On Zia, both Christie and I are sort of news junkies, and one of the things that we miss the most from our shorebound life is a constant supply of news. Back home in Annapolis, we had TV, Internet, The Washington Post, Annapolis Capital (local paper) and National Public Radio (NPR) all helping to keep us up to date on news and politics. Now that we are sea gypsies, we are have a lot more trouble keeping informed. I suppose this is both a blessing and a curse, since our lives now revolve around a whole different set of issues. Now we are most concerned with exploring new ports of call, learning how to buy groceries in a foreign language and, of course, weather information - as opposed to the latest political scandal or terrorist attack. But we still love to get the news and we miss it horribly.

Whenever we are in port, we try to get our hands on an International Herald Tribune, an American paper written for an international audience. The IHT is a condensed version of the New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post, and we eagerly devour it whenever we can find it.

When we are at sea, we use the SSB to tune in the BBC as often as we can get it, which, alas, is not very often at all. That is probably mostly due to cockpit error in finding the correct frequencies and times. Ocens Weathernet has a fantastic service that is FREE with their weather downloads. You can get US and World news added to your weather files as well as sports and business too. This is a great service; the only cost is a few seconds of Globalstar satellite time for the extra data in the download. We usually add these downloads to any batch files that we create and we leave 'em up on the nav computer for all to see.

When we were sailing amongst the Portuguese islands of the Azores, Portugal was playing in the Soccer World Cup. Portugal had been doing very well and we were eager to find out how the games came out, so we could know how much hard partying we were in for when we arrived in port. We downloaded sports info from Ocens Weathernet - and after perusing all of the football, baseball and basketball scores, we didn't find one word about the World Cup soccer matches. We know that the World Cup is not such a big deal in America, but it is a huge deal pretty much everywhere else in the world!

We figured out that Portugal had won the match as we sailed into port to honking horns, firecrackers, and pealing church bells. We will take the news however we can get it.