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.
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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