Final Boat Preparation

All ten boats are rafted up in the marina a few hundred yards from my house, full of bustling people such as myself fine tuning the rigging above decks and anything anyone can think of below decks.



Among the many tasks being undertaken, all lines (ropes) are being replaced, which is an immense job.


On Carrie's boat, Qingdao, she's been busy at work doing her part. In fact, she's doing more than her part.


I don't know how many times I've looked over and noticed that it was Carrie who was doing something productive while a group of men stood around her being useless. Here she's refurbishing a winch while several men of her crew try to figure out if she's doing it right. She's done many, they've done none, and yet they insist on "helping."




I stepped over onto her boat to add to the confusion and she grabbed my camera from me.


In the end, though, it was her hands getting greasy while the rest of us just watched.


In this week I've spent three separate days attending day-long classes in the three specialties I've been assigned; boat engineer (engines, generators, water makers, toilets, etc.), video photographer (schooled in how to compress and download videos while at sea to meet sponsors demands), and here, in the photo below taken in a classroom, radar.

This was a fascinating class, where we used two PC's to simulated both a radar screen and boat functions to operate in realistic conditions in the English Channel and used our radar's software to predict probable collisions to calculate the best evasive maneuver.


Back on my boat, the other RTW's (Round The Worlders) worked on other aspects of the boat and rigging. There's enough to do to keep us busy a month but we'll wrap it up to depart Gosport on Monday, two days away. We'll do a bit more in Liverpool for a week before the actual race start but here it's easiest where we have all the tools and supplies we need.


This blog entry marks a transition of sorts. Tomorrow morning I'll put into storage whatever I'm not taking on the boat and whatever I've not thrown or given away. This includes my laptop. From now on, then, my blog entries won't contain any photos. What ever I post will be just by text from the boat limited at-sea internet capabilities or from some internet cafe in various cities.

There'll be official websites with pictures and even video (of which I will be behind the camera most of the time) but it will be generic in nature, not personal from me.

This is it, then, in a sense. Being such a visual kind of person, I can't imagine communicating without images, but I've got no choice for the time being.

Good night.

Leonid Birthday

The Leonids are historically the most spectacular meteor shower, peaking with a truly spectacular storm every 33 years or so. Probably the most well known Leonid event occurred in 1833, with an estimated one hundred thousand meteors per hour.

This image is a 19th century representation of what it looked that night in 1833.

The 33 year cycle varies. In the year 1999, people were expecting the best, but it never came, nor the next year, nor any after that. Perhaps we'll have to wait until 2032 or 2033 to witness a significant storm again.

This meteor shower has been on my mind because the shower of positive thoughts and energy coming my way lately has almost been overwhelming.

Over the year I've spent here in Gosport, I've been blessed with a growing sense of appreciation from the entire Clipper Venture organization, who seem to view my enthusiasm to get as involved as I could with a bit of both amusement and appreciation. My being here has worked well for them (lots of free and happy labor) and very, very well for me.

Further more, in these last few weeks, good feelings have come from far and wide, from people I know well and from people I've yet to met. I've felt immersed in good feelings all around.

-A few weeks ago I wrote a summary of all the events that seem to reveal the encouraging sense of unity developing during my first full week of sailing with my crew mates in this race. I posted it on our group site and was met by numerous responses of gratitude that I'd expressed openly in words what many had been feeling in their hearts.

-I threw two videos together from some low grade footage I'd made from those adventures at sea, posted it on the internet, sent out the address to my crew and a few other friends, and since then have been inundated with praise from what seems like every sailor I know (and don't know) here.

-I passed on a bit of praise a friend made about a mutual acquaintance and was later immensely gratified to learn I had unknowingly met an important need by doing so.

-I counseled a future ship mate I'd yet to meet about a few concerns and was rewarded with personal praise of such strength that I'm too shy to record it here.

On and on it seemed to be going, like a 33 year cycle Leonid shower of good will and good faith.

I'd thought it couldn't get any better but my birthday on August 27th proved me wrong. It began a few days early with a touching card from a new friend I've met here in England, telling me how much my own life inspires her to have the courage to seek the life she wants. Monday morning, the 27th, I was finally permitted to open a birthday package of delectable edibles I'd received from Australia two days earlier. I also found a pile of small gifts and a card from Carrie waiting for me on my computer.

After breakfast I went down to the boat to work and was rewarded with a cards and simple gifts from three separate people on my own boat. From various boats around me in the marina, both skippers and crew I knew would shout "happy birthday" across the docks. Carrie, it would appear, had told everyone.

E-mail birthday wishes came from Australia, England, the States, Russia, and even Columbia in South America.

Coincidentally enough, a new fountain of praise poured in on the 27th from people who had no idea it was my birthday. The previous day I'd written an additional summary of the reasons I felt a good sense of a team building within the group of my boat's crew that I'd just finished a second week of sailing with, and posted it on our group's site. Overnight words of gratitude poured into my computer for once again expressing what others had felt but hadn't known how to say, leaving me with an additional list of spiritual gifts to add to the day's already burgeoning tally.

To end it all, after Carrie and I had spent the entire day working on our respective boats in the mad rush to finish preparation for the race, she whisked into the house and, still wet from her shower, energetically whipped up a birthday dinner for me.

Certainly I feel loved, not just by one but by a shower of people. James Taylor's Shower The People You Love With Love has always been my theme song.

Things must be coming full circle.

A New Beginning

It took two trips to get all my year's worth of possesions down to the marina. First came my Ocean Sleepwear sleeping bag and a few loose ends.


Then the rest.


Down at the marina, it was a mass of amateur sailors getting ready for the next phase of their lives, a new beginning for all of it. Carrie caught this image of me from her boat.

Now we're done with all our training on the water and back on land with one week to go before we leave for Liverpool on September 3rd for the final preparations and race start on September 16th. This final week in Gosport will consist a mixture of boat tweaking (I've become the boat carpenter, building custom shelves and such in a few places), a few more technical courses (I've also been selected to undergo one full day of training in our boat's radar system and another full day video photography instruction to meet the demand of the media for footage). Carrie has been selected to undergo five straight days of training to become the medic on her boat, able to administer injections, insert catheters, etc., to fill the gap between basic first aid and true medical attention.

So much to be done but it seems doable now.

All You Really Need in Life

Today's my last full day (for probably more than a year) in a home that doesn't rock with the waves. Above is what it takes to spend a year at sea...abut 25 kilos worth.

One of the key people in Clipper Ventures did the race six years ago and has mentioned that one of the most worthwhile lessons of the year for him was that all you really need in life can fit into a duffel bag.

I've got to get a larger duffel bag.

Our route in Google Earth

Click here to bring up two tracks in Google Earth. You get something that looks like the image below.


In red, you'll see the route for our race as it stands right now, sort of (see below).

In blue, you'll see the actual track of one of the boats in the previous race, with each waypoint being an indication of the boat's daily position at midday. The name of the waypoint will indicate the date of that position (e.g. 050922 means Sept 22, 2005).

To create this track, I borrowed one boat's logbook from the race office last winter and spent two days pouring over it, transferring each day's entry nearest to noon into a data file that GoogleEarth would read. This is the kind of information I wanted to have. This is the kind of graphic I wanted to see.

Thinking the skipper of that boat would enjoy it as well, I e-mailed the resultant file to him. Two months later he was hired as the new race director and, he later told me, he used my file to show the new website company one of the things he wanted to see on the site.

So now the website will have exactly what I would want it to have for all my friends and family. Funny how things sometimes come full circle that way.

Our route as it stands now is as follows.

• Sept 16: Liverpool
• Sept 19-23: La Rochelle, France
• Oct 16-24: Salvador, Brazil
• Nov 17-25: Durban, South Africa
• Dec 16-Jan 1: Fremantle, Australia
• Jan 17-26: Singapore
• Feb 12-20: Qingdao, China

The next set of dates are a bit more vague, because the race office hasn't finalized them yet. San Francisco and Halifax are still undergoing negotiations, so it hasn't even been confirmed that we'll actually stop there. New York, however, is firm.

• Early March: Japan?,
• Late March: Hawaii
• Mid April: San Francisco?
• Late May: Panama Canal
• Late May: Jamaica?
• Early June: New York
• Mid June: Halifax, Canada?
• Early July: Dublin?
• Early July: Liverpool finish

In A Perfect World...

...I could take all of this for my year at sea. This is what I want to take. I need to cut it in about half.

Back to work.

The Final Preparation

Carrie arrived in England on July 30th, having finished the laborious task of closing down her life in the States. Before she began her final two weeks of training (which she's doing consecutively), we took a long weekend trip to Vienna, Austria to visit two of her closest friends, Sylvia and Thomas.


Back in Gosport, we spent this last weekend taking three days of classes. First aid came first:





Sea Survival came next. After a bit on dry land where we worked with emergency flares...


...most of the day was spent in a pool. One quarter of us practiced teamwork while bobbing in the pool while the remaining three-quarters did their best to make the pool simulate true storm conditions by splashing, kicking, and pouring buckets of water on top of us from the pool's edge.




We inflated liferafts...


...flipped them over and practiced flipping them back upright again...


...as well as liferaft ingress and egress.


We spent the following full day with radios wired to transmit only within the room, working on May Day procedures and how to effectively communicate in an emergency.


Yesterday Carrie moved on to her boat, Qingdao (home of the 2008 Beijing Olympics sailing venue).



Having already done one of the two final weeks of training, I won't move onto my boat until August 20th.

At that point, the race will have essentially begun for all of us. I won't get off the boat until mid July of 2008, after the race finish in Liverpool and after the boats have been sailed back down to Gosport.

That gives me seven days, then, to do everything I need to do while I've still got a home, time, and internet access. Right now, my once comfortable and cozy apartment is a pile of boxes, bags, and piles of things to be sorted: take (not much), store (not much more), or give away (quite a bit).

It's a melancholy feeling, actually, which is why I've made the excuse to take the time I don't really have to make this blog entry. It's been so grand this year, living here. The upcoming year will be grand, too, but in a different way.

I can't wait for it to begin but I'm sad to see this year end.

Back to the boxes for me right now.

Sunrise from my balcony one morning earlier this summer