On board again

Now I've been back on the boat for a few weeks. She's a second home for me so despite all the work and expense involved in having a boat I'm still glad I kept her. My brother-in-law and his wife were here for the first week and rented a small apartment nearby. Uffe was a great help doing the heavy work with the boat before she was launched. I am so grateful he undertook the worst job of all: renewing the toilet plumbing. He fought with it in the tiny space for hours on end to remove the old pipes and change the ball valves. In the meantime I banged, hacked and scraped the inside of the brass T-junction and pipes to remove years of lime.
On the first leg of the seasons voyage  Uffe accompanied me to make sure everything worked.
The boats built-in GPS was a bit unreliable and the navigation app on my ipad couldn't get a fix either which was worrying. I had to rely on good old fashioned paper charts instead. Otherwise everything worked. On arrival at Porto Heli I sprayed the GPS antenna with electro cleaner and fixed the Ipad by turning off location services, then turning them on again. Wish everything was that simple....
The next job was to try and install the Iwirie wifi booster I had bought. The idea is to pick up wifi signals from land so that I can have internet and my own hotspot on board. I mounted the antenna on to the bimini frame, drilled a hole in the fibreglass cockpit combing and crawled under the deck to put the wiring in place. The software was quite easy to install and after scanning I was thrilled to get a whole list of possible wifi sources. The nearest hotel looked promising and as they had an unsecured connection I chose that. It works! Last year I spent a lot of money and time on establishing and maintaining an internet connection so this is a great improvement.