Paul, would you be willing to give us an overview on your proposed route, with ports of call? I'm also in the planning stages, and I'm curious about your choices. Thanks!!! Scott Bulger Knot@Work, 31' Camano Email: scottebulger@comcast.net

I've had a couple of requests off-line to share my proposed route with the list, so here goes. First off, a lot of our route is shaped, at least in part, by fuel needs. Gentle Wind carries about 2750 USGal in tanks, and we've got another 500 in a bladder tank sitting in the cockpit. So figure on a total of 3250. We're running twin Cat-3208TA 300 Hp monsters plus a pair of 12 KW Northern Lights gennies. At 1800 RPM, we dash along at 9.5 kts and consume just over 10 GPH (including one gen-set) - range of 3000nm. At 1600 RPM, we slow to 8.25 kts and consumption drops to a bit under 8 GPH - range increases to 3300nm. Now, back to the route! We'll be leaving San Francisco bay and running south for a couple of days on the way to San Diego. Basically, this is a shakedown cruise to make sure everything is working. Then we top off the tanks and go southwest, a bit south of the rhumb line to Hilo. We chose Hilo over other Hawaii ports simply because it is closest to the mainland and has reasonable facilities, including fuel. >From there, we run due south to Kiritimati (Christmas Island) where we hope to be able to pick up a few hundred gallons of fuel. (The bunkering agent can't help us here - we're on our own dealing with the locals.) If we get fuel, we head southeast against the trades to the Marquesas, fill up there, and turn west to the Tuamotus; if we don't get fuel in Christmas Island, we'll skip the Marquesas and Tuamotus and go straight to Papeete. After that, things are a bit easier. Just island hopping our way west, stopping in the Cook Islands, Samoa (American and Western), Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, and finally to Brisbane on Australia's Gold Coast. Our expectation is to be somewhere in Oz for Christmas 2005. If we are early, we might hop up to Port Moresby (Papua/New Guinea) and then through the Torres Strait to Darwin. If it is close to the end of December when we arrive in Brisbane, we'll take some R&R, then day trip up the coast, hoping to sneak between any storms (it will be the onset of the southern hemisphere's cyclone season). Either way, when we're ready, we leave Darwin for Bali, Jakarta, Singapore, Phuket, and Galle (Sri Lanka), then cross the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and Suez Canal. I haven't actually planned much of the trip past Australia, so I have no idea if we'll stop in the Maldives, Seychelles, Madagascar, or any of the other exotic Indian Ocean locals. They're just so far apart. But if piracy gets bad in the Red Sea then we'll definitely head to Madagascar on the way to South Africa and "the horn" - I really do hope to avoid that! So that's it!