a spare RS232 connecter he had for the serial port on the computer c/w a picture of which pins to solder, still got the picture. We left his boat after thanking him profusely, Ulla clutching the magical computer tightly, no way she was going to let me either carry it or use it.

Three years later a French cruising friend who was repairing both rudders on a cat having failed to properly read the opening to Provedencia’s anchorage put MaxSea on my computer and I’ve never looked back. George and Thalia

“If I’m lyin…”