London to Auckland

I’m typing this on a Panasonic Toughbook from my hotel in Los Angeles and thanks to Panasonic coming on board ‘just before the haka’, we will get to see over the next 4 months just how appropriately named these things are. Panasonic Toughbook from London to Auckland by PWC sounds impressive. Panasonic have also lent us a broadcast quality video camera so that, later, you can get to see what happened along the way as well, but only if you are good.

Filming will be done professionally by Stuart Kershaw of In the Dark Productions through Europe and then we will take over using our Panasonic job and our GoPro HD helmet Cam. We are hoping for enough footage for a six part documentary. This will take some discipline as all the good filming opportunities happen when you are not really in the best position to film. Usually you are just trying to survive.You are hardly going to stop and get the camera out if you are being chased by Pirates. At that point a heart rate monitor and ‘Sphincter meter’ would give more valuable information anyway.

There are only 12 days until kickoff. Next Wednesday Travis and Jed head up to London. I follow on Friday arriving on Saturday and Ivan arrives Sunday. Adrian will meet us there with George Robson who will be our chief ground crew man.

We will be staying at the Cherry Tree-Rochford pub just north Of Southend on Sea. The first two days we will be completing the mods on the machines with the assistance of Andy and Jon at Thorpe Bay Marine. Then for the next few days we will do test rides including a longish ‘baguette run’ to France and back. These rides will ensure that all our systems are working such as tracking and navigation and fuel transfer etc etc.

Leading up to departure and when underway there will be a team of people on standby or working behind the scenes to keep the show on the road. Angela from Goode PR will update the blog when we cant, Tracplus will be tracking us(that webpage should be up and running by about 27/7) VJ Clark will be correlating the tracking data for a running total on kilometers, Ian Hall-Kenny will be updating the site, Kevin from Ski MD will be available for technical advice, Bob McDavitt from the Met Service will be monitoring the weather for us and DR Andrew Murley will be our medical advice man.
As well as that we have a team of guys working hard to smooth things over for us. They are Richard Tankersley from Malaysia, Bill Holdsworth from the Netherlands, Gerry Ryan from Melbourne, Robert Vogel from Indonesia and Mark Robinson from London. We also have agents working for us in many ports and great people in all the cancer organizations that we are partnered with. Their efforts are all appreciated.

So where do we stand then? Well the sponsors we have, have been very generous and we are flush with high quality gear. But we are way short of cash and will need to find more as we go. Logistically we are well organized except for a support boat across the Bay of Bengal. With a lot of patience, a little bit of luck and some good management we will make it to Auckland. There may not be any cash spare to donate to cancer research but we will have contributed a lot towards that along the way by working with our partners. The real value will be in the lives saved through us getting our message out there and for the record here it is again: Healthy living can reduce the incidence of cancer but if you are still going to get it then early detection of cancer is the key to increasing your chances of survival. For more detail see: http://london-sydney.com/healthy-living.htm
Regards Jeremy