welcome to our blog!

This blog tells the story of our 22-month sailing journey from Oakland, California, to Bristol, Rhode Island, aboard our beloved Bristol 32 sailboat, Ute. Please feel free to browse through the archives (partway down the sidebar to your left) to see pics and read stories of our adventures in North America and Central America . (Sorry the first 3 months of the trip are missing - they vanished somewhere in an internet cafe in Mexico - but all you're missing is CA, Baja and Western Mex).

If you're trying to track us down now that we're landlubbers, try us at uteatlarge at yahoo dot com. Thanks!

Monday, March 19, 2007

eco speedsters

Remember Scott and Allison, the crew on the big fancy Dutch boat, the sewing machine gurus that helped us out in Bocas del Toro? (see October archives for pics of us transiting the canal on the boat they crewed/captained). anyway..they've moved on and their new project is pretty cool...they are ground crew for the Earthrace. Earthrace is a bio-diesel powered boat that is, as we speak, racing towards Acapulco, the second stop on their attempt to break the round-the-world-on-a-speedboat record time. The clock started ticking when they left Barbados on the 10th. They transited the Panama canal a couple days ago - see cool pics below.

Luckily their job does not entail actually riding in the boat, which is evidently about as comfortable as the rock truck that Allen made us ride in last week (of course, as Kermit taught us, it's not easy being green).

Learn more at www.earthrace.net. Good luck guys!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

uh-oh, news is they collided with a panga off Guatamala, killing one of the fishermen. Their site is quiet about it but see:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/i-tried-to-save-him-earthrace-skipper/2007/03/19/1174152933869.html

Also, thanks for all the shopping advice, I just sent away for the wireless dish. We gave away our plants yesterday, we're on our way.

Craig

Lucky Penguin said...

holy god. that is horrible. for the rest of you readers, the above link didn't work for me, but if you search keyword "earthrace" on the Sydney Morning Herald site, you'll encounter two articles on the topic.
Having been off that same coast at night I can tell you how easily this could happen....the pangas are unlit and do not show up on radar. and there are dozens of them.
Our sympathies to the Guatemalans and to the ER crew....

Anonymous said...

This is horrible!! Isn't this the thing danny almost went on??? What a nightmare! jkb