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Old 01-12-2010, 10:34 PM   #14
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Help me spend some money

Quote:
GonzoF1 wrote:

*if something catastrophic happens and our boat gets an eight-foot hole in it and sinks... four feet or more of our boat will still be sticking out of the water.
Yes, the advantages of sinking in shallow water are many.* Of the eight battleships in Pearl Harbor in 1941, six were refloated, rebuilt, and saw service in the war.* The ship on the left in this photo (West Virginia)*is sitting*solidly on the bottom.**It and the one next to it (Tennessee)*lived to fight another day.* The one in*the foreground and also sitting on the bottom*is the Arizona, and we all know about her.

Your boating environment is very unlike ours, so I suppose a life vest might play a different role where you are.* I can think of circumstances where a person could drown in*six or less feet of water if they weren't wearing a vest but as you say, that's not the point of this discussion.

One of the items on your possibilities list and within the gift certificate amount is a handheld VHF.* We find this extremely useful and we*use*it all the time when one of us dinghies off to go fishing or take a hike with the dog on shore or whatever.* A number of the places we go have spotty or no cell phone coverage, so the radio is the only way to communicate with the boat.

A handy deal we had made up at the suggestion of the electronics shop we use is a cable to connect the antenna connector on the handheld to the coax cable coming down from our 24 foot VHF antenna in case of a main radio failure.* The radio that's connected to this antenna is in a panel mount that is very easy to remove so getting to the antenna cable is quite easy.* Connecting the handheld to the antenna*won't up the transmit power, of course, but it vastly improves the reception and will broadcast our signal considerably*farther than the little rubber antenna that came with the handheld.


*


-- Edited by Marin on Wednesday 13th of January 2010 12:44:09 AM
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