Monday - April 25, 2011

Got up this morning and phoned the electronics specialist. Apparently he was located in Jacksonville and was not really interested in coming down to St Augustine. However he did tell me a couple of tests that I could do to see if it was the hardware or software and it would appear to be the software. So we went over to Westmarine and bought a new chip for the chart plotter, inserted it and it worked. It appears that the old chip simply crapped out as I was going along the ICWW.

In the afternoon, the folks from Q's End and ourselves went over to the Lightner Museum which was founded by some guy call Lightner from Chicago. He apparently was a n avid collector of stuff and he encouraged others to collect stuff even if it was match books. He left his collections to the museum and encouraged others to do the same. There were collections of many things, cigar labels, dolls, dresses, crystal, dishes etc - many of them very interesting. The most interesting however was a collection of music machines that operated by themselves. While we were there, we were fortunate to have a demonstration and these machines were amazing to see and hear - operating on paper holes, or huge copper and steel discs.

The museum used to be an old hotel which was constructed by a man named Flagler who also built a number of other hotels and churches in St Augustine. He also built a railway to bring people down from the northeast to Florida for the winter. Of course they stayed in his hotels. By the way, Flagler co-founded Standard Oil with Rockerfeller which now is known as Exxon. He was obviously not short of money to fund his other ventures. In any case, this particular hotel had at one time the largest swimming pool in the world and in 1925, the US women's swimming championships were held in the pool. The existing pool is now long gone but it was a far cry from the swimming pools we know today.

After our visit to the museum we went for pizza and wings at a local restaurant.