MMSN

I became a Net Control Station (NCS) for the Maritime Mobile Service Network on Monday, and ran my first net that evening. I'm not on the schedule yet, that'll have to wait a while, but I have been picking up open slots almost every day this week. It's been a lot of fun, but the first couple of times really wore me out.

The Maritime Net provides assistance to maritime mobiles like myself with position reports, phone patches, hourly weather reports, and message passing. I'm currently the only NCS that's actually on a boat, but I've heard that there have been others before. Although I can run the net, I obviously can't provide phone patches, and find it difficult to read weather reports on my iPhone -- the font's too small. Luckily, there's normally other NCS's online willing to help out.

In the afternoon and early evening, I can usually contact stations from as far away as The Netherlands to the east, the out into the Pacific to the West. I've had several European stations check in with me, which is close to 4,000 miles.

Radio watch:

The radios are all in place, but I still need to finish making up all my coax cables. I'd also like to reinstall my antenna tuner, but since that's not critical, it may have to wait.

My 20-meter dipole is working really well, but the 40-meter I made up doesn't work quite as well. I hoist the 20-meter up to the masthead as a vertical/sloper, but the 40-meter is too long, so I hauled it up on the starboard flag halyard as an inverted V, with the lower ends tied off to the pulpits on both ends. However, the boat's too short, so I had to coil the ends. I can make contacts with it, but it doesn't work near as well as the vertical.

Boat watch:

I've been making slow but steady progress, so I'm still planning on leaving by the middle of next month. I decided to hold off on replacing the forward hatch. Lashing it down like I did for the hurricane should be fine. That means that except for remounting a few things and painting on the non-skid, she's pretty well ready to go. Looks like it's time to start thinking about provisions, and route planning.

Zoe watch:

It's been pretty cool out here for the last few days. So much so that the last time I let Zoe swim, she turned right around and came back to the dinghy and wanted out. I guess it was just too cold for her. We're in for some more rain for the rest of the week, but it should warm back up after that. However, I think our swimming days up here might be numbered -- at least mine are.