Boatless, So great to see you are still beamed in. I parked my boat next to the young man last May in Hobart that is currently the youngest to ever circumnavigate solo, a 17 yr old Brit by the name of Mike Perham. He crossed the finish line last Thursday in the UK. Young Mike had a Vendee Globe boat, was a nice lad and very brave, but I had a sense Dad was driving the show and possibly this maybe Dad's thing being done through his son, but stand to be corrected. A girl 13 cannot be in charge of all her faculties, no way in my opinion. This event can present deep psychological trauma, just the loneliness for a starter, not to mention something seriously going wrong. I have a GP friend that claims he went insane when his sailing boat was dismasted and was lost for two weeks in a single handed race. He made it back to Oz from NZ finishing 2000nm south of his objective. First thing he did was to further his studies to do psychiatry as he felt he had an insight into the human mind going off the rails. What we need to do is get PUP back onto its mission and discuss passagemaking, and to promote the joys in store for the adventurer, so here goes. I have just reached the 60% mark of a circumnavigation of Australia of 7,200 nm in total. I believe it's the first time this has happened in a power boat, particularly going the "wrong way" i.e. east to west. I don't want any accolades as crossing the notorious Great Australian Bight as it was a stroll in the park to be quite truthful. However on earlier passages I have experienced Bass Strait in its unrelenting fury. This I confidently believe is now the future of cruising as we now have power boats that can do this because of the Trawler type characteristics. I ran into a guy from Perth in the Kimberley on an Horizon, who was having fuel flown into him constantly for his 3000nm trip. I also ran into a sailing boat returning from Indonesia begging for fuel, as there was no wind at all, while I'm rhumblining it to the next waypoint with stacks of fuel. My Nordie burns 4 gls an hour, doing 7 kts, and I start out with 2,260 gls, so this is surely changing the religion for the future. To cap it off as a measure of encouragement to others, I am a ladies shoe salesman starting out with zero understanding of anything mechanical whatsoever. I am approaching 66 yrs old, and will rack up 18,000 nm at the end of this year in a little over 2 years. Yes I'm a lot smarter now of course, but better off I believe than many of my friends at home falling off their twig playing golf. Let's get this site back to the basic premise, help the dreamers to get going, and robustly encourage some members to maybe adopt twitter to get their crazy rocks off. Peter SKIE N55#38 www.skieadventure.com