Ready to go

1330 today British time we will head off into the Solent. We, that is Didier le Vourch, Gerald Bibot, Yvon Bereharr and me. The forecast is very light and upwind.

Our brand new Class40 is in perfect condition. I am personally very excited to test this new boat against the other class 40s in a strong fleet. The tracker will be updated every half hour so the coming days I hope very much to provide interesting online entertainment to you. We will do our best to send images etc. An innovation this time for you will hopefully be our live webcam stream of the fastnet rounding. It is still in experimental mode so I cannot promise 100% it will work but we let you know on the website.

Thanks to everybody for the great support that brought us so far. Being at the line is always the first major achievement in every offshore race.

It’s an honor for me to be able to skipper this beautiful well prepared boat with its experienced crew in such a prestigious race. 30 years ago the Fastnet got hit by a tragic storm. But nowadays we have better boats. For our Crewmember Didier it will be the 9th rounding of the Fastnet Rock. Together we look back on certainly more than 20 Transats.  I hope very much to be able to encourage us as a team to make use of this potential.

On the other hand I have to push expectations back a little. I sailed only one hour on this boat so far. We have never sailed together as a team before. I do not know the Solent very well and we have strong competition with namely Giovanny Soldini and Pedro D’Ali on Telecom Italia.

Stay tuned and get back on our site this afternoon or check the official Fastnet site and the tracker to see how the 2009 Rolex Fastnet gets underway.

For the German readers I want to mention that we are over a dozen German boats in various classes.

Regards,

Boris