Hello everyone. We've been a long time out of touch, hibernating through the Southern winter. It took Evans three months after our arrival here in Fremantle to attend to the list of repairs and maintenance that had accumulated over four years and 35,000 nautical miles of high latitude cruising. HAWK now has a new, leak proof hatch over the sail locker, safety glass (in place of Lexan) in the windows along the coach house, renewed non-skid on the decks, a new engine panel, refurbished sails, new running rigging, new bottom paint and on and on. I spent much of my time here beginning work on a revision of "The Voyager's Handbook" which will be out in the fall of 2005. We also managed to see a tiny fraction of this huge country with visits to the areas north and south of Perth and ten days in Sydney. When we arrived at Cairns aboard SILK in 1994, we had our share of preconceptions about Australia, many of which proved true but not universally. We had pictured dirt roads passable only with four-wheel drive vehicles running through dusty deserts, and arrived to find rainforest and sugarcane plantations. The size of the continental US, the Australian continent has a population of only 19 million, the vast majority living in a handful of coastal cities. That means that the veneer of civilization is very thin, and it doesn't take long driving off in any direction from one of those cities to find yourself in the bush with kangaroos, wallabies and emus wandering around or grazing in farmer's pastures. The winter here proved mild after Chile and Ireland. While it was very wet and cold by local standards, we didn't use our big heater once, and it only rained for an average of two days a week. In between the rain, we had bright, sunny days with temperatures in the sixties (fifteen to twenty degrees Celsius) though it often got into the forties (five degrees Celsius) at night. Now spring has supposedly come to these latitudes, and it is time for us to get underway once again. But a winter weather pattern seems to have set in, and we've had a series of frontal systems and nonstop gale- force winds for the last five days. We're hoping things settle down a bit soon - this morning 5.5 meter swells were reported just offshore. As soon as conditions stabilize, we'll be heading south for Cape Leeuwin - our third (and last?) Great Cape. But leaving "Freo," as the locals call it, means saying goodbye to all the wonderful friends we have made over the last six months. This has to be one of the hardest things about our nomadic lifestyle, especially as we have lived it aboard HAWK, spending months at a time in different places and really getting to know local people. It's hard enough to say goodbye to cruising friends that you hope to meet again in some distant anchorage, but saying goodbye to people you will likely never see again can be heart wrenching. And cruising goodbyes either tend to be protracted, said day after day while waiting for weather, or not said at all when the weather changes for the better and the docklines must be slipped without delay. Perhaps we are getting older, but each goodbye seems more difficult than the last. Thank goodness for e-mail which keeps us in touch with our friends worldwide. We hope to do some cruising along the south coast of Australia before the summer easterly winds set in over the Australian bight. We plan to spend most of the summer in Tasmania, in areas that look as inviting on the charts as the Inner Hebrides in Scotland, Penobscot Bay in Maine or Trinity Bay in Newfoundland. We'll make sure and let you know what we think! Fair winds, Beth and Evans