Don Rumsfeld – Singapore to Qingdao

There are known knowns, there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns. I never expected to be quoting Don Rumsfeld trying to explain the distinct lack of WMD’s lying around Iraq but it neatly describes the collective knowledge of the crew in our ongoing saga, or should I say motor-sail tour of Asia. We are a couple of days out of Hong Kong now. Oddly the rest of the fleet has passed us by.

We are to arrive at some pontoon, somewhere in Hong Kong harbour to get repairs done to our forestay, as the rest of the fleet require too (see last blog). These repairs could take an hour or half a day. Apparently Sir Robin himself is flying out to do the work himself. Are they running so short of cash they have to send their venerable chairman to do the graft? Or perhaps he is quite literally hands on type of guy. I’ll give them the benefit and go with the second. We’re not really sure when we will get into Qingdao. We don’t even know if we are to sail up the Taiwan Straits or go round to the east of the island before heading north. The arrival date is vague too. Could be the 10th, could be the 14th. We don’t know. Obviously it’s weather dependent but they should be able to give a narrower margin of error over this. Oh wait a minute, they or we or all of us don’t even know what the route is. It’s either 900 miles or 1,200.

Volcano was examined over all of this glaring ambiguity at the team meeting. He became defensive. He either knows and is not telling us or does not know and can’t tell us. Clipper organisation and Bush administration are showing some spooky parallels.

Or another way of looking at it, and this only occurred to me while getting the one good thing out of this – a sun tan – is that is reminds me of the horror stories you would hear about package holidays going awry with the holiday operator making wild and implausible promises in their brochure about the destination, only for the hapless tour rep (Volcano) to get both barrels from the disgruntled guests upon experiencing the reality on the ground. Let me compare:

• The hotel is a mess, it’s still a bloody building site = the boat was not properly sea-trialed; bits are falling off or don’t work.
• The bus driver got lost from the airport and we didn’t get in till 3am = we don’t really know where we are sailing nor do we know when we will get there.
• The tour rep was ignorant of our situation and didn’t really care = our skipper doesn’t really give a shit.

All analogies and roads draw you to one incontrovertible truth. They don’t know what they are doing. Boats that arrived late and were put together with the aid of the crews have problems. Why weren’t they in the UK earlier? Why was a yard in China used that apparently had not done anything like this before? Guesses can be made but none of them would give you any confidence.

You are probably wondering why I have not packed my dry bags. I am more stubborn than I realised, I will not get any of the outlay back if I jump ship and I want at the end of the all this to say I still managed to circumnavigate the globe despite the tremendous inadequacies of the organisers.