Hello Fellow Sailors and HOW Participants, We are Roger and Susie Mummah and we cruise and live aboard the 1983 Hunter 31 "Endless Summer". We have made two other Bahamas cruises. In 1999/2000 we made an Exuma Cruise and we wrote "Cruising Endless Summer-Exumas" about the experience. In the Spring of 2001 we went to the Abacos for 6 weeks. No book resulted from that cruise, but we had another great time and met many wonderful people. We are in Marathon, Florida now, but we plan to leave tomorrow morning (Monday 12/08/2003) and head for Miami. There are lots of boats there waiting for a break in the weather so they can cross the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. We hope to get to No Name Harbor at Cape Florida by Tuesday afternoon and then leave early Wednesday morning. We have friends who are already there and they say 12 or so boats are waiting to cross together on Wednesday morning. There are probably many more boats waiting at other places in Miami too. This is the first in a series of reports from our Exuma cruise. Phil Herring has graciously allowed us to post these reports on HOW and we hope you enjoy them. When we can not get to an Internet connection we will be sending reports from our single sideband radio using a radio email system called SailMail. SailMail is a commercial system, like an Internet Service Provider and it costs $200 per year. The amateur radio (ham) version of this system is called Winlink and it is free (except for the cost of the equipment). Both systems use a base program called Airmail. You can use your favorite search engine to get further information on these systems. The radio reports may not be as elegant in form as one might expect. They will probably be short and one big long set of sentences with no paragraph breaks. We are allowed 10 minutes per day of bandwidth and since there is a lot of error correction, I have no idea how that equates to the size of a document. To accomplish the magic of radio email, we have a single side band radio transceiver, an antenna, an automatic antenna tuner, a radio modem called a TNC and a computer. All components of the system are important, but a key item is the TNC. There are other brands, but it is the opinion of many cruisers that the SCS (Special Communications Systems) PTC series is the only way to go. SCS developed a radio protocol called PACTOR that allows the efficiency of the system. We have an SCS PTC-IIe TNC and we have upgraded it to the latest PACTOR version which is PACTOR III. It's really cool to sit here aboard Endless Summer and turn on the laptop, the radio and the TNC and send and receive email through the atmosphere. There are Winlink and SailMail radio stations all over the world, so we can quite literally "stay in touch" from anywhere we plan to go. If you follow our travels you will be able to prove to yourself that this kind of "on-board" communication capability is a reality. Our plan is to leave Cape Florida at 4-5 AM Wedesday, cross the Gulf Stream, enter the Great Bahama Banks at the cut between at Cat Cay (pronounced key) and Gun Cay and keep on heading across he banks (about 15 miles) until it gets dark. We'll anchor on the banks and pray that the conditions are calm. The next day we'll continue across the banks and anchor out in the open again. The next day we will continue through the Northwest Channel and make our way to the very protected Chub Cay Marina in the southern Berry Islands. We can get some rest and fuel at Chub and wait for another weather window to cross to Nassau Harbour (note British spelling of harbor). The water between Chub Cay and Nassau is as much as 3,000 meters deep. WOW! That's over a mile deep. We will do a little reprovisioning in Nassau and wait for the right weather to cross to the top of the Exuma island chain. Our plans can change, but right now we plan to leave Nassau, cross the Yellow Banks (lots of shallow reaching coral heads) to Shroud Cay. Then from Shroud to Staniel Cay and then to Galliot Cay. We'll pass through Galliot cut from the Exuma Banks to Exuma Sound and head for our winter address, which is Georgetown, Great Exuma Island, Bahamas. My current plan is to get a mooring ball in the protected "hole #2" and stay there until the Spring of 2004. Susie wants to explore, so we may stay on the mooring ball for a few months before visiting some other islands. We have had many months of busy days getting ready for this cruise and we are very anxious to get underway. Soon we will be sending cruise reportd which you can read here on HOW. Enjoy. Roger and Susie Mummah s/v Endless Summer (1983 Hunter 31 #58)