Blog number 1!

Panatlantic
Wed 28 Nov 2007 13:10
Dear All,
Welcome to our first blog entry! Sorry it´s taken so long to get this
started, i´ve had the considerable inconvenience of being in hospital for
2 days and nights as a partial excuse, but more of that later! I will keep
this first addition fairly brief, as there will be far more interesting
things to write about when we´re at sea i´m sure!

James and i arrived a week ago today, San Sebasiten de la Gomera is like
any other third world town where everything happens in a random and
unpredictable way, there are stray dogs everywhere, and bread tastes
awful. We run the gauntlet of ordering food twice a day, not once have we
got what we ordered so far, but it all adds to the charm of the place!!
I am being a little harsh, it´s really rather nice here, just has its own
small-island idiosyncracies! My pidgin Spanish is coming along nicely, so
far James has managed to ask a waitress for a plate of "Hasta la vista"
and told our hotelliers that we need somemore "donde esta la bibliotequa",
which, rather surprisingly, illicited the required response on both
occoasions!

Our other competitors are invariably excellent people, though i must state
that the women appear to be of dubious moral persuasion, not that this is
a good thing: most of them have been "fattening up for the race" for some
time and could out-bench me, out-eat James and out-drink a homeless
person. Not what i would really describe as ladylike behaviour, but it
makes for some interesting gossip!
There is one very strong crew from South Africa, who are likely to be our
nearest competitors. They have a very strong pedigree and an tremendously
light boat, built by a kiwi crew in 2003. There are 23 boats in all, which
makes for quite a sight in the small marina in la Gomera. Everyone has
been making minor adjustments for the past week ready for the off this
weekend.

Speaking of which, we may have to delay our start!! I managed to get
myself rather unpleasantly infected with what turned out to be a highly
aggressive bacterium that advanced down my arm at a rate of knots! I took
myself to hospital on thursday night, having changed out of my santa
costume from the fancy dress party we were having, and after being stared
at with bulging eyes by the nurse in A&E i was pushed to the horizontal,
covered in little monitoring patches, hooked up to an ECG and rushed in to
surgery! The surgeon poked and prodded, stabbed, cut, squeezed and did
various other things to me including cutting out what i presume to be a
piece of scar-tissue that - i again presume, for my Spanish is too poor to
understand what they were telling me - was causing the initial irritation
in my elbow joint. The surgeon frequently asked me whether i was feeling
any pain, which i found quite a funny question as he hadn´t administered
any anaesthetic and he was chopping things out of the inner-workings of my
elbow joint! "No problemo, solo un poco", was my unfailing and highly
inaccurate answer!
I was hooked up to a saline drip for 24 hours, given 4 courses of IV
antibiotics, disallowed from leaving my room for 30 hours and eventually
released early on saturday afternoonafter 2 further examinations by the
surgeon!

Luckily for me James had got his ass in gear and worked wonders on the
boat, leaving me very little else to do but soak up the sympathy from
those easy women i was telling you about! The race officially starts on
Sunday at midday (please refer to www.atlanticrowingrace2007.co.uk),
though James and i have been given a 5 day window in which to start. My
great thanks to all the other teams who have agreed to letting us have
this leeway, every one of them knows how much we have given to this
project and to have it ruined like this at the last minute would be a
right shitter, so there is no point in taking any chances and leaving
before it´s all sorted!

The drainage tubes come out of my arm tomorrow (they are holding open the
3 incisions the kind surgeon made) and hopefully i´ll be able to start
load-bearing. We will move our boat Komale in to the water tomorrow, and
have a little paddle. Our decision as to when we are leaving will have to
wait until the weekend....i´ll keepyou posted!

Right, that wasn´t quite as short as i had intended, i hope you didn´t
mind! I´m offfor a quick shower using the bath taps and then for a meal of
something i didn´t order!

Hasta la vista, con quesa y jamon por favor,
Niall