Wow are we behind on the blog. Once everything is updated this post will seem a bit out of place. That said it seemed like the right place to start given the gap.

On July 13th we left Swingin' on a Star floating quietly on her mooring and headed for the airport. We have never left our boat alone before, not in the three years we have owned her. We did take a little trip to Japan for a wedding but my parents were aboard the entire week we were away. This is a very different experience, we miss our boat and being in the islands.

We have worked hard over the past four months to put together a cruising guide for Palau. The focus on getting the guide done and spending every spare minute trying to capture all of our meaningful experiences and discoveries in the book put a rather serious kibosh on our blogging, not to mention the gruelingly slow internet performance on Palau.

The book is now almost complete in so far as the research phase is concerned. We are now on our way to San Francisco to get the publishing process completed. With luck we will be back by early October with some proofs to test out on the critical eyes around the harbor. Finishing that process will put us in a one month lead window to release.

Sam's Tours has kindly offered to host a release party for the book so we hope to have The Palau Guide formally introduced to the world in early December.

The blog will slow down drastically while we are in San Francisco (not likely island cruising blog readers will be interested in exploits in a big city). We will be back posting the entries from the ships log in the days ahead however, and have many lovely pictures and experiences to share associated with the development of the cruising guide.

Thanks for all of the kind emails in the interim. We miss all of our cruising friends and hope everyone has found some blue sky in the rainy season (or moved to the southern hemisphere).