A few more photos

I haven't been able to add captions -never worked how to do it. Dozy and decrepit neurones.  From the beginning: Iron Pot; Tasman Island with Cape Raoul in the distance - you can just see the lighthouse in the cloud; Chain Locker Bay on the Freycinet Peninsula - one for the gang in Falmouth; Naval escort; the hoist and El Pinko; El Pinko; Sydney cliche - ferry, Opera House and Bridge; Berri alongside at CYC.

Personal email address and other stuff

If anyone wants to contact me direct for the time being, my email address is alex1whit@gmail.com - please feel free to use it.

There is a short term Plan evolving - I am going to California for a week in April to rendezvous with Leroy, Pascal (who drew the little map that started this latest silliness) Keith Cowing (spaceref.com) and Pat Hahn from Nome. No doubt there will be serious Consulting, but I want to cut some video  interviews as well, to splice into the Berri Galactic Guide Video that our friend Matt at NASA Ames has generously offered to put together for us.

If any of you have burnng questions you want answered by any of these legends, flick them to me in the next couple of weeks please. Or just interesting questions related to their involvement with Berri.

Steve Jackson, may his name be in lights for evermore, has finally persuaded Google to give us control of David Speed's www.berrimilla.com/tng website (which we lost when he died) so that we can clear the spam. There are over 1100 spam postings and unless any nerd out there has a better idea, it's one by one, with the obligatory "Are you sure...?" Bleeeah!

ET, please call!
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Some rather profound words

I was at Uni with my friend Chris, learning Mandarin, about a century ago and ince then we've shared that sort of friendship over the years that needs no words. So I was surprised to get this letter and I asked him whether I could put it on the blog. I thought it deserved  wider circulation::
Chris' email reply:
Dear Alex
Lovely to chat with you earlier. Here is the (soft copy) letter. The more I think about the Berri write-up, the more I think the central theme is that of the 'horizontal anarchic network as back-up team,' enabled by blog and enthusiastic word-of-mouth. It contrasts so dramatically with what has become the conventional way of putting together expeditions, with massive (vertically organised) sponsorship and a huge caranvanserai of specialst back-up teams... The Berri story is very very different.

The letter

 

16 March 2010

 

Dear Alex and Peter

 

It is now impossible to write to one of you without also acknowledging the other; once again, you have done the remarkable, the extraordinary, something no-one has ever done before, and done it not only with stoic grit and endurance, but also with good humour and many fascinating observations about the world, the environment, the human condition and the taste of stout at different latitudes. Congratulations on another outstanding achievement done in a combination of two great traditions: the taciturn British and the Aussie larrikin. Your physical and mental and emotional endurance – as a dynamic duo – is just awe-inspiring, and it is your achievement of this as a team of two which is most intriguing. It seems to me that well-balanced teams of two are special; there is an essential tension and resolution at the same time; there is a need for trust and consensus in all major decisions; there is an intertwining of psyches, a total interdependence, absolute mutual accountability; there is a complete absence of politicking because neither party can be out-voted. The team of two seems to me to be an interesting phenomenon in itself, and by now, there is probably no-one more qualified that yourselves to share insights on that.

 

Somewhere along the journey, while reading the Berri-blog, I got really pissed-off, and I expect this is what a wife feels in such cases. It was a combination of things: you two doing some extraordinary feat of ingenuity on the high seas, with masses of online suggestions pouring in from the global Berri fan-club at a time when my simple suburban life was in bad shape and without any sense that there was any support team out there; I can't remember the specifics but I remember writing it up in a very angry way in my journal, saying to myself: "Sure, those guys are out there testing their mettle against the elements in a way that brings them encouragement and admiration, but, bugger me! I'm on my own journey through hell here of another kind and I'm bloody well on my own with it because no-one gives a shit, and it doesn't end with a nice pink ribbon and a pop of champagne corks; it fucking well goes on interminably and there's damn-all recognition at the end of it!" It was a particularly severe case of weltschmerz. And after a while, I realised that I was looking at it upside-down. Instead of getting angry and resentful of what you were doing – achieving something remarkable, something that generated spontaneous admiration from a whole community of observers – I could use your example to validate the odyssey of my own feats of psychological/emotional endurance and say: "Hey, look, those guys are out there on the high seas, but what I'm doing, hanging on here by my toenails in one untenable situation after another, is pretty damned remarkable too!" And once I realised that, I felt a whole lot better. And I think this is why we are drawn to identify with epic feats of endurance: they help us to make sense out of what seems unendurable in our own lives.  

 

So the next feat – before the high energy of the return dissipates – please – is to document the story so that it can have that impact. And I think that task is almost as important as the journey itself. It's like a piece of academic research; the experiment means more once it's written-up. And let me toss out a challenge to you: I know that this task of documentation is the one you have least patience with. You'd far rather be bashing into a headwind with three reefs than be bashing away on a computer writing slabs of text. And you'd far rather sub-contract or outsource or delegate the write-up task. But it's the documentation now that validates and consolidates what you have done and it's an endurance task in and of itself; and – as your previous ghost-writer experience demonstrated – it's not a task that you can meaningfully delegate to others. So I encourage you to take it on with all the determination you gave to the journey itself. And here are a few suggestions that might help:

(1) Focus the story on Berri and that might help you to get around that awkward sense that each episode seems to begin 'And then I did this and then Peter did that…'

(2) Take as much as possible absolutely raw and verbatim from the Berri blog. It is full of wonderful, unique stuff, about the journey, the mechanics and gadgets, the weather, the environment, wild-life, your analogies to the Hitchhikers' guide and the Space Shuttle… these all make extraordinary reading and do not need any editing at all

(3) Yes, also incorporate the combined wisdom and contributions from the hundreds of external contributors. I think one thing that will make this a unique document is the way you have used blogs to create a global community of Berri-helpers. The number of times people helped with advice, suggestions, engine parts, and so on; the way the journey galvanised people to help, to anticipate, to pitch in, with satellite internet as the vehicle for enabling it all – that is I think a very interesting theme all on its own.

(4) Following from the above, the fact that both circumnavigations have been done without the big-ticket sponsorships and huge media caravan and the multi-million-dollar, Branson-Forbes-Travolta style excess of ego. It's the taciturn Brit and the Aussie larrikin at their absolute best.

(5) And lots of pictorial stuff

(6) Lastly, get onto it right away.

 

 

That's it from me. I look forward to catching up with you both for a cuppa and a chat sometime soon.

 

Meantime, the Masters Exhibition from the Quai d'Orsay is still on at the National Gallery in Canberra for another few weeks, so if can bear getting away from the sea-shore for a bit, come down and look at a painting or two.

 

Love and good wishes

Coming Home party

Don't you all go away just yet. There will be the Great Berrimilla Coming Home Party real soon now - will take a bit of organising but probably mid April after Easter. Watch this space for details.

The photos - the famous collapsed arch at Baiede L'Oisaeau and Slarty's face carved by one of his students -clearly not one of his originals.

On a roll

One for David Carne and the Victory mob. The World Championship
Trophy, suitably mounted.

lastpart.

With thanks to Steve W for the photos. There will be more.

I will catch up with myself and write some coming home stuff in a day
or so and I know I owe lots of you thanks and replies. I'll get there
- this 'civilisation' stuff takes a bit of getting used to. Likewise
this laptop - the spacebar doesn't work...

part 4

part 3

part 2

Coming home part 1 of several

and so it came to pass....

docked at noon at the CYC, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney.

That was home for many, many moons. There is no "other" space!

Berri's mission control station. Just add movement and water...

The final 6.30 report for this gig

Position 0638 15th 3358 15117, trip 109, DMG 107. We're off Long Bay with the barn door looming. GPS distance so far from Fslmouth 15214.

More later, though probably tomorrow - it's likely to get a bit busy from here.

Arghhh...the ribs.

Hi, I was intending to write to you all on the way from Eden to Sydney but a fall to the water from the wharf in Eden put an end to that.
We had moored Berri alongside a large ex-fishing boat the night before, I was on the wharf about to make a call home when it started to rain. Deciding to go back and get a jacket I moved down to a wooden beam just below the top of the wharf then pulled the ex-fisher in. The top of the rail I was about to step onto had been capped with stainless plate and it had recently been rained on but I didn't take that into account. As I stepped on board my foot immediately slipped and I fell back and went down. I hit my back on something on the way either part of the wharf or one of the boat's heavy mooring lines.
You feel so stupid, how did that happen? Anyway I grabbed the mooring line and after a couple of goes managed to drag myself the four or five feet up and back onto the fishing boat. Of course the office, with a lot of documentation was in the wallet, in the back pocket of the shorts, along with the phone.
I felt ok at first glad that I hadn't hit my head on the way down, there was no one there to pull me out, if I had. I now feel like I've been hit in the back with a cricket bat, hit with all the vigour one associates with a 20-20 player trying to loft a ball into the members stand.
That's my excuse, I'll write later, after the xrays, when I feel better. Cheers for now, I feel the need of one of Dr. Cooper's herbal tonics. Pete.

Past The 'Gong

For the meeters and greeters - 1100 this morning at South Head looks pretty much do-able. We'll be on VHF 72 and my mobile is 0418243600 - look for the Fastnet battle flag on the forestay and the hoist of all the other flags up the backstay. The Fastnet flag is almost as big as all the rest put together. The Mark of Sponsorship!

Night vision. The west a lively organism, the east Stygian and a sharp dividing line fore and aft. Dawn's flush a just a statistical probability. The long string of lights that is the coast road north from Wollongong with its little villages, brilliant against the black silhouette of the scarp behind and the slight silver-grey glow of the sky above - the sky ruffled like the underside of a woolly rug - little tufty balls of cloud all tightly curled together and reflecting the white loom of the lights of Sydney ahead. The jewelled chain of the coast road disappearing just ahead as it climbs the scarp to Stanwell Tops and then just the black line of the scarp merging into the point in the distance where sea, scarp and Sydney fuse and the Sydney glow and its reflection from the water fill our horizon. The Southern Cross and its pointers - Crux, Rigilkent, Hadar visible in a hazy gap above the mainsail. Another star, perhaps Antares, in a tiny gap over the scarp. A big cargo ship a mile or so out to sea waiting to go into Port Kembla, its lights cutting the gloom to the east and reflecting in coloured lines towards us on the rolling glassy surface. Phosphorescence - separate green sparkles rushing past in the surf of Berri's bow wave and the coiled luminous trail of her passage through the water astern. And now the cloud opening everywhere and letting the stars through - the lights at Sutherland and Cronulla and Kurnell just appearing at the meeting place of the sea and the sky and the reflections ahead. I'm going to miss all this!

So - anyone have any suggestions about how to make all this waffly nonsense available in a more conventional form? There's a book in draft about the first circumnavigation but I think there's perhaps a wider story. Do you think an edited version of the Complete Works of Berri - all three website blogs with incoming emails included and a few linking fillers, lots of maps and a glossary - would actually work as a book? Gerzillions of photos and lots of video available as well. I hope we can organise a video of the full story but it will take time and a lot of help from our friends. Likewise, perhaps, a book of the photos? Albatross calendars perhaps, a desk diary with daily quotes? The Complete Works would be quite substantial - perhaps 400+ pages with some fairly savage editing. Or just a coffee table book of pictures and little grabs? I'd love some bright ideas from all y'all out there who experienced these gigs from the other side of the looking glass.

Interesting Fact no. 42 from Malcom - Cook might have seen a camel as they had been some in zoos and menageries in Europe since the 13th century. Dromedary, though, implies knowledge of Bactrian as well, or perhaps all available camels were single humpers called Dromedaries, if that makes sense. Else just Mt. Camel? Anyway, thanks Malcom! Food for speculation.

If the wind is kind later, we'll sail around the corner.