It seems all but certain that Robin will arrive some time on the 28th. Back when I bought my airline ticket to come to Fremantle, Alex Thomson's team told me they were planning on being here on December 4th. I thought it would be safe to add a few more days and arrive on December 7th since I didn't expect Robin to be moving quite as fast as the a race favorite like Alex.
Little did I imagine how safe a margin I established for myself. I'll have had a full three weeks to bide my time here in Fremantle. No complaints, however. I've quite enjoyed this time to explore and get to know a town I'll return to almost exactly a year from now when my own sailing race is underway.
The rest of Robin's team, some of them paid and some of them volunteers like myself, have arrived in these last few days and are sleeping off their jet-lag in a nearby house. Robin has been able to transmit by e-mail a list of details and damage that his boat has been subjected to in this 14,000 mile leg of the race, so a rather tight schedule and a list of objectives has been drawn up for what we want to accomplish in the short period we have between Robin's arrival and before the race restarts on January 14th.
For the first week, I've been assigned to Kiwi Dave, an energetic and amazingly knowledgeable 22 year old New Zealander who helped us quite a bit in Bilbao. He works for the internationally known and respected sailmaking company; Northsails. We'll be working as a team to repair the extensive damage to all of Robin's sails. This involves wrestling all day long with huge and heavy sails in a sail loft outside of town, working on a table the size of a small plot of land and using an industrial strength sewing machine. Look at the size of sails in the photo above (taken in Bilbao's harbour) and when you consider that only two of Robin's collection of seven sails are deployed, you can begin to imagine the scope of this job.
I jumped at the chance to take on this task, for not only will learning sail repair make me more valuable to my own upcoming sailing race, it also relates to taking care of the sail material used on both of my hang gliders.
These current days over the Christmas weekend, then, are my last few days of repose, I imagine. Once Robin's here, it will be 17 straight days of 12-15 hours of work a day to get him ready to sail again. Our goal is to give him a boat in better condition than the one he left Bilbao with.
I've scheduled one last day of surfing (my sixth so far) on the 27th at the nearby surf school. I'll follow it with a 90 minute massage (my sixth since I've arrived) that evening and be ready for the storm to hit on the 28th with Robin's arrival.
As for the holidays, I'll be celebrating them with my fellow travelers (Brits, Dutch, Danes, Germans, and one American-me) that I've met at my backpacker's hostel here in Fremantle ($18 a night!!).
Holly, a gregarious and delightful Brit who turned 22 just last Tuesday, has taken on the task of being our social secretary and has arranged some holiday activities for this weekend. On the 25th we'll be having our own Christmas feast that will include swapping simple gifts with one fellow traveler whose name we've picked out of a Christmas stocking. I've drawn "Kirsty" but I've yet to figure out who she is among the 55 inhabitants with whom I share this dorm-like hotel (we sleep six to a room, men and women mixed together in rooms and bathrooms).
