We're in Central CA now on our way south down the Pacific coast from Anacortes WA on our way to MX. It's just my wife and I and we're taking our time spending a few days at each stop and not heading out unless we have good weather (or at least a good forecast). We've owned our 46 Nordhavn for 2 years and have over 7500 km on her from Dana Point CA to Anacortes, two trips to SE Alaska and now down the coast. After the first year we did a major refit of the electronics on the boat. We replaced the aging radar, chartplotter, and depth sounder with Furuno NavNet 2. We also replaced the autopilot with a new Simrad with an AccuSteer pump. We now have redundant systems for radar, chartplotter, gps, vhf, and autopilot pumps. Some general thoughts - AIS vs. ARPA - we have both an AIS receiver (Milltech) interfaced to the Furuno radar and chart plotter and the ARPA add on to the Furuno radar. While the goal of both is collision avoidance, they both accomplish that in a slightly different way and I would hate to part with either. ARPA can be applied to any radar target while AIS can display on a chartplotter, see around corners and provide the ship's name. We have called vessels by name frequently at night or in narrow channels such as bar crossing and have always had them reply. Airmar/Furuno PB100 weather station - fantastic feed of NMEA 183 weather data and with the Airmar transducer, depth data for the Furuno RD-30 display or a PC chartplotter, we use Coastal Explorer and display the wind speed and direction on a sidebar panel. It also provides a backup GPS and compass heading data source. Paravanes - We do not have active stabilizers on our boat, only paravanes. We've used them continually from Neah Bay south and we love them while underway although it can be a bit of a pain to deploy and retrieve the arms in rough conditions when you need to get them upright before entering a narrow channel, i.e. Brookings OR. Our fish can be deployed and retrieved from the cockpit using the boom winches and a remote control so that's not an issue but going up to the cabin upper deck to pull the arms up in rollie conditions and when your tired after a long or difficult passage is not fun. We also snagged an out of season derelict crab pot while approaching the outer channel buoy at Brooking OR at 1 AM. It was simple to unhook off the fish once we stopped and there was no damage to the rigging but we could have lived without that. SSB, Pactor Modem & SailMail - We use this extensively for email and downloading weather info (NOAA & Buoyweather.com). We've never failed to get a connection from the remotest areas of SE Alaska, British Columbia, and down the coast. It may take a couple of tries but once the install was debugged and I got the hang of radio wave propagation, it's a reliable and inexpensive way to send and receive email. I'm sending this email via SSB & SailMail from Monterey. A little long winded and I didn't even mention how much I love Sirius radio or hate VacuFlush heads. Maybe next time. Frank Osborne Discovery N46-37 Home Port: Anacortes, WA Blog:http://mvdiscovery.blogspot.com/ ---------- radio email processed by SailMail for information see: http://www.sailmail.com