Australian bloggers

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 27. Chapters: Jessica Watson, Gerald Fredrick Töben, Andrew Bartlett, Andrew Bolt, Caitlin Hill, Joe Vialls, Melinda Tankard Reist, Jeff Waugh, Donna Williams, Joanne Nova, Andrew Leigh, Tim Blair, Jonathan Strahan, Marieke Hardy, Richard Neville, Pia Waugh, Norrie May-Welby, Darren Rowse, Penny Sharpe, Steve Kilbey, Rusty Russell, John Quiggin, Jean Burgess, Kate Lundy, Kerryn Goldsworthy, Cameron Reilly, The Worst of Perth, Max Barry, Olive Riley, Antony Loewenstein, Joshua Gans, Jason Wilson, Rodney Croome, Selena Silver, Andrew Norton, Peter Faris, Amir Butler, Duncan Riley, Kimberlee Weatherall, First Dog on the Moon, Daniel Bowen, John Helmer, Peter B Marks. Excerpt: Jessica Watson (born 18 May 1993) is an Australian sailor. She resides in Buderim, Queensland. In May 2010, she unofficially became the youngest person to sail non-stop and unassisted around the world, although her route did not meet World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSSRC) criteria for circumnavigation of the globe. Watson departed from Sydney on 18 October 2009, heading eastbound over the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. She returned to Sydney on 15 May 2010, three days before her 17th birthday. On 25 January 2011 she was named the 2011 Young Australian of the Year. Jessica Watson was born in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The second of four children of New Zealand couple Roger and Julie Watson, who moved to Australia in 1987, she has dual Australian and New Zealand nationality. She has an older sister (Emily) and younger brother and sister (Tom and Hannah). All four took sailing lessons as children, and the family went on to live on board a 16 metre cabin cruiser for five years, the children being home schooled via distance learning. Later they lived on a purpose-built double decker bus for some time. When Jessica was eleven and they were still living on the boat, her mother read Jesse Martin's book Lionheart: A Journey of the Human Spirit to the children as a bedtime story. This led to Jessica forming the ambition at age twelve to sail around the world too. Approximate route taken by Watson on her voyage between October 2009 and May 2010Watson had been planning to complete a solo non-stop and unassisted circumnavigation of the globe since at least early 2008. Officially announced in May 2009, the journey was expected to take eight months with an estimated distance of 23,000 nautical miles. To fulfill the plan of sailing non-stop and unassisted, during the journey no other person would be allowed to give her anything and she must not moor to any port or other boat, although advice over radio communication was permitted. Watson's planned c