The skipper wastes no time in putting you to work fixing the damaged deck, though he has you doing the labouring work while he does the more technical aspects.

He then spends the next few hours teaching you which rope is which, and the various aspects of the boat.

In reply to Fate (msg # 1):

Certainly the hard way to do it... a simple reactor and this thing would move better with out all this rope mess.

In reply to Cyril Zotmund (msg # 2):

"Yes, but we would then need all the infrastructure to support a reactor and maintain it, which we don't have. Even if we had it, we would be vulnerable now that we have lost it. This gear, with a little relatively low tech automation, is much more reliable."

I don't see how... you are wind dependent, it's slow and there are numerous things that could go awry. Your Tech will be back soon and I expect serious advances shortly thereafter.  The ability to move quickly has many merits, especially with agricultural goods.

"We got here six years ago in one small ship with about seven hundred people. The labs," he spat venomously, "killed everyone at Landfall - about a quarter of our number."
Meir was already intimately familiar with the operations of the ship, even if he usually sailed slightly smaller vessels during his expeditions. A hundred a twenty foot long ship wasn't really necessary for exploration, mapping, and biological surveys.
"That's a lot of valuable skills and genetic diversity. I'm not even sure the colonies are still viable after that. We certainly can't support more than basic technology at this point."
"In fact it will be hard to maintain even just what we've still got after loosing so much in the attack."
It wasn't just people and knowledge that was destroyed, much of their more advanced industry had been shattered beyond repair.

I saw, but I also know some things...one being that Kalishnakov has a major settlement just a jump away. He has lots of current tech and could use a place to plant both people and tech... right now he only has a moon. You both might be able to work out something where you both gain ... and the Government guys won't want to mess with his stuff... he has handled them quite roughly in the past.

Kat looks around the vessel as she is very curious about it. She explores what she can to see how it works. "So skipper, how did you survive the crash and such? I am impressed by what you did.  Hopefully now that we are here, we can help to rebuild your colony"

"What crash?"

In reply to Meir Galinski (msg # 8):

"Not sure about any crash, but we were simply absent when Landfall was attacked, and we stayed hidden. Nothing we could have done anyway. We thought to go an pick up survivors, but there were not any...

More than likely, we survived because we did not have any high tech they could detect. Half the planet is covered by trees, so finding a wooden boat is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The reason we adopted low technology was to enhance our survivability in the event of a catastrophe hitting one of the bases, as happened. Of course, contact with Earth or t least other Terrans changes all of that, but that only happened in the last few days."

The sea so far is fairly mild, with gentle 1m swells and 15-25 knot breezes bringing you along gently at about 5 knots. The ship departs from the coast and head towards the Fishing settlement.
This message was last updated by the GM at 05:39, Wed 04 Jan 2017.

Meir filled in for the position of navigator, a role he was eminently qualified for. After all, the maps and charts aboard the ship he'd had a major hand in creating in the first place.
"We're making reasonable speed. I estimate about ninety to a hundred standard hours if we can keep it up."
"That's doubtful though as I've never known the wind to blow consistently, and we're probably going to have to anchor when it gets dark."
Although his maps were good, they'd only had a few years to survey the route and many hazards remained unknown. Better to travel by daylight when they had a better chance of detecting trouble before they hit it.

[Private to GM: Made Navigation by 4.]

In reply to Meir Galinski (msg # 10):

"Agreed. There is an island about 25 nautical miles away where we can anchour for the night. We should be there in about 5 hours."

"Still don't see why we need to use the old antiquated measurements," he muttered, clearly an old argument he was used to loosing.
"I mean, this is our planet, why can't we just use metric like normal people and make my job so much easier?"

In reply to Meir Galinski (msg # 12):

"I thought you knew about navigation? Nautical miles is based on the circumference of the planet, and as this planet is approximately the same diameter as earth, 1 nautical mile is equivalent to one minute of longitude at the equator. This makes reading charts so much easier, and navigating much more logical. At one knot, you travel 1 nautical mile in one hour. So it becomes very easy to understand, and this, by the way, is not an imperial unit, but actually a metric unit used for navigation. As a derived SI unit, one nautical mile is 1,852 metres is metric, as there was an old Imperial nautical mile, but it was abandoned before the turn of the 2nd millenia."

[OOC: the old Imperial Nautical Mile, or Admiralty measured mile, was abandoned even by the United States in 1970, probably because maritime charts needed to be consistent worldwide and such details were decided my the IMO, (International Maritime Organization) not the client states such as US and Australia, and most other nations!]