Gloucester, MA

This was a motoring day, brilliant blue skies, just no wind. The little anchorage in the little inner harbor was crowded, we took the last available mooring ball.

We found a super market and a coin laundry in walking distance. It's good to have a supermarket again, not just little convenience stores. And we take a laundry anytime we get one.

In the evening Dirk met Tom, a guy Dirk contacted via Craigs-list. Dirk bought a used Furuno GP-32 GPS receiver. Tom was so nice to bring it to Gloucester. This is the same unit we have mounted at our nav-station and can serve as a backup unit. It is a great little unit, some of the features we like:

• Standalone display, doesn't need a chartplotter or radar display to run
• It has a simple graphic display, no chart, butone can see the boat swinging at anchor.
• Built in anchor alarm
• Very low power consumption, and with all the functionality needed to turn off everything else when at anchor

A couple of times the anchor alarm went off at night and we had to stumble out of bed, to the nav-station. Mostly, the alarm was caused by strong tidal currents, which swing the boat in the other direction, then the anchor is being pulled out and has to re-set itself. It mostly does re-set, and we can watch this on the little display. The new, used GPS unit will be mounted just overhead where we sleep, so we don't have to get up, but can just watch our position staying in bed..... It also serves as clock and has an alarm to wake us up in the morning.