26 Sep-2 Oct

Not long now before we ship our boat, and still plenty of work to do on the boat. I just seem to be getting busier and busier! We had a good week of buying random bits and bobs that we needed - water bottle holders (like you get on bikes), new cushions for the seats (lighter, but still plenty of padding), new gates for our riggers (you wouldn’t believe how mangled the previous ones were - makes me a bit nervous about how rough the ocean might be), and such like.

Dan also received our subsidised sports drinks from SIS - so thanks to them. 4 very large and exceedingly heavy cardboard boxes turned up at his office - after sheets of aluminium, sheets of wood, 3m aluminium tubes and packets of fibreglass, his deliveries department are getting used to having slightly bizarre stuff arrive! We’re advised that dilute sports drink is much easier for the body to absorb than plain water, so this is what we’ll be drinking most of the time. Plus I’m led to believe that while desalinated water is drinkable, it doesn’t taste too great, so that’s another benefit!

I managed a few decent length training pieces this week - two 1.5 hour ergs, plus an overnighter in the boat. It strikes that I need to do as much as possible to keep up with Dan - he calmly let me know that he’d done a personal best distance on the rowing machine recently, for his standard training piece of 45 mins. 13167 metres. For those of you who have used a rowing machine, that’s a 500m split of 1:42.5. For those of you who haven’t, that’s outrageously fast - many a club rower would be fairly happy with that as a 2000m speed. I’m glad he’s in my team.

The weekend was spent in a frenzy of gluing, drilling, screwing, nailing, sawing and painting. The boat is coming along nicely, and we’re hopeful that the boat will be pretty much ready by the time we go. We do have time in La Gomera before the start of the race, during which we can complete final work, but we really want to leave this as a last resort. Having said that, we’ve spoken to a number of people who took part in the first race in 1997, many of whom said they hadn’t got the boat on the water at all before they raced, and were still pretty much building the boat the day before the start! So at least we’re in a better position than them - feeling pretty positive.