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Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei
WOW! - What a holiday! So much excitement. As if mixing it with the other four million in
London on Millenium Eve, a training sail in Plymouth and an interview with Thanet Local Radio weren't enough, I had the London Boat Show and team announcements to look forward to. The Boat Show was exciting,
surprising, exhausting and throat-wrecking, but overall great, great fun. In brief, I'm now a proud crew member of the yacht "Isle of Man".
MEETING THE
CREWS - I have received e-mail from Crew Volunteers (CVs) throughout the last year, long before meeting them. The beauty of this kind of cyber-chatting is that I knew that because of the Challenge I would meet up with
them. Then when the new BT site came online which included the crew index, I saw their photos. Then the night before the Boat Show announcements, we had an unofficial crew party in Putney in south-west London, when
meeting up with so many old and new faces was quite phenomenal.
FAME! - To know people's names before you have met them is quite awesome, especially when they are not stars! By the same token,
some CVs had clearly been reading the BT website where my photo and name were accompanied by the words "....sailing a shovel backwards" (referring to a journal entry about ISO dinghy sailing). Anyway, to finish a
long story, when I was introduced to them, at least 3 CVs greeted me with "Oh! Jan Giffen - 'Sailing a shovel backwards'? " So all-in-all, most of us CVs had a lot of fun meeting and greeting each other and wondering
who would be in our team by the next evening. |