Location: 33° 32 S, 103° 29 E
Wednesday 12:00, 02.14.2007

Happy Valentine's Day! We are all thinking of friends and family distant in space but close to us in our hearts.

At noon today, the Schooner Maggie B was at 33° 32 S, 103° 29E. We are back on starboard tack, making eight knots straight for Fremantle, which is 625 NM away. Three days at this speed. The wind is from the Southwest at 22 knots. The waves are playing with us a bit, but rarely get to more than 15 feet. We had cold front passage at about 0830 this morning -- some rain and wind, but not much of a fuss. We jibed with the wind shift from NW to SW (remember -- opposite from the Northern Hemisphere).

In the last three days, we have made good 585 NM towards Fremantle.

I forget to mention earlier one little indication of the conditions we had last week. In all the photos of someone at the wheel, one can see the lovely old-fashioned Danforth steering compass mounted on the binnacle. Nice safe position -- right? During the blow, one wave came over the side, took off the top cap of the compass and kept going right over the side. People used to say that Neptune/Poseidon takes presents from sailors, if not properly gifted. We gave him a nice dollop of Madagascar rum at the start of this leg, but perhaps that wasn't enough. I think that he is wearing our brass compass cap as an earring now.

We have two powerful navigation systems on the boat. Furuno's NavNet2 and MaxSEA 12.5. Japanese and French. Neither country has any Army, so they seem to need to get their hostilities out through technology. Furuno and MaxSEA get along like...two bulls in a boxcar. Last night I got up to find that our principal Furuno system was completely frozen and would not restart and the MaxSEA on my laptop had crashed Windows (not that tough, I know). It was like two boxers who had been going at it until neither could rise. MaxSEA eventually restarted, but was taken offline from the Ethernet ("Go to your room!"), but the Furuno multifunction display will have to go to the hospital (French 1; Japanese 0). But we have redundant Furuno systems, so Owen and I removed the old primary display and brought in the slave, which had been set up at the helm station. The understudy finally got to come on when the Star broke her leg! But, of course, Owen and I had to hack into the code to persuade #2 that it was #1 now. But all is now working well. Hopefully there is a great Furuno dealer in Fremantle.

The "to do" list for Fremantle is up to 25 items. The merchants will be glad to see us.

Regular readers have followed my diatribes against Lewmar blocks. Five failures! Yesterday I got an email from the Lewmar Block Product Manager! He asked how he could help. I sent him a long letter detailing the failures and what I believed the cause to be (bad engineering!). I wonder how they heard about the Maggie B? Nigel says that he approached them at the Paris Boat Show. Or perhaps somebody called them up after seeing my pictures of their broken blocks. I can't believe that they have a "bot" that searches the web for comments about their products, but that is a possibility.

Quote of the Day: "You only live once, but if you work it right, once is enough." Joe E. Lewis (1902-1971).

All is well.

someone