Big fish swimming under the boat!

There are quite a lot of fish that swim around in little shoals in Marina La Gomera – passers by often throw stale bread over the marina wall for them, and there are mini feeding frenzies. The largest are only about 8″ long. Today,I was standing by the boat and Ole from Team Amigo walked past. “Look Ole”, I said”, there’s a big fish swimming under the boat!” At this point Richard swam up from underneath her, nearly giving Ole a heart attack – I think he said something that might have been Danish (he’s a Canadian of Danish origin).

As the afternoon had heated up, Richard and Eric were both very keen to go for a swim under the boat to check for any damage that might have been caused when she was launched – and Eric took the opportunity to add some spare paw print stickers I had to her transom. Whilst we are unlikely to show other crews a clean pair of heels, we will at leats be showing a clean pair of paws to anyone behind us.

We’ve also had our bows “branded” with Talisker stickers today, and had our tracking beacon fitted. The jobs really are being ticked off. Oh, and Eric painted our robustly repaired stove stand in survival orange to match the rest of the boat. Maybe tiger stripes on it tomorrow?

We were interviewed, as all rowers are, today, and this will appear at some point on the www.taliskerwhiskyatlanticchallenge.com website. I believe there’s an interview available online that the Talisker media people did with us at their London launch 10 days before we left the UK on Vimeo – search for Talisker. For those of you who may struggle to fine this, we’ll try to find you a URL later (I’m writing this offline).

One thing we’d like you to be clear about with media, though: the Row 2 Recovery crew, who are a men’s six of soldiers or ex-soldiers, 3 of whom are amputees and another has a major leg issue as a result of an injury in action, have a very large, very expensive marine broadband unit fitted to their boat so that they can transmit video whilst at sea for, I think, ITN news. If you see any items about them on the news, though, please don’t wonder when coverage of us will come on – we don’t have that technology, or that media contract.

Off to the Italian restaurant by the Blue Marlin now for some lasagne!

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