London to Auckland

In my experience Saturday the 14th is the day you have to really watch out for because this is the day when you deal with all the stuffups from your decisions of the day before. And today was no different.

We rose at six again and looked out the window at the harbor and immediately knew something was wrong. We couldn’t see the skis. We hurried down to the harbor hoping that they were just out of site but when we got there our worst fears were realized. They were gone. We were devastated. I felt like vomiting. At that point I could see our whole ride going up in smoke. We woke the old guys who were as shocked as us and the forced ourselves, still in shock, into action.

The old blokes called the police, Ivan and Travis stayed with them and I started walking down the river bank looking for some evidence. I found nothing and returned 30 min later to find a couple of police there. I the decided that what we needed was a huge media push and to put as much pressure on the police as possible so I sent out an emergency call to Bev Bailey in London who immediately put out a press release. I rang Garry Learmonth from the New Zealand Police and left a message for Jayco’s Gerry Ryan in Melbourne who has contacts in the Victorian Police. My wife Manola alerted Interpol.

Within an hour I had done a sat phone interview with TVNZ and a radio interview with the BBC. More detectives arrived with an interpreter.

We suspected George from the night before and he had been dumb enough to let me photograph him so we showed the photo to the detectives and our interpreter Rosen Popov. In a stroke of luck(ask George for a second opinion on this), Rosen recognized George from the unit next to his and now the hunt was on.

At this point we got a timely call from Richard Shaw at BRP Seadoo in NZ who said he would support us and keep the show on the road and not to worry about the lost machines. This was welcome news and much appreciated.

But now in another side plot the police raised the theme of us being illegally in Bulgaria and we had to agree that vaguely and with some minor reservations, that technically this was correct. We were ‘invited’ down to the Kozlodui Police station to explain. We were each ‘interrogated’ separately at the station which took all morning with the assistance of our official translator, Rumyana Stoyanova. During this time we ere pleased to note that George had been brought in for questioning.

Meanwhile on the other side of the river in Romania, the s__t had hit the fan too and Romanian Police were mobilized and were searching the river for 200kms and searching larger boats on the Danube.

Returning to our illegal immigrant status, we were picked up by the border police and driven at break neck speed to a border post to have our passports stamped. The border police were very friendly and bought us coffee and waters and we did a t-Shirt swap before heading back to the Kozlodui Police station for more paper work. When we got there we noted that George’s two friends had been brought into the holding yard as well and were pacing around nervously. Their fears were well founded because now the Bulgarians were aware of what sort of international publicity our event has and the station was swarming with special forces police in overalls and heavy boots.

The day ended with a ride back to Romania to our hotel there. During the ride we made plans. If the machines were not found we would go back to Ivan’s dealership, find some more machines and start again. We would not give up. A really crappy day ended up on a very positive note for the team.