Day 8, Sunday, April 25. Galapagos to Marquesas. Checking in with the net

...It's ANZAC Day in Australia. G'day to all our Aussie mates...
We're still a few weeks behind the rest of the World ARC fleet. They will rendezvous in Tahiti on April 28 and expect to make landfall in Australia at Mackay towards the end of July. We hope to be there to cruise the Great Barrier Reef with them but we still have a very long way to go.
Outside the cyclone season quite a number of boats are sailing the South Pacific to the Coral Sea to reach Australia before November. Others will be dropping south to New Zealand and will wait out the cyclone season there.
Not every cruising boat has SSB radio. If you do you'll most likely be making a cruisers' net your daily check in point while underway. In the anchorages along the way we've especially enjoyed the informative and fun cruisers' nets on VHF radio. The grapevine, at it's best.
We left the Galapagos last Sunday with Anthem (Jack), Inspiration Lady (Gary and Jackie) and Jackster (Dave and Jacqui). We've nicknamed our regular SSB chat sessions with the group "The Jac Net". We're also checking in mornings and evenings with a larger group of boats on the "Barefoot Net".
Others also underway and checking in are: Acapella, Bamboozle, Bubbles, Dignity, Dream Kaper, Freedom, Gratitude, JSea, Kamia, Mintaka, Passages, Scream, Sea Mist, Sidewinder, Savannah, Victoria, William Phuket and Wonderland (apologies if I've renamed some boats with incorrect spelling). Jewel and InnforaPenny will hopefully soon be underway. We'll be looking out for a couple of Aussie boats who are not on SSB, Woolloomooloo and Fine Gold. We expect our friends on Whiskers and Emily Grace are now enjoying the Marqueses, but they're a few weeks ahead of us.
When checking in we give our current position, latitude and longitude, wind direction and speed, the sea conditions and our course. It's a big ocean (the Pacific covers 64 million sq. miles!) and the net puts us in contact with boats over a few hundred miles radius.
We use our SSB radio to log our position report which you can see when you click on "Where is Bristol Rose" at the top of our blog page. Our Yellow Brick tracking device seems to be working well and you can also go to the tracking page on the World ARC site.
We can't upload images while at sea so before we left the Galapagos we scheduled a couple of blog posts to share while underway on this long passage to the Marquesas. So you'll see some photos interspersed with our entries via SSB.
Onboard Bristol Rose on the way to the Galapagos we celebrated the achievement of sailing across the equator. Watch out for those photos (sorry Captain) when we get our next internet connection once we get to the Marquesas.
Posted via SSB radio
04 46.369S
115 21.348W