128. No Ordinary Race, No Ordinary Year

It’s just a fraction over a year since the Clipper Race was “suspended” with the yachts in Subic Bay, Philippines and unless you’ve spent 12 months in Outer Space, marooned on a desert island, hibernating, or following a programme of self-isolation living in a cave, you don’t need me to tell you what a different year it has been.

This time last year Clipper crews from around the world had managed to get out of the Philippines and get home by various routes as the Philippines and most of the rest of the world went into some form of COVID quarantine-lockdown. I touched on some of the “escapes” of my UNICEF colleagues in Blog 113: Update, published exactly a year ago today and my own “predicament” and feelings were explained in Blog 112: I See No Ships, published 15 March 2020. Regular readers will be aware that “I see No Ships” was a bit too literal for comfort.

Allowing me a little-bit-of-leeway in terms of how I am defining the timeline, for me the Clipper adventure had gone from this

via this

to this

with plenty of this inbetween:

Race 7 Day 4 on the bows of Dare To Lead

and then:

Team UNICEF alongside in Cape Town about to start Leg 3, Race 4 to Fremantle, Western Australia.

and since returning from the Philippines a few “blog-diversions” covering:

and what of my eyesight after all that ………..

……….. well it turns out that at my last “formal” eye test a couple of weeks ago I got down to reading the lowest line I have ever been able to read … with BOTH eyes. My eyesight is now better than before the original haemorrhage back in March 2020. How EYERONIC is that!!!!

So what about the Race? No further update since my previous blog, Blog 127: There is a kind of Plan…. or at least a Clipper Plan, published 15 February 2021.