London to Auckland

I hope I haven’t surprised you too much by posting to the blog so soon after the last post. If I have I apologize and please pick yourself up of the floor and sit back in your chair so we can get started.

The experts say that for a blog to work you need to post to it frequently. I on the other hand have always thought that if you don’t have something to say you are better off to keep quiet. Thankfully I do have something to say on this occasion. …but you be the judge!

It’s exciting to be able to report that more progress has been made on Domino, our support boat. The drums from Paraguay are reporting that part of the structure for the crane that will be used to lift the Seadoos is now in place. A photo of the partly finished structure installed on the back of Domino is shown below.

If you wish to view more photos of Domino and the structure click on: http://picasaweb.google.com/mtdufour/LondonSydney# and to see a few more that I took on my vist to Paraguay see: http://london-sydney.com/more_photos.htm

On a different note I am now in quite serious training for a 160km bike race in November. This will be a good buildup to lead into the final fitness push for 2010. At the moment I am training about twelve hours a week with two hours of weight training, one of rowing and nine of endurance cycling. With an additional core strength program and lots of stretching this program relates well to the physical requirements of the actual London-Sydney ride. We pick up the first Seadoo in a couple of weeks and will start major modifications on that soon after. Once the mods are complete I will be testing that machine as part of my training.

For testing I will be looking for training partners who are willing to go out through the Manukau Heads and practice in the rough waters in the rip at the Manukau Bar. One such training partner who has already shown a complete disregard for his own personal safety and been out there with me is my good friend Barrie Mabbott. You may remember Barrie from a previous post as the man who saw the credit crunch coming before most because he is tall and when the sky started to fall he bumped his head on it first. Barrie was bemused by my managing to include him in a blog post and recently inferred that he would be very impressed should I be able to include him again in a ‘relevant’ way. Too easy!

Did you know that tall people like Barrie can also see into the future. Do I hear you saying,”Oh really, tell me more?”

Well, being taller he can see over the horizon relative to shorter people and if he sees a flock of killer sheep coming from below the horizon the first thing that the shorter people will know about it is that Barrie will say something like, “ Love to stay and chat but I’ve gotta run.” And he will hike up his trousers under his armpits, pin back his ears and bound off in the other direction at high speed disappearing over the opposite horizon in short order. And the moral of the story according to Ian Hall-kenney is, if the tall people leave in short order, seriously consider following suit.

Because there is no one tall on the London-Sydney team we can’t see into the future so we need a logistics team to do all our planning for us. This is a critical task as we need to cover everything we expect to happen and all the variations that might or might not happen. We need to have this all covered off well before the start date.

This involves: route planning, accomodation, permissions, customs, working with local authorities, visas, vaccinations, the supply of good quality fuel at the best price, other supplies, security requirements, spare parts, safety equipment, communications, foreign languages, working with cancer groups along the way, working with sponsors, filming, moving equipment, crew support and much much more. It’s a huge job and I’m confident that we have the best people on our logistics team, capably lead by John Letham. Keep up the good work guys.

Part of the logistics team’s job is to do a full risk analysis of all of the above so that surprises are reduced to a minimum on the ride. On the next blog post I’ll see if I can get John to explain the risk analysis process for you and by then maybe we will have taken some of the guesswork out of it by employing a tall person too. Until then…Cheers! Jeremy