Hello everyone out there in email land!

David and Claudia are finally back online with a new email address: KD5MXA@winlink.org. This email address is a permanent replacement for the old SAILMAIL address. Like the old email account, this one is via the HAM radio and it makes use of the identical technology and software. So, it’s the same SLOW send and receive for us on this end, although we do have more stations and frequencies available to log on to. There is a real neat feature of this new setup. On the web, go to http://wl2k.org/arps.htm and enter KD5MXA in the call sign prompt and click “display”. This will take you to a series of maps that show our last reported position which gets updated each time we logon to email.

We really love it here in the Virgin Islands. Even though we’ll be heading to Florida in the coming months to setup a new home base, visit family and friends and go to W*RK for awhile, we think this would make an excellent home base, too, someday. We already know that when hurricane season arrives, we can be south to Venezuela’s out islands in 3 days and that is a perfect place to cruise during that time of year, and then return here at whatever pace that suits us. We sailed down to St. Croix around the middle of January (35 miles south of St. Thomas) in order to take the HAM tests, the passing of which has given us these new email privileges. On this trip we finally made it over to Buck Island, a small island-national park less than 5 miles from Christiansted harbor. What a great discovery this was! The west end of the island has a beautiful white sand beach lined with palm trees and the anchorage is in deep sand in about 10 feet of water just off this beach. There are fabulous coral reefs around the island that made for excellent snorkeling. When we go back we hope to lure some of those big lobsters outside of the park boundary and have them over for dinner. On the sail back to St. Thomas we had yet another encounter with a group of dolphins playing at the bow of our boat. It was especially fun to watch the m in the incredibly blue and clear water competing for position directly in front of the bow.

We’ve made extensive use of 1-800 numbers and the U.S. mail in St. Thomas; ordering new parts, returning broken ones for repair and getting them back in a reasonable period of time. We’ve been without the use of either of our depth sounders since the first day of October when our backup unit decided to take early retirement. Although we got real good at judging depth from the color of the water, it is very good indeed to have both of them repaired and back onboard again. The forward seal on our transmission took to leaking awhile back and we’re going to have that fixed next week. Since the parts are on order for that and will take a week or so to arrive, we sailed over to St. John to spend some good NO-SHOPPING time at some of our favorite anchorages. We’ll head back to St. Thomas early next week to make the transmission repair.

Well, that’s the news from the Virgin Islands. It’s good to be back online and will be even better when we hear from you!

David and Claudia
aboard Ma’alahi
Leinster Bay, St. John, USVI
February 10, 2001