Starting on December 17th, 2001, our family, along with our cat, Arthur, will be starting a two-or-three-year trip on our sailboat, in the Caribbean and, later, in the South Pacific. The boat, named Ocelot, is a 45-foot Kronos catamaran. She is currently in St. Martin, which is in the northeast corner of the Caribbean.

   We'll spend a two months or so installing new things and fixing old things. Then, we'll spend about a year sailing down the chain of islands to Venezuela, and west across the northern coast of Venezuela to the Panama Canal. From there, we expect to take about two years to head southwest, through the Galapagos and French Polynesia, to New Zealand and Australia. Once there, we think that we might sell her, but we aren't really sure about things that far in the future.

    Communication won't be that easy. We will mostly be using email, a little on the boat, but mostly at Internet cafés on islands. We will take one of our four laptops to shore, use an Internet hookup, get all our email onto the computer, and then, back at the boat, read the emails offline.

    We are all HAM (amateur radio) certified, and we will be able to use that to voice-contact people back in the States (and everywhere else), along with the Satellite phone that we will have on board.

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