Not all Fun and Games

I must admit,  I am fully entertained by the antics and interactions of this crew. It’s a relaxed atmosphere aboard with everyone willing to help. There has been no stress involved, even during the Engine Control Unit failure where we replaced our ECU at Sam’s suggestion in minutes. But that was a wonderful fluke; a fortunate combination of Sam’s long experience and my own insistence on robust spares aboard the boat. But when you experience equipment failures, especially at the front end of a month’s long journey, things can get stressful. Losing a vital piece of equipment is a gut punch to a trip like this one. It’s not all fair winds, following seas, and scenes of grandeur out the windows of Sarah- Sarah.   Sometimes bad things happen, and they aren’t fixed easily.

Two nights ago, as we navigated to Beach Point, Newfoundland, I noticed our Garmin chart-plotter was running up to the limit of it’s loaded charts. That’s wasn’t unexpected, it’s was just time to run and update; I’ve done it countless times. It so happens that while I was uploading the charts, Garmin was pushing an update to the Multi-Function Display (MFD) software. Also as I have done many times before, I hit the update now button. Halfway through the update, the system beeped, the screen went blank, and the MFD’s started a loop of starting up, running through part of a setup, and shutting down – rinse, repeat, forever. Our primary navigation system on three MFDs was gone.

Our primary navigation system is Garmin. We have two Garmin screens down below, one on the bridge, and a spare under a settee if necessary. We also have a Furuno MFD that is used primarily for radar but can be used as a chart plotter in a pinch. We also have a time zero computer on board. If all of those fail, we have all of the paper charts for the entire trip. In short, no shortage of backups. However, the Garmin is best set up to feed directions to the autopilot making watching standing a very easy task and easy tasks create fewer opportunities for errors.

Somehow, I had completely corrupted the system. Simply moving to a backup was possible, but painful and we needed to be moving by morning to escape an aggressive low building between Labrador and Nuuk Canada. If we didn’t get out, we would have introduced at least a 4-day delay waiting for the associated gale to lay down. The crew antics had come to a halt and things were no longer fun.

My motivation to get this issue resolved was significant. After several aborted attempts, I threw my hands up and called Brent. Brent happens to be a great combination of smart, experienced, and calm under pressure. I am proud to call Brent my friend and thankful that he runs an electronic business in Anacortes WA, Sarah-Sarah’s home port. I will forever be thankful that he stayed awake and on the phone with me for roughly 4 hours after I spent 3 hours downloading the new software version for the Garmin and transferring it onto a micro-chip.

Sadly, it wasn’t as easy as just downloading the software and installing it. The corruption of the whole system came about because I have a chip reader on the network to make updating things easier and it is no longer compatible with Garmin’s own software. In fact, trying to use that chip reader with the current version of software is what might have corrupted my system in the first place. In order to update the software, I needed to disconnect all the networking cables in the back of the units and at the hubs. Brent was trying to isolate the MFD from everything else on the network to minimize that potential for ongoing issues. I worked the problem from roughly 9pm when we arrived until 5am the next morning just in time to leave. My crew was concerned and wanting to be helpful, but I had Brent in my ear on a headset, and it was really a one-man job. I thought I had, with mountains of help from Brent, and Mario snoring quietly on the settee, successfully installed the new software on all three units and was no longer crashing the network while trying to use the system. Turns out I was wrong.

The morning after I thought I was done, we arrived in Battle Harbor and I tried to load charts to head to Emily Harbor up the coast of Labrador. The system crashed. Then to prove my own insanity, I repeatedly tried the same activity over and over again hoping/praying for a different result. We left for Emily Harbor without proper charts on our primary navigation system (yes we were running backups) with only a brief slow-down in Battle Harbor. In short order I made the decision to stop in a small cove on Island of Ponds. We arrived around 2pm, dropped anchor, and shut everything down.

The aforementioned Brent was able to connect me to John from Garmin who was working hard to try and solve the issue. Ill save you all of the details that kept me busy from 2pm to 9pm, but we seem to have cracked the code. My attempt to do a normal update corrupted the entire system and we had to roll it back to all factory settings and start from scratch. As I write this in the eastern part of the Labrador Sea the following morning I can report that the system is once again solid and performing.

We were able to head out for Greenland at exactly the time good judgment and our weather router suggested, and the primary system is working flawlessly. Some of the updated features of the new software are actually growing on me. We’re all having fun again and the antics continue, and I’m hoping the next problem – and I’m sure there will be at least one – will be much easier to fix.