Shearwater is the hub of commerce between Port Hardy and
Prince Rupert. They supply many of the communities with fuel and building
materials. And they have the only boatyard on this long section of coast.
Lady in Waiting had
arrived in Shearwater the a couple days before to get their dinghy davit
repaired. We arrived to find the repair complete, apparently quickly and very
reasonably.
I arrived before most of the boats in Shearwater and quickly
got to work changing the generator oil. Easy, but a bit messy.
Getting from Ocean Falls to Shearwater means transiting
narrow, winding Gunboat Passage. No problem with good charts, but one of the
boats suddenly found themselves without any charts.
The owner had asked Philbrooks Boatyard to install charts of
the whole Inside Passage on both his Nobeltec and NavNet systems. Philbrooks had charged him for the work and
indicated it was complete. But the charts weren’t installed. They’d somehow not
included one of the chips needed for the NavNet system. And, upon questioning
by phone, admitted they’d not installed charts on Nobeltec because they
couldn’t get the computer DVD drive working. They did not, however, offer a
solution to our problem of no charts.
So we called Nobeltec and asked what charts we needed. They
happily sold us the appropriate C-Map unlock codes for $500. With the unlock
code we could install the charts from DVDs that we had. Except the DVD drive
didn’t work. I grabbed my boat laptop (Windows) and transferred the contents of
the DVDs to a thumb drive, then transferred them from the thumb drive to the
other computer. After several hours we had all the charts installed and
functioning. For the record, Nobeltec has got to be one of the most frustrating
pieces of software to operate. Rose Point Coastal Explorer seems every bit as
capable and a whole lot more user friendly.
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| Moonrise in Shearwater |
22.25 nm today
464.96 nm total
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