Tuesday, June 26. 2012

    After yesterday excitement I keep turning over in my head: what did I do right, what did I do wrong, or how did I get myself into that predictment. When I am in my boat, moving it along, I always listen to channel 16, or maybe because I was going through a lot of bridges, and a lock, channel 13. but after the bridges I turn back to 16. I heard the Coast Guard continuely asking boaters near the Chesepeake Bay Bridge Tunnel to keep a look out for a person in the water. but never heard anything about an approaching storm till after it was over. In the marina I wondered if the guy knew about the storm. So the following day I decided to give him a call. I described myself to him and he remembered me. I asked him if he knew that the storm was comimg. He said that he had heard about it in the morning, didn't say how, but said that he was keeping an eye on the doppler images on his smart phone all day. I didn't ask him why he did not mention it to me, but I did tell him about the experience that I had with it. Maybe after the call he asked himself why he didn't say anything to me.
    So I remember that there is this thing called weather alert. I was not sure if my radio had it. In fact I felt  that if it had it that it would of been working. Last night I decided to look into the operators manual and yes my radio has it. To me it seems a little clumsy the way it is set up. There are 10 Wx weather channels. The weather for your area is on one of them. So in order to get a weather alert for your area you have to be on the correct channel. On my radio I have this feature which is called duo-watch or tri-watch. What this does is let the radio scan each of two or three channels, and if a message is coming in on any one of them you will hear it. So you must include the correct Wx channel in the scan. I somehow  remember seeing an FRS- 2 way radio that had this weather alert feature. I know that when I get home that I will be purchasing one.
     When I saw the storm coming I was already about a mile from where I raised my anchor. I would not of made it back to there to set my anchor again. And if I tried I might of got myself into even more trouble. There was no place to run to over there.