False Alarm
Due to an obscure but noteworthy electrical glitch, plus oodles of distracted seamanship on my part, a sizable U.S. Coast Guard team spent part of a beautiful Saturday looking for an AIS man overboard alert associated with my boat, Gizmo. Fireman Joey Jansen-Hedrick and Petty Officer 1st Class T.J. Iaci were the guys in the boarding party; they had to deal with an owner/operator (me) who was pretty sure they didn’t know what they were talking about. But they were politely persistent. And as it turns out, they were right.
It was July 29 and I had begun the day at about 10 a.m., motoring over to the launch ramp dock at Eaton Point in Camden, Maine, to pick up six guests. We then tagged along behind the classic boat parade and back into the inner harbor, where we took a few gawker turns around the amazing superyacht anchored north of town. Then we crossed the bay to check out seals and such, and timed our return to watch the noon Camden Classics Cup race starts. We even took pictures for the . It was (almost) a complete blast of a summer Saturday excursion. I know this is an accurate overview of our cruise because it was recorded on the NMEA 2000 log of received AIS tracks collected by a Yacht Devices YDVR, and later displayed as a GPX file in Coastal Explorer.
