It’s a bird, its a plane, it’s…Brent up in the air! 🙂 One of the last big projects on our to-do list was going up the mast to install the AirMar, a system for weather monitoring. Then the iKommunicate and iKonnect (wireless access point) inside the main cabin. All of this tech craziness combined allows us to detect wind, speed, GPS, barometric pressure, and temperature. Raw data thats transmitted down, where we can view via app on our electronics – pretty cooooooool!

Weather/wind was perfect this week to finally go up. Brent was the lucky one to go…actually he hates it up there, haha. We have a bosuns chair, one of the more popular ways to go up the mast. I’m not exactly strong enough to hoist him up by myself so we enlisted the help of some nearby friends. We’ve got some great boat neighbors that let us repay them with beer! They just happen to have a sailing expert/instructor visiting from NY. Sailing, boating, marine he knows everything and has been such a great resource offering up TONS of tips that we are super grateful for. He even called me young grasshopper when I embarrassingly didn’t know where something was. Eh, we all start somewhere.

We planned out the install the day before. So when it was time to go up, Brent had all his tools ready with him, and we were able to fix one of our spreader lights on the spot too. From below, I was in and out of the cockpit, to make sure everything was happening as planned and if Brent needed anything up above. Our neighbors helped with hoisting and communication. Especially as it came time to feed the cable down. So what exactly did we do up there?

1. Hoisted Brent up the mast – safely.
2. Mounted the AirMar to the top of the mast.
3. Ran a lot of cable down into the salon and over to the starboard settee.
4. Installed the iKommunicate, which takes raw 0183 NEMA (National Emergency Management Association) data from the AirMar weather stations and puts it over wifi.
5. Installed the iKonnect, a 12v wireless router that replaced our Apple router.
6. Lastly, downloaded the Weathercaster software for our two iPads and Android tablet.

Cheers from the marina!