3700 to go

Position 37d 48m N, 13d 10m W. By tonight we will have sailed 1000 miles, with 3700 remaining to Brazil. Last night was as different from the previous night as possible. Instead of ripping spinnakers, snapping mainsail sheets, booms crashing across the deck, and no sleep for anyone, it was a stable spinnaker run on good seas under utterly brilliant moonlight. I spent my fair share of the 3-7am watch at the helm. On a 68ft boat with an 80ft mast hoisting a spinnaker bigger than any house I've ever lived in, it was a challenging and even intimidating task, but it was also exhilarating. The boat plows through the water and occasionally surfs down the huge waves that are rolling the same direction we are sailing. Standing at the helm on a starlit night, leading this 46 ton mass of fiberglass and Dacron through wind and waves, it's amusing to remember being so intimidated by my 14ft catamaran years ago which, in respect to this boat, seems like a paper airplane compared to a 747. How good it is that we are able to grow.

Ripped Spinnaker

Position: 40d 21m N, 010d 28m W. Last night at sunset we passed the northwest corner of Spain and now are on a generally straight run (depending on the cooperation of the wind) to Brazil. The middle of the night found us with a ripped spinnaker and a few other breakages that, at the time, seemed intense and quite the handful in the dark but by the morning we'd repaired everything on deck and are sewing up the spinaker. It's truly a good crew i'm with.

Landfall in La Rochelle, France

Everyone should be so lucky as to have hugs like this waiting for you at the end of a journey, particulary one on the sea.

Yesterday we arrived at La Rochelle, France, the site of our first stop in this race. Sian, above, is a new friend who's boat we actually beat in our first race but who ended up docking just before ours. She was, therefore, amidst the crowd on the dock to greet me.

When one of the official photographers took a picture of our embrace and we both were so delighted with it, he graciously asked for our e-mail addresses and sent us both a copy.

I should note that at the moment of that embrace, neither Sian or I had the chance to shower for the previous four days but, at times like those, it doesn't really matter. Then again, had the weather been more conducive to fewer layers, perhaps it would have. When we land in Brazil, we will be wearing shorts and a t-shirt...or perhaps less. Perhaps there I won't receive as many hugs from friends on other boats as I did yesterday.

Tonight is the first chance I've had to find an internet cafe to post. Where to begin?

How about here: the official website for the race is http://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/.

Within it, you'll find this page dedicated to my boat, Uniquely Singapore.

At this point, all the video, photos, and blog entries on it are of my doing, though I'm hoping to get others involved in photos and blog entries. Officially I'm the videophotographer and our boat's sponsor, a new marina in Singapore, has paid the extra bucks to allow our boat to send back video by satellite from the sea. Any video you'll see this entire race is something I created. It's exhausting work editing video with a limited laptop in a cramped navigation station on a heeling boat while exhausted from the work of sailing amidst a continually interrupted sleep pattern, but I'm glad I've been selected to do it.

Our race down from Liverpool ranged from tacking duels in a river channel in the pouring rain (just out of Liverpool) to limping along at 1 kt in a near windless sea with La Rochelle still 120 miles away. As the forecast left no hope for wind and we all had schedules to meet, it was annouced in the middle of Wednesday that the race would end at midnight that night. One boat (happily it was Carrie's boat Qingdao) was one mile behind us at that point, limping along just like we were. Holding them off for seven hours didn't seem like much of a problem but in the end, they beat us by 176 yards after 500 miles of sailing. They got sixth place. We got seven.

That amounts to an extra half a point for them in a race that has 145 points up for grabs, but it will certainly be bittersweet if that half point comes back to haunt us.

Then again, it's all fun in a sense. Both Qingdao and Uniquely Singapore were full of happy words, hugs, and respect for each other when we docked side by side in La Rochelle last night, having motored the last 120 miles in.

It's midnight here and I've skipped dinner to write this. Hopefully I'll be able to post something from the sea during the four week voyage we have to Brazil beginning in 36 hours.

I'm off to bed.

Dolphins, Snowden, and Liverpool

Our fleet of 10 boats departed their (and now my former) home in Gosport on September 3rd and sailed up to Liverpool to position ourselves for the race start on Sunday, the 16th, eight days from now.

We arrived at Albert Dock in Liverpool this morning. I'm at an internet cafe with an annoyingly sticky keyboard but this be how I'll be updating this blog from here on out. My laptop is storage. I'll figure some way to include pictures in the future but for now it's just words.

The sail up had two notable moments for me. On the second night I had the 2:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. watch. When I shook my slumber off as I climbed the companion way steps, I was happy to note that the sea was bioluminescent that night, with each tumbling crest of any wave carrying a vaguely shimmering glow. The last time I'd witnessed this was in October '06 while sailing north from Spain back to England. That night I'd had the most incredible experience at sea in my short sailing career, something I've written about before: Midnight Dance of the Bioluminescent Dolphins.

An hour into the watch, while taking my turn at the helm, I glanced at the trickle of glowing light falling off our bow wake moving away from us on both sides and thought of that October night. As I did, a lone dolphin's body, shimmering in bioluminescence perhaps one meter below the surface, caught up with the focus of my gaze and then surfaced with a gasp and dropped back down into the water, trailing a torpedo-like wake of light.

"Dolphins!" I shouted and everyone spun on their seats to look. In only a few moments, ten more dolphins appeared and gave us all a replay of that show from last October. For everyone on board except myself, it was a new experience.

What was new for me, however, was that when I went below at 5:00 a.m. to sleep, I heard them through the hull next to my bunk. I feel asleep to the squeaks, clicks, and whistles of dolphins as one might do to the sounds of a forest or field at night on land.

The next morning we sailed up the coast of Wales, passing through an area of the Irish Sea that I had seen from the top of Mount Snowden in Wales on Christmas Day of 2005. Cyndi and I had chosen to leave London and spend the holiday weekend in a bed and breakfast in Wales. Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales at 1085 meters, was only a half day's walk and climb from our cottage so we built an appetite for our Christmas dinner by climbing it. It was exactly two weeks later that I stumbled upon the Clipper Ventures booth in the London Boat Show and was inspired to begin the decision process that has lead me, twenty months later, to begin this amazing adventure by sailing through the very body water I had gazed upon from that mountain top more than a year before.

Sailing by a few days ago, I'd set my handheld GPS to indicate the direction and distance of Mount Snowden's summit. It was covered in clouds as we passed the point nearest to it, but I still felt some sense of coming full circle in an unexpected way. Not to be deterred, with a sense of spiritual purposeI gazed into the appropriate section of clouds that my GPS indicated. Not much later the sun set and it grew dark.

The Andromeda Galaxy is high in the sky this time of year, making it as visible to the naked eye as possible. Clinging to the happiness and significance my Snowden moment, I pointed it out to all on my watch, explaining to them that they were looking at light two million years old. Such a concept never fails to awe me. My crew shared the sentiment.

Now we are in Liverpool, truly wedded to our boat and at home with all it entails. There's much work still to be done, of course. I have today off, but the next seven days will be busy.

I'll try to write again before we sail. If not, I should be able to post thoughts directly from the boat at sea. We have limited internet access by satellite.

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

The Wilberforce Race

Just after dawn on July 24th, exhausted but delirious with joy from the previous hours in the Force 10 storm, we motored up the Nieuwe Mass river into Rotterdam. As previously arranged, once I had a signal on my mobile, I sent my Dutch friend Daphne an SMS with our estimated arrival time indicated by my GPS.

Living only an hour's drive from the marina we were going to use, I was hoping she'd have the time to gather up her three kids and meet me there. Though the storm had blown us in hours earlier than I had estimated we'd arrive before we left England, Daphne still managed to beat me to the marina. As we maneuvered into our berth, our entire boat was greeted by her children's high-pitched squeals of my name with a Dutch accent from the shore:

"Teee-mo-theeee! Teee-mo-theeee!"



After an afternoon of cleaning and repair (from which I was graciously excused on the account that I actually knew someone in the Netherlands who had actually come down to see the boat in), Uniquely Singapore was prepped for the Wilberforce race the next day. Daphne, her children, and I took a boat tour of Europe's largest port and enjoyed a sumptuous dinner out while the rest of my crew scrubbed, sewed, and washed. I was assured a way would be found for me to make up for my absence.

The next morning our boat's crew lined up along one rail to greet the well wishers along the shore while a fire boat tug gave us a full spray display.





Once out in the North Sea, all our ten boats lined up side by side for a Le Mans style start: with the engines running and only the mainsail up, the boats work to form a perfect line abreast. At a selected time, the engines are cut. One minute later the race is on and crew members are allowed to move forward to erect the two headsails as fast as they can.

It is a spectacular thing to behold such magnificently large ships maneuvering in such close quarters. As the boats are identical, it's tactics, sail trim, and the smoothness of whomever is at the helm that allow any one boat to pull ahead. Below is a five minute video I made of the race start. For most boats, the priority was the training value of the race, not the race itself. Still, with your competition right next to you, it's hard not to want to pass them or hold them off. Furthermore, such proximity allows you to see such immediate results to sail adjustments. In the video you'll see Durban (skippered by Ricky, one of the two skippers I'd asked to be assigned to; the other skipper was Mark, the skipper I got!) slowly pull away from us as the helmsman finds the right waves to surf down and maneuvers to find the optimum angle to the wind. They, like us, had selected one reef in their mainsail. The boat behind Durban had selected two reefs. Despite that much disparity of sail area, you'll see how slowly the differences are apparent.

Thirty-six hours or so later, we finished our race's course (we didn't win) and, after a night at anchorage waiting for the right tide to get into Hull's locks, all ten boats motored into a marina lined with cheering crowds, part of the year long Wilberforce Festival going on in the birthplace and home district of William Wilberforce, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Wilberforce's final success of a life long effort dedicated to ending British slave trade.

A gracious Clipper Ventures employee greeted us at the dock with a case of the local beer, which we scarfed down with delight. We were celebrating the end of our Part C training (the last segment of training for anyone except those doing the whole race, as I am) and the beginning of our adventure together as a team. No longer were we sailing with merely fellow Clipper Venture participants. We were now sailing with our own team. This was it. Anyone on our boat was someone I'll be seeing for all or some of the race that's only 46 days away from starting.

So much still to do.

At the Helm in a Force 10

In sailing, rather than indicate the specific speed of wind, the Beaufort Scale was created in 1805 by British Rear-Admiral, Sir Francis Beaufort to generalize 12 different stages. Force 0 represents a calm sea while Force 12 is a hurricane.

Force 10 is defined as winds of 55-63mph and...

"Very high waves with long overhanging crests. The resulting foam, in great patches, is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. On the whole the surface of the sea takes on a white appearance. The 'tumbling' of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like. Visibility affected."

The 1979 Fastnet race was struck by a Force 10 storm, in which 25 of the 306 yachts taking part were sunk or disabled due to high winds and heavy seas. Seventeen participants drowned. The ensuing book about the race, "Fastnet, Force 10" is probably one of the most well known books among sailors of any type.

A week ago, during the daylight hours of July 23rd, three days into our week of Clipper Venture Part C training (the last segment), our skipper Mark had slowly worked us through the steps of erecting our trysail. The trysail is a small triangular sail that's made of particularly heavy material (photo above). Used to replace the mainsail in the event of a storm, it offers the wind only a token but sturdy surface to blow against. It also allows one's boat to maintain at least some forward speed during a storm, and therefore allow control. The sail is also marked with a large orange circle to aid any rescue forces in finding one's boat, if necessary.

That evening, when Mark received a forecast of a Force 9 Gale for our area that night, he told us re-erect the trysail. We attached it and set up the lines, but left it lashed to the side of the boom. We had three reefs in our mainsail. Perhaps that would be enough of a reduction of sail to make it through the night.

I got off watch at midnight and, through a rare combination of lucky events, somehow had managed to be allocated a full eight hours in my bunk, a rare luxury on any watch system on any boat. I curled up in my bag and expected to sleep soundly until 8:00 a.m. but I woke up at 3:00 a.m.

It wasn't the pounding sea that woke me as much as the squeals of laughter and excitement that I heard coming from the cockpit down the companion way and reverberating throughout the entire boat. Ah, I thought to myself. It's come. The storm is here.

In my bunk I could feel the boat lurch and heave in long, slow motions underneath me and hear the corresponding exclamations above; "Wooo hooooooo!!!"

I'm probably missing something grand, I thought to myself, but it was so cozy and dry in my warm, four-layered bag and I knew it would be spraying water and high winds above. This might be your only chance, I'd tell myself, to helm in a true storm. I'd think this but still I'd pull the bag's open top tighter around my shoulders. Having the opportunity to rest on a voyage like anything we do in those boats usually takes priority over everything.

At 5:00 a.m. one of my crew came to my bunk and shook my shoulder. "Skipper's says you're needed to backup the crew on deck." Thankful for having the decision made for me, I got up and dressed in my foul weather gear. Passing Mark in the Nav Station as I started to climb the companion way steps, I gave him a thumbs up to show I was glad to be called upon and said, "It's not like I was sleeping, anyway."

"I though you might want to get in on this."
"I was laying there thinking that very thing," I told him. "Thanks."

The ensuing hours, as we approached Rotterdam for the starting point of the Wilberforce Race, rank up there with the highlights of the year for me, right below the Midnight dance of the bio-luminescent dolphins.

The predicted Force 9 Gale had risen to a Force 10 Storm. Because of the history of the 1979 Fastnet race, the mere words "Force 10" have an aura about them. On the other hand, the Fastnet race had "confused seas,'' that is, seas where the wind and tide moving in opposite directions, which creates huge and unpredictable waves.

Our sea in a Force 10 was surprisingly manageable. When my turn came to take the helm (everybody wanted a chance), I felt more like I was kayaking down huge but very slow moving mounds of water. At no time did anything feel frightening or out of control. With our trysail and storm jib (also a small, strong sail for the front of the boat) hoisted tightly, everything felt quite manageable and, most of all, fun. I understood the squeals of delight that had woken me a fe hours earlier. By the next morning, I had lost my voice, most likely from all the howling with glee I did on the helm during this Force 10.

From time to time we'd see a huge wave approaching and everyone would point and shout, "Yeeee haaaaaa" or something equivalent in either Mandarin Chinese or Malay.

Oh yeah. That reminds me. I haven't announced yet that I've been selected to be on the boat, Uniquely Singapore. And I'm utterly delighted about it. Photos of the boat can be found in my earlier blog entry, London delivery, where I was involved in sailing Uniquely Singapore from London back to Gosport.

Now, back to the story at hand.

One wave caught us unawares and, before we knew it, water was crashing down from the left side of the back half of the boat, pouring buckets of sea water down the companion way and onto skipper Mark below in the nav station on the right side of the boat. A few seconds later, with a look of "Why the hell didn't I do this earlier" on his face, he slide the companionway door insert, known as the washboard, into it's slot to prevent any further water from finding it's way down below.

I was in the cockpit at the helm when that large wave struck and I was up to my knees in water for a moment while the cockpit drains slowly vented the pool back into the ocean. In weather such as this, all people anywhere on deck have their safety lines attached to a hard point on the boats, so no one was at risk of being swept overboard by such waves.

The highlight of that morning and perhaps for even the entire week for me was when Yolyn took the helm from the person I'd handed it off to. Perhaps no taller than 5'2", her gaze was right over the top of the cockpit wheel. Earlier in the week, I'd seen Yolyn at the helm with wide eyes and a look of fearful concentration when the boat heeled over once a bit more than usual in the midst of what might have been only a Force 5 or 6 wind. I think it was her first time ever on helm and I wish I'd had my camera handy to photograph the almost humorous look on her face.

Perhaps 36 hours later, I sat in awe as I watched her on the helm during the Force 10; calm, relaxed, capable, and even enjoying the moment. To witness that kind of growth in any of us (and hopefully myself) is also one of the key aspects that motivates me in the experience of this race.

At dawn we had reached the entrance to the Nieuwe Maas river that leads to Rotterdam and sailed out of the storm while it still howled in the North Sea. We were schedule to arrive in Rotterdam at around noon but the storm had blown us in a bit earlier.

Below is a four minute video I made this morning from footage I took of fellow crew mates at the helm. After I'd had my chance, I rushed down to my bunk and grabbed my camera to come back up and record what I could before the experience was over.

Brown Eyes

Ever since my daughter Raine was perhaps 18 or so, I'd remind her every now and then that I was eager for grandchildren. Her standard response, appropriately, was, "Daaaaaaad."

Though Raine's still a blast to be with at 24, I still fondly remember the days when she was four or five and would seem to bounce around the house more on her toes than on her feet, eager for any and everything offered to her.

I have a pair of friends I've known for almost twenty years; Susan, since 1987, and her husband Tito, since Susan married him in 1991. I've known their two boys, Gus, 12, and Max 13, ever since they were born. In the ten years they lived near my home until Tito's work took him to Bolivia in 2000, this couple and their children were the four human beings with whom I and my daughter spent the most of our free time.

Susan is from Rhode Island but Tito is from A Coruña, Spain (formerly known as La Coruña until the city recently removed Franco's imposition of it's Latinized form and returned to the original spelling in the local language of Galego).

I've never had the chance to visit with these friends in Tito's native city until this summer, when a vacation from their current residence in Lima, Peru coincided with a few days I had free during these hectic final days before the race. Unfortunately, their oldest son Max was back in the states on an educational program.



I first met their daughter Nina in March of 2005, when she was two and a half years old and only recently adopted from an orphanage in La Paz, Bolivia. Susan and all her children had traveled to Florida to join Susan's mother for a week in Disneyland. Somebody had to ride on the Disneyland roller coaster rides with the boys and it certainly wasn't going to be Susan or Grandma. I got the happy job.

From the start, Nina has always been wonderfully affectionate and engaging. When I next saw her while visiting the family in Peru 18 months ago, she was as warm as ever, and full of as much energy as I could possibly match.

This visit last weekend to A Coruña was no different. Now, just a few days short of five years old, she is quite the handful...perhaps challengingly so to her parents but only delightfully so to me.


The joys of being a grandparent, uncle, or visiting guest is that you get the best of it and little, if any at all, of the worst of it. You show up fresh and full of energy and have nothing but enthusiasm to give. Children seem to know this, and respond in kind.

Nina had a small plastic wheeled vehicle that she would love to ride down a small hill just in front of her house, shouting "¡Corre con mígo!" towards me over her shoulder: run with me!

I'd jog down with her, carry the toy back up, and we'd do it over and over again, neither of us losing any enthusiasm for it.


Where ever we'd go, it was assumed that Nina would sit beside me, be it in the car or anywhere else. If it didn't happen naturally, Nina made sure it happened. I loved it.


Always...always, it seemed, her arms were around my neck.


Though her parents speak to her in both English and Spanish, she'd only spoken Spanish to me when I first arrived. I struggled to respond in kind but my Spanish is very limited. One morning, after I'd finished taking a shower, I opened the bathroom door to defog the mirror to shave. Nina came in and looked around the bathroom in silence for a moment before bursting out,

"¡Hay agua por todos partes! Tu has hecho todo mojado. El piso mojado, el tocador esta mojado, las paredes esta mojado. ¡Todo esta mojado!"

Clearly I was in trouble, but there was one word I just couldn't translate, so I asked her how to say it in English,

¿Cómo se dice "mojado" en inglés?

With her tiny hands on her tiny hips, she heaved a tiny sigh with her tiny chest. With a dramatic pause that would have seemed scripted had she not been so young, she replied with a stern gaze,

"Wet."

Ahhh. The shower was the kind that baffles most Americans; a spray on a hose mounted on a removable clip on the wall at about chest level, but no shower curtain. I was the ultimate ignorant and unskilled American, having made a mess of her bathroom.

The next morning I sat in the tub instead of standing and took great care to make sure no water escaped to anywhere but the bathtub. The moment I turned the water off, a small knock sounded very low on the door. Nina wanted to inspect.

I wrapped myself in a towel and opened the door. Wordlessly she came in and looked around. She seemed content until she ran a finger across the top of the toilet's tank. Holding her finger tip up to me with an even gaze, she said only, "Mojado."

It would have been no use explaining to her that condensation probably had more to do with that than my lack of European showering skills, so I just bowed my head and accepted her happy scorn.

Such playful delights abounded the entire weekend. I was in grandfather/uncle/guest heaven.


Our last adventure was a family trip to nearby Santiago de Compostella, the goal of one of the worlds most famous pilgrimages. The next morning I would fly home to England. Nina and I made the most of it, playing games and chasing each other around other sedentary adults like a dog and a cat around two chairs. If not playing together, then at least I carried her as often as I could.


I've always been partial to brown eyes. Something about them just melts my heart.

Österreich

On July 8th, most of the Adriatic crew disbanded and returned home (Raine and Bill back to the States, Beccy back to her London home, German back to Spain, and Jamie on to the Spanish National Hanggliding championships in the Pyrénées). Gay and I, however, had originally planned to remain a few days in Croatia. Having flown all the way from Fremantle, Australia for this trip, it seemed pointless for her to return after just one week.

At the last minute, the challenges of Croatian train and bus travel as well as the difficulties encountered in trying to rent a car caused us to decide to leave Croatia altogether (we had, after all, already been there a week). We spent Gay's final five days in Europe touring neighboring Österreich.

In German, this name means Eastern Kingdom. In English, we've altered Österreich into Austria.

Again, pictures tell the story better than words.

After taking a train across Croatia and Slovenia to Graz, Austria (birthplace of California governor Ahh-nold), we spent one night there and found a rental car the next morning. We began our tour in ernest in familiar territory for me; Greifenburg (title picture above). This small hamlet of perhaps only 100 houses hosted the 2004 World Hanggliding Championships.

Gay and I spent the second night up on Emburger Alm above Greifenburg and, though no hanggliders were flying the next morning, I took Gay to the launch ramp to give her a view of what it looks like before one steps off into the air.


Below was the scene at the same place three years earlier, during a pilot's briefing just before the day's task begins. I'm seated in the foreground, holding a cup of coffee, sitting between eventual world champion Corinna on my right and the entire Dutch women's team on my left (one of whom will be greeting our fleet's arrival in Rotterdam in a few days).


A storm passed over southern Austria on July 9th. The next morning, a light snow was falling as Gay and I left our 1800 meter high bed & breakfast. She spent the entire day kidding me about just what I had hauled her into when she'd been so warm and comfortable basking half naked in the sun two days before.

As we drove on through the morning, the mountain tops, bald and gray the day before, were dusted in a fresh white covering from the previous night's storm.


On we moved up a valley towards Mallnitz, where we took a car-carrying train through a mountain...


...to emerge at Bad Gastein, renowned for it's natural hot baths.




There we explored rich forests on foot by trail...


...and viewed immense waterfalls by road.


We drove on a bit and spent that night in Bad Ischl before moving on to...


...a full day in Hallstatt, an achingly beautiful village on a lake amidst granite cliffs all around.




There we explored the city by water...


...and foot.




Driving to our next destination that evening, we were 20 minutes away from it when, at 9:30 p.m., an accident brought a five mile section of the autobahn (a section that included us) to a complete halt. We did not get off the autobahn until 4:30 a.m.

Content enough with sufficient food, water, and each other, it was more of an odd adventure than an ordeal. At least no daylight was wasted, we told ourselves. And we also took comfort in the idea that we'd saved the expense of a hotel.

Arriving exhausted in Millstatt at 5:00 a.m., where we had planned to spend two nights, we waited until a hotel allowed us to checked in at 7:00 a.m. After a few hours nap, we moved onto our final adventure: Landskron Castle near Klagenfurt.


Here, during three performances a day, professional animal handlers send various birds of prey on sweeping flights over the audience...


..., so close that people are warned not to try to touch the birds as they pass.


The grand finale is when a Golden Eagle, secretly released before the show had even started and biding it's time overhead and out of sight, was called down to the handler, turning from a speck few people could see into a massive six foot wingspan hurtling down to a spot only a few feet above one's head.



After dropping to the valley below to pick blackberries (visible in the foreground a few photos above) at a harvest-it-yourself farm, we spent a quiet evening on our room's terrace at Millstatt, a city perhaps not as overwhelmingly grand as Hallstatt but still one full of attraction in its peace and quiet.




On July 13th, we moved on; Gay back to Australia by way of one more day in London with her daughter and I onto one last visit to Spain, though to a region I've never been to before.