I wanted to let people know that if you haven’t ben able to contact me over the phone recently it’s not just you.

My service provider has cut off my service. Times are tough at Minimus Sailing Team Headquarters, so please email me if you have anything of great importance.

I hope to have it sorted out soon, I’ll post when I get it online again. Sorry for any inconvienience.

EDIT: Got it sorted out. Phone is now up and running.

I got up at 3:30am EST to watch the start over the internet, and found my heart thumping away in my chest as the 30 sailors made their way out the canal and out to the biggest race course in the world.

One thing that made this Vendee Globe so special for us Canucks, is that Derek Hatfield made it to the start. This in it’s self is an astonishing feat. With budgets going through the roof in the IMOCA fleet, Derek had an impossible challenge to over come. There are no words to describe the feelings I had watching him on the bow of Spirit of Canada as he headed down the canal toward the sea. His beaming smile said it all and I felt a lump in my throat as I thought of the stress and turmoil that he has been through over the past four years putting this pogram together.

I can’t help but have my thoughts wander toward my own start, that will come in less than a year. Definitly getting to the start line is more than half the battle.

So be sure to check in on Derek at the race tracker, and to send some positive vibes his was as he fights his way around the planet with the best skippers in the world. If anyone deserves to be there it is Derek.

Empire Life is no stranger to corporate giving and supporting the Kingston community. They are just wrapping up a United Way fund raising campaign and separately support the Boys and Girls Club of Kingston among many other things. Empire is unique in Kingston, in that they are a national company with a big local headquarters here, not Toronto or Montreal. I really like that they are out in community and trying to help out. Kingston is definitely better for it.

But this is AWESOME! It totally appeals to the wannabe DJ in me and sailors will appreciate the pretty slick crew work on this monster of a boat.

Franklin Tulloch is the director from Earthbound Studios. Check out his youtube feed here.

Over the past month, I’ve been working with Kingston sail loft on making a new main and jib for the boat. These are super important sails that will be putting on some significant miles in the coming months. We want them to be fast, reliable, and easy to use.

Adjusting the sail plan on the mini is key and you must have the boat set up in such a way that you can adjust sail even when you are tired, it’s blowing 40 and the boat is bucking up and down below you. Making the sails easy to use saves energy and encourages me to make the sail charge early enough that it’s not too late. Andy and John put up with me constantly stopping in at the loft to see how things were progressing or to discuss whatever was coming next.

The Kingston Sail Loft have been so supportive of the campaign from the very beginning and I am very grateful of their donation of time and experience in working on the sails.

I am going to be taking to the kids from the Boy’s and Girl’s Club Leader’s in Training group to see the screening and I was hoping to get some financial help with tickets. Two of my team mates have already offered to donate $50 toward tickets. Is there anyone else out there that would like to help get the kids in to see the movie?

Drop me an email if you would like to help out with this.

But I have a confession though…

When we got back from Bermuda, I took a little time to rest, and then started to look at the months that we had coming up and then looking at the rest of the campaign, we are now less than 12 months away from the start of 2009 MT. It is scary how much we have to get done.

Financial woes also cause me concern. We have barely been able to keep up with the expenses for the BOR, and now we have some repairs and things to change on the boat and cash is really tight. This, despite a crew of teammates that have been working their butts off for every donation and gift to the campaign.

So the long and the short of it is that it’s pretty tough to keep blogging with so much uncertainty and stress. While I would love to be reporting on fun sailing exploits, technical notes of interest and other fun stuff, the reality is that I am stressing about money and trying to juggle all the balls of applications, administration and proposals.

But the reason Steve was right, is because you want to hear about these trials and tribulations, you want to know where we are headed next and what we are up to with events, training and the other very meaningful partnerships that we have set up.

So while I am eager to share the cool stuff, I always hesitate to talk about the financial and administrative worries which consume me from day to day. But you know what? That’s just part of it all, so I’m going to give it to you straight.

More in a bit.

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

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.

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!