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