"The Minnow" ARC 2005 Atlantic Crossing

Mike's Exciting Day 6 Update!

Sailing was good today. We had up Whomper (our biggest spinnaker) most of
the day. We're still heading south of the big low (tropical storm?) to
avoid the really big waves and stuff.

Before this trip we bought an Iridium satellite phone. We also bought a
block of minutes so it would be cheaper to use. The cost is about $1.50 per
minute when we call out using our block of minutes. It's somewhat higher to
get minutes "by the minute." We expected we would get more blocks of minutes
when these minutes run out and in any interim we would just pay the higher
rate.

On Tuesday Bob and I started talking about getting another block of a few
hundred minutes. Getting weather is eating up a lot of these minutes. We
talked about it again on Wednesday. And we talked about it again on
Thanksgiving, although we didn't expect them to be open on the holiday.

After going to bed last night wondering about the Dallas v. Denver outcome,
I got up this morning and connected on the sat-phone to retrieve email. I
got a couple of emails, but they didn't tell me the score (!). Then I
decided to pull up a sports web page and see the results. I tried several
times, but it would not stay connected.

After digging into the problem, I discovered that we were out of minutes.
And I further discovered that our phone was not set up to be used unless a
block of minutes has been prepaid. Hmm . that's not what we wanted.

So we were down to weatherfax's and SSB talking broadcasts for weather. This
is plenty of good information for making a crossing. And we could still
receive sat-phone calls and sat-phone text messages. However, we had no way
to call out to family or friends, and we had no way to send and receive
email. (this update, and others, will be sent after the fact).

So there we were waiting for the phone to ring so we could ask someone to
buy us more minutes. Bop spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to
contact someone via email on the SSB radio. We didn't want to break down
call another boat. That would be embarrassing.

Eventually, Bob's wife Cathy called about something. Bob asked her to email
our wives and let them know the predicament. He also asked her to buy us
some more minutes. She called back later and informed us that it would be
Monday. Our phone supplier was still closed for Thanksgiving.

Fishing report:

Caught two fish (both dolphins). Cleaned one fish.

Arts and Entertainment:

Today's musical entertainment was a small amount of baritone playing, and
some opera. Verdi's Aida.
We also played chess. So far Serge beat Bob, then Serge tied me, then I beat
Serge, then Bob beat Serge.