London to Auckland

We continue to make progress and expect to be able to announce at least a couple of sponsors in the next couple of weeks.

Training continues as well. Today we had a ripper of a ride out through the Manukau Harbour entrance. The weather was perfect and the huge tidal rip in the entrance made for some interesting handling practice as we plowed through the middle of it.

The search continues for a support boat for the section from Greece to Thailand through the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. This section should take around 5 weeks to complete. It seems that the sort of specs we had in mind for the support boat were unrealistic so I did some playing with the proposed route to reduce the range that the boat would require. We will now track from Aden in Yemen to Salalah in Oman and then directly to Goa on the West Coast of India. From there we will track to Cochin and then to Galle in Sri Lanka before heading direct to Phuket in Thailand. This means that we will need an ocean going boat capable of maintaining 20kt for 1,300nm. This range could be achieved by adding additional bladder tanks.

We are looking to update the website shortly with sponsor’s logos and links to their websites. Some readers have asked how they can make a donation so I will look at putting up a page that will allow donations direct to the Cancer Society for cancer research. Contributors will be able to have their linked logos on a special page. The size of the logo will be comensurate with the donation.

We hope to come up with an official logo shortly and offer merchandise further down the track. In the meantime if anyone has any suggestions of things they would like to see on the site please let us know.