Ship's blog

Pete Goss is currently sailing, with three other crewmen, from Newlyn in north Cornwall, to Melbourne in Australia, via Cape Town in South Africa. It's being done in honour of the same journey taken by seven Cornishmen 154 years ago. They are sailing in a 37ft boat built from scratch named the 'Spirit of Mystery' in honour of the original boat called 'Mystery'. An interview with Pete Goss here goes into far more detail on all this.

This is all well and good. The interesting point, for this blog at least, is that Pete and his crew are keeping a thorough, interesting and amusing blog of their trip as they go. It's a great example of the power of blogging, that four men alone at sea, miles from land and travelling half way around the world can keep friends, family and strangers entertained by using the internet and specifically a blog, to upload entries of their latest sights and sounds and adventures that people can read almost instantly from where they are based - which you can also follow via a satellite tracker. Entries which in the past would have been confined to a ship's log are now in the ship's blog. Har har.

Furthermore there are many references throughout the blog of the crew asking questions about certain things - 'What do Turtles eat?' - and the readers of the blog emailing back with answers to inform them. They could Google it of course but where would be the fun in that?