Location: 17° 54S, 38° 44W
Thursday, 03.06.2008

At noon on March 6th, the Schooner Maggie B was at 17° 54S, 38° 44W, motoring north at 6.5 knots. The skies are clear, the wind is a light northerly and the seas are mostly calm. We have come 1790 NM from Buenos Aires. Salvador is 299 NM away and Antigua 2488. We are currently headed to Ilheus, former center of cocoa production and home to Jorge Amato. It is 184 NM away.

We had a lovely evening moored off Santa Barbara Island in the Abrolhos Islands. The water was marvelously clear — 60-80 foot visibility — and the fish were interesting and unafraid. In the morning we were surprised to see a nice sloop sail in. We just haven’t seen a lot of real “travelers” along the coast of Brazil. It was three Frenchmen and a dog (Hugo), who had been out a little more than a year, and were working their way down the coast, headed for the Horn and Chile. I passed them our big book of Chilean Navy Charts that we had gotten for a case of beer from an Irish boat in Fremantle. I am so much happier to have that book out working rather than sitting on some shelf somewhere. They promised that when they were finished that they would pass it along to someone else. I wish that I had written in the book the “provenance.”

We got a huge laugh in our email this morning. It came at the expense of the “Mail Marshall” system at a New Zealand company called Munro Benge. You may recall that in my last email I mentioned the bird Sula dactylatra, known as the Masked B@@by. It just was too hot a topic for the Mail Marshall. Please see below (minor changes in the message deleting the addressee and with the offending word).

The following email message was blocked by MailMarshal:

From:FrankBlair@uuplus.com
To: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject:Schooner Maggie B in the Abrolhos Archipelago
Message:B47cf02960000.000000000001.0001.mml

Because it may contain unacceptable language, or inappropriate material.

If you believe the message is business related, please send a message to call4help@infinity.co.nz and request that the message be released, or remove any inappropriate language and send it again. If no contact is made within 5 days the message will be automatically deleted.

MailMarshal Rule: Content Security (Inbound) : Block Unacceptable Language
Script Offensive Language (Basic) Triggered in Body
Expression: b@@bies Triggered 1 times weighting 5

NetIQ MailMarshal
Email Content Security>>

So the word b@@by is an “5″ weighting. I wonder at the scale. Do you get a degree of difficulty like at the Olympics?

All is well.