Sunday 13^th September 2008.

As from 0800 tomorrow, Monday 14^th September, Impossible Dream will be on Feature Berth 520 at the PSP Southampton Boat Show.  We are there until Thursday 17^th September so, if you are passing, do please stop by and say “hello”.  Thanks to our delivery crew team, led by Julian Mandiwall, for giving up so much time to get ID into a ship-shape and for taking her out on so many trips out for the press, including this latest trip to Southampton for the Boat Show.  Julian and his team will be leaving in 3 weeks to take ID down to Lanzarote where Susana and I will be joining her late November.

Barely an hour is passing now without some form of work being done to get ID ready for her voyage.  Thanks to Fischer Panda, the brand new generator is now installed after a 6 week, rather stressful, absence.  I was on ID this morning and it was purring away quite happily so that is a major job to be crossed off the list.  Just about all of the Raymarine kit is now wired and synchronised although the AIS system will be hopefully initiated this week.  The technical partners’ graphics are due to be applied to the hull tomorrow morning (before the Show opens) by my friends at Grapefruit Graphics and the genoa has just been modified thanks to Hyde Sails.  We still have the Comms to resolve to ensure we can fire back video footage from mid-Ocean and less than 3 weeks to do it so that is one job I’ll be happy to see complete.

Susana has completed and passed her RYA Competent Crew course, next stop, a gruelling and intensive 7 day Ship’s Doctor’s medical course beginning next week.

It’s been a great week for media coverage; a full page in The Daily Express on Tuesday 8^th September, we had a wonderful 10 minute slot on Radio 4’s You & Yours programme on Friday 11^th September  CLICK HERE and, to end a terrific week, we had the most incredible double-page spread in the Sunday Times “In Gear” supplement today, thanks again to KTB for such wonderful PR.

It has been as busy few days in other ways too.  Friday was Press Day at the Boat Show and I was asked by the Ellen Macarthur Trust, along with record-breaking yachtswomen Hilary Lister and Dee Caffari, to welcome back Scarlet Oyster, the EMT’s yacht which has just completed her Round Britain voyage to help raise awareness and funds for the charity which helps get kids out on the water who are recovering from cancer.  Immediately after that I was at the Raymarine stand to award some VHF radios to Tideway Sailability – they had several radios stolen recently and Rayarine kindly provided some new ones.  I was then fortunate to have lunch with Hilary Lister and to hear first-hand about her voyage around Great Britain which she completed last week – as the only 2 quadriplegics to attempt, and succeed in completing the voyage, we obviously shared many special experiences and memories.

Today, after an early visit to ID in Beaulieu to resolve the music system on the boat, was another visit to the Show to make my appearance on the Record Breakers stage where we were attempting to break the World Record for making a simultaneous semaphore message.  We set a record of 239 people but there are going to be several more attempts so there is a possibility that it may be broken but, as of this minute, myself and 238 others, are record breakers.  After a few more sponsor’s meetings and it was home early ready for an early start tomorrow.

I won’t have time to upload another blog for the next week but I hope to have plenty of good-news stories of a successful week at the Boat Show when I do.

PS: Sorry for the lack of pictures in the Blog. There is a problem with the CMS editor which we are trying to resolve.