The team is now gathered in Flushing, Cornwall, ready to tackle the challenge. My comment that my colleagues were well rested while I was slaving away was misplaced, it appears. Joe has been running around Cornwall, fitting out a flat, visiting elderly relatives, eating out every night (and professing to only want to eat in), and being 'busy'.
Matt has been cruising the Balaerics and visiting roly-poly anchorages (which, for the non-sailors means no sleep). Coupled with an annoying squeak in the boat which only materialised at night, he has arrived sleep-deprived. The squeak only at the moment when he was dropping off to sleep. There was the 'squeak, squeak' from somewhere. Much hunting narrowed the location down to an ill-fitting joint in the aft cabin. Out came the hacksaw to 'relieve the stress' on the joint. Back to bed, problem solved. Squeak, squeak. And so the week progressed. A vandalised boat which still squeaked. Coupled with a photo-shoot for Elinda (the beautiful 74' boat he'd been managing the refit for) and a slightly erratic Greek crew, he was not that rested when he arrived at home at 0300 today.
Arrivals
Matt and I came down by train from Emsworth to Truro via Havant, Guildford and Reading. From Reading, the train was completely full and we only got seats by being imaginitive with the 'reserved' signs on the free seats - assuming that labels saying 'Paddington To Penzance' on empty seats meant a no-show which we could snaffle.
Coincidences And People In Strange Places
Coincidence 1
Amazingly, we start of quite well on this front. I bought a copy of New Scientist to read on the train - on the assumption that it impresses people when they see me reading it instead of The Sun. I was happily reading a very interesting article on research indicating that water at 6000 degrees centigrade and high pressure becomes ionic and thus conductive - leading to the moons of Jupiter (or was it Saturn) having a different magnetic field to the Earth. As I was perusing this, I noticed that it was sourced from a professor Jeremy Bloxham of Harvard. Only the Jeremy Bloxham who grew up in Emsworth (and Anne Lawson's brother)!
Coincidence 2
Being the noble sort of chaps we are, Matt and I offered our seats to an elderly lady who joined the train in Exeter. On chatting to her, it turned out that she lives just north of Wellington in New Zealand, and knows Clive Cameron who worked with Helen while on a practice swap. He hails from Waikani, where she ran the local pharmacy. Oh, the stories of their 6 (yes, six) boys we recounted.
Sponsorship!
We have our first commercial sponsor! As we arrived at the house, Joe was greeted by friend Mandy Owens proffering a tube of special cream for those sore muscles. So now we have our own tube of Joint Easy rosemary, ginger & frankincense balm- 100% organic. All provided by Inlight Organic Skin Care!
Real-Time Position Updates
I spent most of the journey setting up a link to GPS Location. This website will take a feed from my mobile phone, with our position updated approximately every minute. That is, if the battery does not run down or the phone does not burn a hole in my pocket (have you felt how hot a smartphone gets when processing GPS updates and uploading to a website?). To watch our progress, log in to the above site with username of jameslavery and password of jamesgps2010, and select the live tab. Pick Track 1, and it should show where we are. If we seem to be at a standstill, then there's probably a pub in the vicinity.
The Plan For Tomorrow
Up at 0530, breakfast, on road for 0700, arrive Land's End 0800, off by 0830 in our new Team Marmite shirts - watch this space for the photo!
Addendum - A Statement From Matt And James
We may be sharing a hotel room, but we love our wives dearly. We will be issuing no further statements.
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