Over the hill

Went for a quick bike ride up the hill past Hastoe and right the back of Wigo - VERY hard going through the woods....the track was 6 inches deep with mud!!

Got back just before the rain. According to SportsDo I burned 1912 calories. Hmmm - not entirely convinced about that.

Offshore yacht racing

I was invited recently to make a presentation on my experience as a crew member on Team Samsung's boat in the 2005 Round Britain and Ireland Challenge offshore yacht race.

It was good to dig out old photos and videos.
I used the following two as part of the introduction - just to give the audeince a sense of the range of conditions we encountered:

What offshore yacht racing is *supposed* to be like! from GoodDay on Vimeo.


What offshore yacht racing is *really* like! from GoodDay on Vimeo.

The strange movements of the fates!

Only just last week I clearly recall looking at Flickr's blog and thinking "it would be great to have one of my photos featured on this - but that's not likley to happen!".
Then - lo and behold - my leaping bride and groom shot is selected for their 29th Feb posting!
I'm pretty chuffed about that.
Now.....if I could just be equally sure that I'm not likley to win the lottery!!

Armageddon? Arm a geddon out of here!!!

Worms Armagedon - the famous "CONCRETE DONKEY"!! from GoodDay on Vimeo
To continue on a theme introduced earlier - namely me getting thrashed by my kids at video games! For many years I've managed to hold my own in those wonderful (now classic?) games - Worms 2 and the newer Worms Armageddon.

Today my youngest boy - suffering from jet lag as he was - beat me two out of three times to claim the crown of household "Worm Master". He will be beaten soundly with a large stick later though!

Not that I wish to distract from his obvious (and increasingly strategic) skills - but he *did* manage to secure one of the most destructive weapons known to wormkind. The weapon of mass worm destruction to end all weapons of errr worm mass destruction.....the rarely seen "CONCRETE DONKEY". We just had to capture that one on video!!! Enjoy

Bike Ride 2

Bike Ride from GoodDay on Vimeo
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Bike ride

Four weeks in a row, in winter, with no gloves!

Good day for a bike ride

Today felt more like May than the start of February! The sun was bright and warm, there were no clouds, and so for the second week in a row we headed out on our bikes wearing sun glasses (and no gloves!). It was a beautiful, uplifting afternoon. Shredded my rear tire on some thorns - but what the heck. It was worth it! I traced our route using the GPS in my cell phone and beamed back the results to SportsDo.Net. Jonathan Greenfield and his team there have a great website and so as well as enjoying a cold beer as soon as we got back - we were able to see what a pathetic pace we made going up Tom's hill and also that we were only going at 31km/hr coming down off the Ridgeway (felt faster!).

Amazing!

When Ellen MacArthur beat Francis Joyon's solo round the world sailing record three years ago it was deemed almost miraculous! All the way round in just 71 days!!

Francis however has just won his record back and smashed Ellen's by 14 days!!!! In total he took 57 days 13 hours 34 minutes 6 seconds!! (There is a very cool animation comparing their journies here).

In 1969 Robin Knox Johnston completed the first solo not stop voyage and it took him 313 days!!

Francis (if my sums are right) averaged almost 16 knots for the whole journey in his awesome 97 foot multihull. 16 knots is as fast as we ever sailed when we raced round Britain a couple of years ago!!

The man is amazing. And well done IDEC for sponsoring this and making it happen.

The final frontier

It is the case that every single video game - from SuperMario Land 2 on the gameboy right through to clever stuff on Playstations etc - has seen my boys beat me in a more than convincing manner.

Wind the clock back a little bit to 1979 and the world's first fully colour arcade game Galaxian and there is a different story!

We got a box of tricks that plugs straight into the television - Galaxian reborn!!

The boys have not got a clue!!! I can thrash the living daylights out of them. They struggle to hit five figures!!! In the arcade game I was good for 60-70,000. Not quite back at that level yet, as you can see. But I'm happy!!!

Brings back memories of an old buddy Dave Gilbert. He had an amazing ability to defy death by zapping an alien right on top of his "ship". When asked how he did it, he replied "Look - if you're going to go for it - go for it!!!" Sound advice indeed! :-)