Sailed to Ganges on Salt Spring Islandand got one of those Telus Mobility USB stick. Works great almost everywhere so far in the Gulf Islands. Only problem is that we got a whopping $524 bill for our first month. It turns out the if you are near the american border, the thing will automatically connect to US towers causing a USArious (sic) fee of 3 dollars per megabyte. According to one telus representative i spoke to (5 all together including the eventual "escalation" person, Carolyn, extension 7752 who was the only really effective of the bunch) The eventual outcome, after about 2 hours on the phone debating the situation and fair resolution with the 2nd, Rick, the 3rd, Van, and the 4th, Rania they reversed the contentious charge and knocked off 50% of the addtional "overage" charge plus tax on those billing items.

It was frustrating all in all but i do recommend the telus stick non the less. Just watch out if you go close to American border!!! There is no way to tell from the Telus "watcher" software if you have been switched to US towers and there certainly should be, as well as an alarm which goes off and notifies you if you have gone over your maximum bandwidth for the billing period.

According to one person i spoke to, i was to go to the CRTC website (mentioned no where that i could find on the telus website) and have a look at coverage maps there to see where the border was. I told her of course that i can see very well the boarder on my charts which are automatically loaded on the Captain software as we cruise about and that we had certainly never crossed them. There is of course a GPS track of everywhere we've been for the past 7 months.

Ok..enough bitching about Telus;P We are having great fun all in all sailing about the southern Gulf Islands, exploring, making maps which exceed in function and resolution existing maps, and making a photo blog. You can see my main blog at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ultrabluelake

This is my first day on this sailing blog and i will make an effort to keep adding new entries as noteworthy and/or interesting events transpire.