David Strike wrote:

> As for me, I'm going diving again tomorrow.  May I suggest that some of
you do the
> same!  :-)))))

I'm sorry for having continued the issues before reading this.  I don't know
if I'm going to be diving this weekend or not.  There's a hurricane moving
SW of Florida at the moment and it's bringing us a lot of rain.

About a week ago, I invested a substantial amount, at least for me, in a
Color GPS/Chartplotter for the new "old" boat.  It's Wide Area Augmentation
System (WAAS) compatable and is supposed to be accurate to less than 3
meters.  With only a thousand US more, it will also be a color depth/fish
finder.  The sonar black box and transducer is supposed to arrive today.
The chart chip it uses is as close to having a paper chart as it's possible
to be without actually spreading them out across the dashboard.

Since I installed the GPS, I've been going through my records for divesites
in S. Florida and the near Bahamas.  I've been collecting books, magazines
and circulars on them for several years.  My plan, already partially
implemented, is to computerize the entire list, complete with scans of any
pictures I have or can find and descriptions of the cites and, for now,
print and include it in a notebook for the boat's library.   The problem is,
the coordinates for most of the sites come from the days of Loran, a good
location system for it's time, but not readily shared between Lorans, let
alone with a GPS system.  Worse, some of the sites in the books, some that I
know well without a book, are simply not where the included charts or
numbers show them to be.

So, even if I can't go diving this weekend, I may be doing something diving
related.  I may be touring the local waters searching for sonar returns from
dive sites that should be somewhere within a 60 meter circle whose center is
the published coordinates . . . unless one of several very powerful
hurricanes blew it away.  I now that happened to one or more of the Tenneco
Towers and that hurricane Andrew broke the Nuola Express in half.

You may assume that I'm excited about my new toy.  If you're interested in
knowing more about the new generation of chart plotters, you can find a lot
of it, including manuals, etc. at
http://www.garmin.com/marine/products.html#chartplotters .

Lee