Friday 26 September 2008

What now?

A rather dark sequence that just missed an iceerg calving in Pond Inlet - magic morning, all by myself in the cockpit with Berri hove to. If you look carefully, you can see Slarty's signature on the rock in the distance.

As the anti-climax takes hold, I'm wondering what might be next. The immediate plan is to get Berri sorted for the winter in Falmouth and then go back to Oz for a few months, via the USA where there are some interesting invitations on the table including a formal sign-off of Pascal's chart with an HMP rubber stamp, appropriately in a bar somewhere in California. What should we do with the original? I'll put a jpg of the final version on the website in case anyone would like one - seems to me that it would make a reasonable souvenir. I will also put it on a T shirt and post a link for people to order one. That's about a month away and I think that by the time the link is available, the immediacy of all this will have passed for all y'all. If anyone would like to buy one, perhaps you should let us know now and we can advise when the link is up. Nigel - if I send you a jpg of the signed off Pascal chart and of Berri's kingfisher (if I can find it), could you do the T shirting and put a link to your website on the Berri site?

I have about a thousand photos to sort and a presentation to put together around them. I will put a selection of photos on the website as soon as I can. McQ, Kimbra and I will need to pool all our photos eventually and make a proper record.

There will be an article in - I think - Yachting Monthly sometime soon, and I will try to get my act together to write a book. And perhaps a Sydney - Hobart in a different boa this year. That will be strange! Don Burfitt, the owner of Miko, my very first Hobart ride in 1977, is coming to Isabella's for a beer this weekend - should be fun, as we haven't seen eachother for aout 20 years.

Next year, Berri and I will do our last Fastnet together and then I will take her back to Oz - not sure how yet, but for an elegant finale, it ought to be via the Med and the Red Sea to complete a different circumnavigation. I'm told that pirates might make this too dangerous these days, so it will probably be via the Panama if we can dodge the hurricanes.

Meantime, I have to write thank you letters to rather a lot of people. Was it Newton who said that he was able to achieve only by standing on the shoulders of others? A statement that falls clearly into the list of things that I wish I'd said first!