Testing, testing...

We are now just over one week away from our estimated departure date of April 16th (weather depending, of course)! In the last several months, we have maintained multiple notebooks with lists of things to do, buy, and try before we leave. Most of the items on those lists are crossed off, although we keep adding more.  After I write this blog post, I will be crossing one more item off the list, that is to publish a post by sending it through email in plain text, because that is what we will be doing while we are under way. Our intention is to send daily updates on our position, weather, speed and direction, as well as our condition on board. These will be brief because we will be sending them through our single sideband radio, which is way slower than dial-up! We will also be sending this information to YOTREPS in New Zealand who shares weather observations from sailors with marine forecasters for ground-truthing the weather model predictions. Once we have submitted some reports to YOTREPS, you can see a map of our reported positions at the link in the upper right hand corner of the page "Columbine at Sea." You can also see where we plan to go next by clicking on the Google map, also on the right hand side of the page.

Disclaimer: Please do not panic if we miss our goal of providing daily updates. There are many non-emergency situations that could impact our ability to post updates that often. Among these include failure of the radio, failure of the electrical system that powers the radio, failure of our computer that tells the radio what to send, etc. We live in a salty environment, which is rather unfriendly to electronics. We do have lots of backups and spare parts for things, but we can't carry an entire hardware and electrical store with us  (although we try). Another likely event that would reduce our frequency of posting updates is... we might just be having fun! Part of the reason to sail the open ocean is to get away from tethers to shore and the speedy way of life common on land. Maybe we'll just lose track of the time, but we'll try not to.

Fair winds and calm seas!