Last year during the West Marine Pacific Cup we had quite a few interesting messages and even some digital photos from the racers at sea. Hopefully, this year's TransPac racers will want to outdo the racers from the north.

If a yacht does have email capabilities, the following rule from the Sailing Instructions should be known to all correspondents:

10.1 A yacht shall neither make radio transmissions while racing nor receive radio communications regarding weather or race conditions unless the broadcast is a publicly scheduled forecast available to the entire fleet.

10.2 While racing a yacht shall not use an electronic communication device either to transmit or to receive any weather information that is transmitted for the direct or indirect benefit of an individual yacht as distinct from all other yachts participating in the race.

Accordingly, a yacht may receive regularly scheduled weatherfax transmissions from stations such as NPM and NMC and may receive from orbiting satellites the maps normally broadcast by satellites. However, a yacht may not receive "e-mail" containing weather information or obtain weather information from a "web page" on the internet. Although a yacht may listen to "chatter" between commercial shipping vessels, if any such vessel transmits weather information to another vessel for the purpose of indirectly conveying such information to a racing yacht and the yacht receives, i.e. hears, the transmission of such information, then the yacht shall have violated Paragraph 10.1. If a yacht conducts any communication with anyone who may not be aware of Paragraph 10.1, then at the beginning of any such communication the yacht should inform the other person of Paragraph 10.1 so as to avoid inadvertent violations.