I will be offline and offshore for the next few days, sailing on a Tall Ship with 11 other women to raise money for the Tall Ships Education Academy.
I haven't been to sea since I arrived in Antigua over 7 months ago. It will be rather different this time around - bigger boat, bigger crew, and only 3 days compared with 103.
So hopefully also a lot more fun!
I am still only half way to my fundraising target. If you would like to donate, please click here to go to my fundraising page. Thank you.
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The picture at the top is how I last saw Sedna - all safely tucked up, free of charge, in Hugh Bailey's boatyard on Antigua. The picture at the bottom is apparently where she is now. It may not look too bad, but I am so very worried.
First, she was moved without my permission or knowledge. Second, she appears to be in an enclosed container. Why does this matter? Every time she has been moved before, it has been by crane, suspended by straps. She has been treated as delicate cargo, to preserve her fragile, lightweight hull. She has been carefully placed onto either a trailer or a custom-built cradle. Now she is sitting on a broken pallet.
Also, she is now in a container, which doesn't have an open top, she must have been pushed in there somehow, very possibly by forklift truck.
Wince.
The photo seems to show some damage to her hull. Or it could be barnacles. I won't know for sure until I see her in Miami sometime around 8th November.
I have asked Steve to have the Kleenex handy, just in case...
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My most vital piece of equipment on the Atlantic was my watermaker. Yesterday I went to see where it was made, and to meet the President of Spectra Watermakers, Bill Edinger, himself a keen yachtsman.
It was immensely reassuring to see the rigorous testing that the watermakers go through before they leave the factory. My Spectra served me well throughout my 103-day crossing.
My only worry now is that I'd never had to 'pickle' a watermaker before (i.e. run chemicals through it to stop green stuff growing in it while it's not being used) and I may not have been at my most compos mentis when I attempted it for the first time in Antigua. So when I retrieve Sedna in Miami in a couple of weeks, I may have a small ecosystem where my water-purification plant used to be...
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Today I was drafting some new content for my website (yet to go live) and was jotting down my Code of Conduct for blogging. There is one particular element of it that is causing major frustration at the moment: 'Don't make forward-looking statements'.
Right now is a very exciting stage of my plans to row the Pacific - having spent most of the last 3 months building my network in the US, assembling the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, those pieces are now falling into place unbelievably quickly, and I am SO EXCITED about it!
But alas, it is all still forward-looking, and I don't want to jinx it by going to press prematurely. So much as it irks me, I will bite my tongue and bide my time and just tease you by saying that good things are afoot, and I'd love to tell you, but I'd have to shoot you....
By way of infill while the jigsaw puzzle gets itself together, here are my self-imposed blogging guidelines.
"My goal in blogging is to inspire, entertain and enlighten others, while providing myself with a record of what I was doing, who I was meeting, where I was going at a particular time of my life.
With these goals in mind, I try to stick to the following guidelines:
a. Don't make forward looking statements (also known as tempting fate!)
b. Be respectful towards all
c. Don't reveal confidential information
d. Stay positive, don't comment negatively on things
e. Convey passion and purpose
f. Update frequently
g. Aspire to thought leadership, be an original, be a champion for my beliefs
h. Whenever possible, convey new information drawn directly from my experience or, failing that, deliver informative commentary about some issue on which I am qualified to speak.
I keep a journal as well as blogging, for those things that don't comply with these guidelines, or which are just too personal to share. To be published posthumously!
Some people feel too shy to blog, thinking that their life wouldn't be of interest to anyone besides themselves. What can I say? This may well be true! But even if nobody ever read my blog, I would still feel it was worth writing. Just the thought that someone MAY read it, and the fact that I am putting my life and my thoughts up for public examination, makes me live my life in a better way, makes me live a life that I am proud to share."
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