Now that we have nothing to do but wait for the wind to change, we can take care of some of the things we've been putting off.
This morning, we finally checked into the problem with the short-
wave radio. We haven't heard a sound out of it for months. We removed the radio and the tuner from their cubbyholes and saw that the wire that was supposed to connect the two was disconnected! We plugged it in, expecting that to take care of the problem, but to our dismay, we still couldn't hear anything. We checked all the other connections, and they seemed to be fine. Then Roy had the brilliant idea of listening with his earphones. He could hear perfectly! Thinking the speaker wasn't functioning, he pulled out the plug for the earphones. Lo! We could hear the radio loud and clear. Such a simple little thing!
Before the day was over, we had listened to the Voice of America in New York, Family Radio in North Carolina, the BBC in London, the Voice of Italy in Rome, and the Voice of Cuba in Havana. How neat to have a shortwave radio that works!
Of course, all those stations have very powerful transmitters. Communicating with other hams is another matter. At five o'clock, we listened to 3868.5 to see if we could hear Roy's brother Ken, but reception was poor. We kept hearing a loud ticking. Can't figure out what's causing it.
Besides playing with the radio, Roy made some repairs to the boat and we read. We also finally found out what those huge concrete things are at the end of the bay. They're just what they look like: approaches to a bridge. A bridge on I-85 collapsed a few years ago, and the remains were brought here. They'll eventually be used as a breakwater.
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