So it’s race day and it’s hot!!

Portimao is paradise, this place will take some beating!

The live video streaming will be on http://marinaportimaosurfski.com/ and the race starts at 15:00!!

Will post again after the race!

Well Portimao is great and the view from our hotel room is even better. We are staying about 300m from the beach where the start is! Speaking of which the start time has moved to 15:00 tomorrow in the hope of some wind. I’m hoping surfski.info has updates and maybe some live commentary tomorrow!

I went for a light paddle this afternoon and a bit of swell about, let’s just hope for more wind! I’ve just been down to register but no matter how hard we stared at the windguru print out it did not change.

I will try keep you posted.

Now it’s time to get the stickers on my boat and then we have got the race briefing at 10pm!!

On Wednesday the 18th of August three(Ivan Lawler, Pete Molnar and myself) of us set out from East Cowes to paddle all the way around the Isle of Wight – A total of 90km.

So on no training for this kind of ultra marathon I was kind of ready. I’m training for the Race of Champions in Portugal(4th sept), which is 25km, so that is all the kind of training I have done. My longest paddle before this was the Cape Point Challenge (52km)December last year!! The longest I’ve paddled since then is about 25-30km. So I would say I was quite under prepared for 90km.

We headed out to circumnavigate the Island anitclockwise starting at East Cowes. Our first land mark was Yarmouth and it was great to get around the corner past Yarmouth to be able to to see the Needles, which is the western most point of the island! We made really good time heading towards the Needles!!

We were going to stop just after the Needles, but as we were all feeling good and we were quite far out to sea so would have missed out on a great downwind had we stopped, we decided to make a quick phone call to our seconds, have a chocolate bar and we were off again!! Next we had a great downwind section of about 25km. Then after a total of about 55km we had our first stop at Ventnor. Had a sandwich, more chocolate, refilled our juice bottles and had some juice!! Everyone on the beach thought we were crazy!!

Getting back on the water was the hardest part!! Then we had a further 15km of downwind until Bembridge. Around the corner we hit a headwind which would be against us for the final 20km!! That almost killed me, as we hit Ryde Pier 10km from the end I hit the wall, talk about hitting a wall….this was the biggest wall I have ever hit!! At that stage Ivan asked me if I wanted to stop, “No one will think bad of you if you stop!” he said, it didn’t take long to reply “No I’m fine, I’ve done 80km I can do another 10km!”. So another bit of chocolate, more energy juice and I started to recover. It was so great to finish and now know that I can paddle 90km.

Thanks to Ivan and Pete for a great slip whenever we could ride slip!!

We are thinking of doing the downwind part again in October, if we get the wind right it will make a great 40km downwind!

Click here to see my Garmin GPS route http://connect.garmin.com/activity/45319456

Very tired!

Also raised some money for the Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance!