Hi All,

Greg and I got into Bermuda on Thursday afternoon and we are pretty much recovered from the race at this point. I’m sorry it has taken me this long to post anything, but sleeping, eating and working out a few things on the boat has taken precidence over the last few days.

I’m not quite ready to post the race report yet, but I wanted to post a couple of videos we took during the race. I hope to post a bit more latter today.

Here’s a little update from Greg. Just a note about record speeds… Right after we did this little update, we managed to get the boat up to 22.6 knots!

More in a bit

Today was a very busy day getting the boat ready for the start.

We had a bit of a scare as we were trying to fix a problem with the cigarette lighter on the boat that we use to charge all of the stuff that takes regular power. After opening up the electrical panel and fixing a lead that had come off, we started to test the system and we found that once we started the autopilot the whole system would shut down and we’d have no power anywhere. Poor Greg toiled belowed trying to fix the problem, while I went about ticking off things on our long list. Eventually we call a marine electrician that found we had a faulty lead on of the batteries. He also gave us a a general electrical “check-up” and cleaned up a few things for us. Everything works now and we are pretty confident that we have a good electrical system.

Around 1300, I registered the boat in the race. This is always such a stressful process, produceing documents and numbers for everything. We were pretty well prepared for this though.

The Captain’s meeting was at a local community hall and we got a very thorough overview of the logistics for both the start tomorrow and for our arrival in Bermuda. There is so much to think about and organize between customs arrangements, shipping schedules, call in schedules etc.

Tonight we finished packing the bins (navigation, kits, and food). You have to be so careful when you are packing all this stuff, making sure that you haven’t forgotten anything, and knowing exactly where everything is so we can find it in a hurry.

I’m looking forward to a good sleep, as tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.

On Monday this week the Boys and Girls Club of Kingston held a send off event for Greg and I and it really was a special event for me.

Hard to play the hardened sailor when you have such a cute group of kids send you off…

Here is a movie that George put up. Great stuff!

It has been a long time since I wrote an update on our prigress with the Bermuda Ocean Race and it is high time that I start getting these updates going.

We left Kingston around 0300 yesterday morning and had a very uneventful trip. Greg, Perri, and Chirs (Greg’s dad) had a nice drive with no drama at all. The trailer and boat were well behaved on the highway and truck was perfect for the job.

Once we got to Annapolis we launched the boat at the Eastport Yacht Centre and then brought her around the penisula to the Eastport Yacht Club. We accomplished our goal of getting the mast up, solar panels on and generally getting things ready. Today we hope to get things cleaned up below and then go for a sail to make sure that things are set up correctly.

We’ll have the pre-race check-in tonight, and then hopefully a good nights sleep before we head off tomorrow afternoon.

Perri has been snapping pics along the way. I’ll try and get some up on flickr latter tonight.

For those of you that are wishing to follow the race, here is the link to the BOR iBoat tracking page. (Nothing is happening there yet…) The race site its self is www.bermudaoceanrace.com.