Greetings from Esperance

Hi Folks,

I am writing this from the Esperance library which offers excellent internet facilities, including the ability to upload photographs from a thumb drive. You can expect tomorrow the fresh set of photos that I sent to Stephen yesterday.

At this point I would like to correct a glaring omission which I blame on the frenetic activities during the two weeks prior to our departure from Fremantle.

Stephen Fryc is Brenda's son. It is Stephen who deserves the credit for the quality of this blog. Indeed, it was Stephen who helped set me up with the blog in the first place and has subsequently made significant contributions such as the amazingly useful map facility by which you will be able to track the progress on a map, satellite image, terrain context, etc. The facility has the look and feel to me of Google Earth, with its zoom and pan facilities. Stephen has already given the reference to it, at http://tinyurl.com/5rqcke

Stephen has helped us with many other IT aspects of this voyage, from finding valuable software for weather fax, tide predictions, etc to setting us up with hardware such external disc drive storage, a pre-amp for our movie entertainment system, etc to setting us up with file backup and disaster recovery procedures.

Now that we are cruising Stephen has become the key person in the management of the blog and communication between Pachuca and the rest of the world. He and Arnold have put in a lot of work to establish the procedures for communication between himself and Pachuca via the Iridium satellite telephone. We will send a daily noon report to Stephen via SMS giving our position and one or two short comments on our situation, though this will not necessarily be put on the blog every day.

So Thank You, Stephen, on behalf of the crew of Pachuca and all readers of this blog.

Finally, I would like to note a change in our Esperance departure plan. We were planning to depart Esperance on Sunday morning but the wind report for Sun-Tue for this part of the coast is pretty dismal. The highest wind speed predicted is 9 knots, for an hour or two. Beyond that much of it dips below 5 knots, the absolute minimum for Pachuca. (We'll be able to sail with less than this once we have mastered the use of our spinnakers, whenever that may be.)

So rather than going out on Sunday and spend three miserable days of flogging sails, rattling rigging, and getting nowhere, we've decided to postpone our departure until Wednesday, 5 days from now. We think that we still have a good chance to get to Port Lincoln at the planned time because the speed assumptions in our time calculation (11 days) was a very conservative 80 miles per day. With good winds we can easily exceed that.

For now we are enjoying the comfort and security of a pen at the Esperance Yacht Club and are enjoying our various forays into the town. Today will will get a visit from Chris, our most faithful blog reader and contributor; and tonight we will have dinner at the yacht club to meet some of the members. We spend other evenings on the boat, such as last night when we had a terrific meal over several glasses of red wine, then settled down to watch Forrest Gump which amazingly Brenda had never seen before.

Life can be tough.

Robert