Hello everyone! We made landfall at Fremantle in the early hours of Monday morning, March 17 and tied up to the Fremantle Sailing Club dock at 0500 after a fifty-nine and a half day, 9,000 nautical mile passage from Cape Horn. Our course took us east-about under South Africa, supposedly with the prevailing winds. The reality of this wholly Southern Ocean, "roaring forties" passage proved to be quite different from our expectations. Whitbread and Volvo racing footage had led us to expect hard downwind sailing in near-gale force westerly winds and huge, following seas. In fact, we spent as much time close-reaching as running, and we spent way too much time trying to make headway in less than ten knots of wind and a large swell that made it almost impossible to keep wind in the sails. The reality we experienced best reflected the e-mails and postings from the crews of the Southern Ocean racing boats describing fickle conditions with lots of light air pockets. The best word to describe the weather on our passage would be "changeable." We rarely went more than one watch without a major sail change, and we often had winds that oscillated in strength by 15 knots and direction by 50 degrees over a period of fifteen or twenty minutes. Watch keeping was not the easy look up from the book every fifteen or twenty minutes we had known in the tropics, but rather an almost constant tending of sheets and course to keep the boat moving well. We did have some heavy weather, but as a percentage of the total it was small. Getting north from Cape Horn to the forties proved the most difficult week of the passage with three easterly gales in a row, one with winds to fifty knots. Overall we spent a total of almost a week hove- to/forereaching in easterly gales or becalmed and rolling in the swell waiting for wind. But Hawk took excellent care of us, sailing well in everything from gale-force winds and twenty foot seas just forward of the beam to five or six knots of apparent wind over the stern. She came through it all with only minor breakages and though the list of boat work we want to get done here is long, it reflects the last three years and over twenty-five thousand miles of sailing we have done since we've been in a place where we could do serious boat work. We still haven't absorbed the reality of arriving in Australia. The Fremantle Sailing Club has extended us every hospitality, and we spent most of yesterday wandering around totally overwhelmed by the wealth of chandleries and marine businesses within a few blocks of what will be our winter home. The climate is Southern Californian - the streets are lined with open-air cafes and many of the restaurants have interior courtyards. We are enjoying summer-time temperatures even though it is now fall here and most of the locals consider it cold. More than anything else, we feel bemused at completing this passage - if anyone had told us eight years ago when we rounded the Cape of Good Hope that we would pass it again going in the other direction in the Southern Ocean we would never have believed it. Just goes to show you never know where you might end up once you start messing about in boats! We hope this finds everyone healthy and, for our Northern hemisphere friends, well on the way to spring. We are back in the land of e-mail and Internet, so please feel free to get in touch. We may even get a landline and Internet access on the boat for the winter! We are indeed back in the developed world. Here's to making dreams (even crazy ones) come true! Beth and Evans s/v Hawk