Excerpt from an email received from Maurice & Louise-Ann Nunas aboard
Akama, a Krogen 48 Whaleback:

Well, as you may have surmised by now we are no longer in Australia.
We left on schedule on 21 July, and are now in Kupang Indonesia,
which is on Timor Island.  Yes. that's the island where all the
trouble happened over East Timor separation from Indonesia a few
years ago; but we're on the western end, which has always been safe.

The crossing was reasonably good, with moderate winds and following
seas.  We were part of a fleet of about 110 sailboats and two race
boats on a rally, a new experience for us.  There were two other
power boats.  The rally started without us from north of Darwin, as
we were still taking on fuel at the fisherman's dock, about 7 miles
to the south.  Due to a swift current in the strait going north, we
intercepted the fleet in about the middle of the pack.  But, we were
then passed by nearly every sailboat, as the winds were quite strong
once we got a bit offshore.  However, overnight the winds dropped out
and we passed nearly all of them, despite our sedate 6 to 7 knot
pace.  About a dozen of the sailboats started their engines that
night and stayed ahead of us to the end, as did the two race boats.
By the end of the rally, only about six sailboats actually sailed all
the way, about 450 miles across the Timor Sea, although only a few
managed to catch up to us.  We arrived in 20th place.

We still do not know for sure where we will go from here, or when.
This is synchronistic with the locals, as everything they plan seems
to turn to sh!t, get postponed, or not happen at all.  Some of the
other yachties are finding this a bit hard to deal with.  Having
lived and travelled in the area we're used to it.  In all
probability, in a few days we'll go to Makassar (on Sulawesi Island)
for their 400th anniversary celebration, stopping to anchor where we
can. After that, we plan to head straight through to Bali, weather
permitting, hoping to get there in time to meet up with our friends
Andy and Muli from Jakarta.  From Bali we'll probably go straight to
Kumai, on Kalimantan Island, to see the orangutan sanctuary, and then
day-hop our way to Singapore.

http://nunas.com/

Not sure if this is an appropriate place for this, so I won't say
anything more than if you're upgrading to Vista-64 and want to use your
Nobeltec software, or actually, charts protected by a dongle, you will
need to stand on one leg while waving a dead chicken in the air and
singing Gypsies Tramps and Thieves at midnight under a full moon, but
other than that it's a piece of cake. If the moderator thinks the
details on how to get it to work ought to shared here, I'll be glad to
do so.

tr