Cruising the South Pacific with Tackless II
Tackless II, along with her two captains, Don and Gwen, cruise from Fiji to Australia
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
13 May 2007 – Happy Mother’s Day
One of the big advantages of being on this side of the dateline is that, since we are a day ahead, the forgetful have an extra day to remember important events. Of course, if you don't forget, then you have to hold the thought an extra day in order to sync the call to the calendar back home.

This worked rather well for Mother's Day since all the businesses in Savusavu are closed on Sunday, but Monday morning here is Sunday afternoon in Indiana and Florida. Thanks to some groundwork by Don, we were all set to call home by way of Skype on the computer at Savusavu Computers on the east end of the main street. A particularly nice thing about Savusavu Computers is that is it the only air-conditioned place in town!

For those of you not familiar with Skype, it is a free software and service whereby you can communicate by the Internet. With decent Internet service you can, via a headset, chat with folks halfway around the world at no charge computer-to-computer and for a small fee if a telephone is involved at the other end. If you've got really fast broadband, you can add a webcam and see one another. We had great fun with this Christmas morning sharing Kai opening his packages with Gpa & Gma Wilson in Indiana. While we were back there in the real world, we'd daydreamed of being able to video-Skype back to the family right from the boat via our new Vodaphone cellular broadband card. To our disappointment, not only can we not manage video, we cannot do voice! (Guess it would compete with their phone service!) All is not totally lost because we can "Chat" (type) which I guess is similar to Yahoo Instant Messaging.

Typing is really not what mothers want to do on Mother's Day, so ashore we went to avail ourselves of the better connection. We Skyped Gpa and Gma in Indiana, we Skyped Tiffer in Florida, and I Skyped my 89-year-old Aunt Jo up in Massachusetts. I think she was pretty tickled to hear from her wayward niece direct all the way from Fiji! We could have been in the same room!

So if you don't have Skype, Google it; download it, set up your own account, and put TacklessII in your contact list. And whenever you see us pop up GREEN, sent us a Chat message!


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1 Comments:
Blogger geodesic2 said...
now I know where you were - hope you are feeling better - got an e from Sherry in response to my comment on their blog - good posting - always fun to read about your adventures
Bill
s/v Geodesic2

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