Security On Board....

Over the last year we have been reading peoples blogs talk more and more about people getting dinghy's and motors stolen from their boats....  While I'm sure theft in the islands isn't much worse than theft at home, we have decided to make our boat a little less attractive to thieves....

We have a 5/8" cable that locks the dinghy to the boat and a piece of 3/8" chain that holds the motor either on the boat transom or the dinghy transom.  We also have dinghy davits that we will use to lift the dinghy out of the water at night. The interior of the boat has always had a motion activated alarm that makes an awful racket whenever someone enters teh main salon. (I forget to turn it off all the time!)

Yesterday I added the last piece of security gear that should help.  We added 2 outdoor Uniden security cameras which connect to our on-board computer and start recording when the motion detector in the camera is activated...  This way we will know when someone is on the boat when we are below. (It also is connected to our TV in our stateroom, so we can look outside the boat from our bed.)

When we are away from the boat, the computer will automatically begin recording every time the motion sensors go off in either of the cameras.... This won't stop the theft, but might help catch the thief...

We also made the "weather resistant" cameras, more "weather proof" by adding a thin bead of good quality silicone on all the edges and seams...

Today our good friends Mike & Patricia came by for breakfast.  (Cinnamon Buns in our new oven!) They own a 43' Formula and are a few slips away at the marina and live a short distance away our house...  Our daughters are also good friends.  Anyway, Mike owns a company that adds exteriors to large buildings and suggested that there is a material that he uses that would make us an AWESOME HARD DODGER!

He is going to check with his engineer on Monday and all going well he will be making us a hard dodger in the next few weeks!  I have also contacted the folks at Bomon (the people who made the pilot house windows) to see if it might be possible to get 1 or 2 more windows made to go on the front of the dodger....  All going well, we can make that happen and have the greatest dodger we could hope for....

The last project this weekend was to start the bimini.  Next week, Shelley and I hope to get to the boat and finish it before the summer gets into full swing...

More later... Cheers....