Sea Rose - Day 10 - The Big Blue Orb

I keep grabbing my phone and opening email. Im not sure why as we don’t have wifi on the boat, just a slow proprietary email service from Iridium that works with our (very dated) Iridium Go. We are disconnected from the world, save for short text-based emails from rally control, the weather service and friends that we can trust to not send us attachments or include us in long email threads that would jam up our very slow bandwidth connection. We could have installed Starlink, and plenty of other boats did, but for many reasons we took a pass on this option. It’s not often you get to choose to be disconnected for several weeks. Some day in a future ocean crossing, broadband satellite service will be so ubiquitous that most everyone will have it, like the eventual offering of wifi on planes, a space favored by purists for so long as a haven of peace unless you wanted to pull out that phone in the seatback with the long skinny cord and pay a king’s ransom to reach the office.

For now, we get the critical news, like where we are in the fleet ranking even though we promised ourselves that it is a rally not a race! And we can send off Happy Thanksgiving messages to our families back in the States. But otherwise we have much more time for conversation, for reading, and for reflecting on life on this beautiful big blue orb called Earth.