While far from land we have both sat-phone and e-mail capabilities, but these are reserved to selected relatives and friends.

Shaula3's communications array: VHF, SSB, satphone

Also restricted to authorized persons is the ability to access the Yachtplot website, where the possibility to send us short text messages is made available.

 

 

The reason for this behavior is that, despite the huge advances of modern technologies, voice- and data-communication from a yacht at sea are still very slow, sometimes problematic and always very expensive!!   If our coordinates become the target of spam messages, we may have serious difficulties to extract the important traffic from the mass (and we may incur in extra costs as well!).

To contact us, you may use the following e-mail address:

Please be aware that we do not systematically connect to the above address while at sea, but only when we are on or near land and able to get a relatively fast and cost-effective connection.
It is therefore quite possible that several days, occasionally even weeks, may pass before we read the messages sent to this address.

Even then, we are forced to take some additional precautions; please understand that we are not being paranoid: a careless behavior may render our offshore communications unusable for critical purposes like receiving weather forecasts!!

• The address above is not "clickable" to automatically open your e-mail program (in fact, it is not a text altogether, it is a picture!!), and you will have to copy the address in your mail program.
  Sorry for the little inconvenience, which is aimed at avoiding that automatic internet web-site scanners recognize the e-mail address and put it into spam distribution-lists.
  Unfortunately, spam may easily increase a mailbox traffic by 10 times!! This is very annoying at home, but it can make a mailbox totally un-usable from low-speed connections.
  
• A trusted person will check periodically the above mailbox, and will take care to forward only the urgent (and reasonably short!) messages on the mailbox that we actually can read at sea. 

 We also ask you to follow a few simple rules:

• Please, please, never, ever, send messages with large attachments to the above-indicated address.
  If you really need to, then contact us and we will give you instructions.
  
• Again, please, do not publish our address on any web-site of any sort!  If you think that somebody deserves to have our address, point him to this site or give him the address via a private e-mail.
  
• Further still, do not include this address in your mailing lists that you use to send messages to groups of friends: sooner or later, somebody will forget and will include our address in the distribution of a "funny" multi-Megabyte document or photo!!
  
• If you discover our "secret" Sailmail e-mail address, please do not use it to reply and do not give it to anybody without our previous consent!