Being away on a boat for six months causes some unique problems. It's hard to work, but not impossible. We also want to maintain our relationships with our family and friends. Last, while traveling, life goes on. Bills still need to be paid, bank statements have to be reconciled, and so forth. Here are some of the things we’re doing with technology to solve these problems.

• At the navigation station: Our main computer is a small-form-factor desktop that fits nicely behind the dinette in the main cabin. The computer uses a wireless keyboard, a trackball built into the navigation station, a flat screen 15” monitor mounted on an adjustable bracket, and a color printer/scanner.

• Web page: We created this page to keep in touch with our friends and family. We write to people individually, too, but the web page lets us post our photographs without sending separate messages with photo attachments to people from a cell phone roaming internationally and very slowly at 9600 baud. We update the site about every two weeks. If you'd like us to notify you when there are new pages, contact us and tell us your e-mail address.

• Photography: Our digital camera helps us record our experiences. We have to degrade the picture quality a little to keep the size of the site manageable. If we've done too much degrading, let us know.

• Financial life: We use the online banking features in Quicken. In partnership with our bank, we pay bills and download transactions as soon as they clear. Our historical Quicken records help us anticipate bills, and we are eternally grateful to Gertrude the momma for wading through our forwarded mail and sending daily e-mails to us.

• Telephone: We have mobile phone service and a “world phone” based in Florida. The network uses GSM technology, which is all over Europe. (Europe is ahead of the US in wireless. If you want to know why, go get Karen’s telecommunications strategy book.) If you call our mobile number in Florida, it rings in Europe. You pay for the call to Florida, and we pay a reasonable charge per minute for airtime.

• E-mail: We use the mobile phone to get e-mail. This means that we can pull down our mail (and get marine weather charts) while we sit in harbor. It’s very slow and expensive, and we hope that people don’t send us huge pictures without warning. We get online during hours with lower per-minute rates whenever we can.

• Phone messages and faxes: Instead of calling in constantly for messages in long international calls, or forwarding faxes, we use a service called J2.com. The service assigned us a local telephone number and forwards our calls to it. J2 takes a voice message or a fax, converts it to an audio or picture file, and immediately sends the message to our e-mail account. It’s faster than calling in to retrieve messages and much less expensive.