London to Auckland

I had an email from Marinus Du Plessis a few weeks ago. Marinus used to be the World record holder for the longest personal watercraft ride. He and his mate rode their skis from Alaska to Panama. Marinus told me about their efforts to get sponsorship and how in the end they just went, sleeping on beaches and running on a shoestring budget. That was quite an effort. His closing comment to me was(in a South African Accent) : “Just do it. When you are sitting with your grandchildren in years to come don’t be telling them you thought about doing it. Be telling them you did it.!”

I couldn’t agree more. The harder it seemingly becomes and the less people think we are going to do it, the more determined I get. We are continuing to work away at this. We will make it work as it’s the adventure that needs to be done. Currently the environment is not great for getting sponsorship. For many corporates the World is coming to a swift and cruel end. The general feeling is that the World will shortly fall off it’s orbit and wobble uncontrollably into Mars. I don’t believe it, so we are still aiming for June 2009 but may have to delay until June 2010. If we delay to 2010 this will allow more time to raise funds and we have a possible support boat becoming available for 2010. Whether it be 09 or10 the ride needs to start around June to coincide with the northern summer. This gives us heaps of daylight and warm conditions as we follow the sun south. Some people like the cold. I do not. At about 10 degrees Celsius my blood freezes and my IQ declines to a point where I like to sing Waltzing Matilda over and over and I pronounce nuclear as nucular. So summer is definitely best for me.

The ride from Suez in Egypt down the Red Sea and out into the Gulf of Aden is best done in late summer to ensure mainly tail winds for that part of the ride and we hope to be pushed along by the tail end of the southwest monsoon across the Arabian Sea from Salalah in Oman to Goa in India.

Piracy is making the news at the moment. It’s the first thing people ask me about when I talk about the ride. Until recently my answer has been that as long as you use common sense and avoid the worst areas then you should be ok. We would also be a highly maneuverable and fast moving unit so would be unlikely to be targeted. They tend to pick on opportunist slow moving targets. If you were a pirate and you saw a fast moving cruiser being escorted by two PWCs you would probably decide that the risk outweighed the benefits when considering an attack.

That said, in the current environment it would be risky although the pirates have definitely gone too far and will likely be put back in their place in time for June 2009 or 2010. Their latest efforts can be summed up as follows…until recently they have been stealing the occasional banana from a gorilla. In the last few days they have stolen the gorilla’s left testicle while he was sleeping. A move which can only end in sadness for the pirates and will probably hurt a bit the morning after.(This also applies to the gorilla)

An excellent website on piracy can be viewed at http://www.icc-ccs.org/ and there’s a mob in the UK that train crews to handle these situations at http://www.mast-yacht.co.uk/case4.asp I plan to visit at these guys at some point before we leave.

In the next post I’ll talk about the planning of the trip down the Red Sea to Aden and we hope to be able to announce details of the skis we will be using.