so here is the latest, i have received one request for less quality more frequent updates. here goes at least with the less quality. i will start by saying that keeping this group in any sort of formation remains much higher stress than any sort of pirate issues!

this am after checking in on a couple of SSB nets (during which eagle 9 tried to board me again) we heard some vhf chatter on 16. as i listened it turned out to be a "coalition aircraft" asking some ship if everything was ok as they where not transmitting ais. shortly after this i saw a plane on the horizon and as it overflew us i got a nice shot of what turned out to be an ausi P3. shortly after the overfly the called us and asked for our info which i was more than happy to provide. i am hoping that all this pirate stuff stirs the US to do something other than just implying it is the ships fault for sailing through this "danger zone" . who was the us president who stopped paying tribute to the barberiy pirates back in the 1800s. its not rocket science guys!

the real drama today was karli waking me up from my nap to tell me we had lost contact and sight with eagle 9 (how hard can this stuff be). i stumbled onto deck took the main down and asked here very nicely why she did not wake me when they broke formation (here version is a bit difference). apparently eagle 9 had said "i am just going to swap out my jib i will catch up in a few minutes". there is no catching up when you are in a 36 ft boat sailing with palapa doing 6.5kts in a nice breeze!!! several hours later we are back in vhf contact still waiting for the formation to get back together. it should be all set by my next nap :)

2 more hours to happy hour and then sunset, tonight is taco night but we are out of cheese!

cheers, roger