Sailing a carbon fibre racing yacht across the English Channel to France

Sorry for the long gaps between these blogs, it’s been a very busy few months with my work at Lupine Travel culminating in a large amount of press and media surrounding a train trip from Wigan to North Korea we’ve been working on. Coverage at links here in The Times, The Independent and the BBC.

I’ve got some blogs in draft that I’m working on with images and videos of visits I’ve made this year to Socotra Island in Yemen as well as Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific so I should have these ready soon.

The reason for this post, I’ve just returned from a trip across the English channel and back on an incredible carbon fibre hulled Volvo 70 ocean racing yacht which I’ve made a short video of below that I thought you might enjoy. I made the trip as I’m planning to take the same boat across the Atlantic as part of the ARC 2020 race from Gran Canaria to Antigua. It’s been a dream of mine for many years to sail the Atlantic, not the cheapest thing to do as part of a racing crew, but I’ve decided to finally make it happen.

We’ve got aims of making the 2,700 nautical mile journey in 11 days working an sleeping in a 4 hours on, 4 hours off pattern, standing a good chance of placing  highly in the 200+ yachts competing. I was keen to try out the spartan conditions before committing to the race, keep your eyes peeled for the ultralight carbon fibre toilet located around 1 metre away from the cooking facilities…

If you’re keen to book a trip on this boat, or one like it, check out Kraken Travel and they’ll be happy to help :).

New website and projects!

Hi all!

I’ve not posted to this blog in a very long time (sorry for this!), but I’m going to start posting updates in a few places for some projects I’m working on. I’ve just put together a little website detailing some of them over at jamesfinnerty.co.uk.

If you want to follow along with some of these projects directly you can also try the following, thanks for your support!…

Mailing lists…
My personal mailing list sign up
This will contain reports on trips I’ve done in a blog style format
Mailing list signup for my challenge to eat or cook a meal from every country
Recipes and restaurant reviews from the challenge

Instagram accounts
Eating Every Country
My Personal Instagram account

All the best!
James Finnerty

So What’s Next?

I’ve gone a bit quiet on this blog for the last month. I’ve been slowly working on a reflective blog on the bike trip (from London-Shanghai) but it’s taking quite awhile to get my thoughts down in a way that I am happy with. To tide this blog over I thought a little summary of my month back would be helpful for anyone wanting to take a long journey and are worried about the inevitable return. On top of that I’ve got a couple of plans in the works.

Strasbourg, France to Dillengen, Germany – 245 miles (726 miles total)

My pace is starting to pick up now and I’m well on my way down the Danube, it’s been an interesting week or so since I last posted on the ride from Luxembourg to Strasbourg. Firstly I spent a day off resting in Strasbourg and spent a couple of hours seeing the place, I don’t know if it’s because I had no real expectations of the place (mainly stopped there as it was a logical place on the route to the Danube) or because of the nature of cycling all the way their but I really enjoyed just walking about the town.

Strasbourg Cathedral

Update: Media & Plans

It’s been a bit of a while since I’d made a post so I thought I’d put together an update of my upcoming plans and also put up a little bit of media coverage I’ve had in the last few weeks :).

Firstly my next interesting trip is now only 6 weeks away. I’ll be travelling to Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region of Iraq at the top end of the country that borders Turkey and Iran. Whilst travelling to Iraq may sound like a dangerous ordeal this area of the country has maintained an air of calm to it managing to mostly avoid the Shia/Sunni civil war due to the population consisting mainly of people of Kurdish ethnicity. There has been some ramping up of suicide bombings and conflicts in the Southern part of the country recently but hopefully this will not affect the trip. I’ve been reading a few books on Iraq and would highly recommend the following to anyone interested;