Change of blog address...

Due to a change in circumstances, I have moved the location of this blog.

You can now access my blog by visiting www.buttertrain.blogspot.com

The end of summer leave, time for work...

At the end of August, after 5 weeks of driving in the worst terrains I've ever encountered, we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, 96th across the line, although not many teams arriving before us actually finished with their car. Our car was pretty battered, but nevertheless was there and ready to go to auction, or however AFDM (Adventures For Development Mongolia) want to use it. Both Olly and I were in good spirits throughout and really enjoyed a few days of reminiscing on adventures with the other teams that crossed the line during that period.
Since the rally, I’ve flown from Ulaanbaatar to Berlin to London, and from London to Lisbon to Fortaleza where I spent 2 weeks with my girlfriend and also had an amazingly cultured and out of this world experience- as if Mongolia wasn’t enough! I was then due to meet the ship in Uruguay- but the stop was cancelled, so I then flew from Fortaleza to Lisbon to London, and the next day from Brize Norton to Ascension Island- and eventually after a 16 hour delay, to the Falkland Islands. In total, during this summer leave period while I have been away from work, I have travelled over 32,000 miles, so I am quite glad to be settling down with the ship in the Falklands.

The trip down from Brize Norton gave me a great view of Tenerife- I managed to get his photo looking out the window.

Now that I am back in the Falklands, and have met back up with the ship, it’s back down to hard graft for a few months. There’s not much chance for me to visit the penguins this time round, because of a fairly tight routine, but anything exciting I do see, I will be updating this blog!

Awesome mods

Having problems with our suspension dampers, so the easier way to deal with it is to eliminate them! The micra now has rear coils twice the original thickness, straight out of a mercedes, they were snapped in a previous accident, but they's perfect for our car, which now rolls along like a limousine- despite looking like a hotrod! This is our car sat at the russia/kazakhstan border near semey. Only 2000 miles or so until the finish in ulaanbaatar!

Travelling to mongolia...

Travelling to mongolia is all the more fun when you come across a spray paint shop! Since odessa, our micra has looked particularly rally-ish! This is us waiting by the side of a motorway- and behind us is team 'let's get ready to mongol'... Somewhere behind them is team 'cornwall to mongolia' being investigated and probably fined by russian police.

Wow. How tiring a few weeks can be. BOST is finished, we've been home for a few weeks, just had families day, and despite the attention-sapping world cup, I've been doing lots of PR work for the Mongol Rally, which is now less than 2 weeks away! How scary!

I'm loving the Gloucester at the moment. We're in about as good condition as a destroyer of this age can be, the deployment looks exciting enough, but having them give me almost 2 months off to compete in the Mongol Rally, and also the chance to see my girlfriend in Brazil, has been more than I could ever have imagined. Pretty good way to serve out the remainder of your career...

So here's some of the photos, and a reminder to get sponsoring us. We need everyone's donations if we're going to reach £3000 for charity. www.justgiving.com/gcgb.

And the next thing is this- just round the corner now!

BOST: Week 6

The first website I visit when I log into my computer, is the BBC news website. Today one article argued that day-dreaming for about half an hour can improve concentration for the rest of the day. I whole-heartedly agree with this, and so sat down and shut my eyes, allowing my thoughts to vanish and my mind to take a wander... until 30 seconds later I was abruptly woken by machine gun fire from the GPMG machine gun on the deck above my head. The ship then went into attack mode, which means 30 knots on the 2 olympus engines, and lots of swerving about to concentrate firepower on the jets swirling around above our heads. I wasn't heavily involved in this exercise- it was more of a practice for the war-fairies in the operations room, but as you can tell from the picture above, moving about the ship is like being a marble in a game of labyrinth. It's not too bad if you're somewhere that you can keep focus on the horizon- but deep in the ship, especially at the forward and aft ends, it's a complete nightmare!

So, what's going on then? Well, here's the official script that came through just before last weekend, as we were about to enter the harbour...

(HMS GLOUCESTER is currently on patrol South of 'Brownia')

Human intelligence sources have revealed that the Peoples Front of Ginger (PFG) activity has increased in the last 24hrs and that this small, but highly determined group, have been operating small craft in the littoral. It is believed that the PFG may be planning a headline-grabbing spectacular. A British naval unit would certainly make an attractive target and our presence in the area has been very well publicised in the world’s media. Threats are likely to include, but not limited to, jet-skis, speed boats and other pleasure craft likely to adopt suicide tactics...

So as you can see, we're a little busy. We've also been refuelling at sea, "Fred" has been jumping over the ship's side with alarming and suicidal regularity, and we took just 4 hours to rescue a town battered by a hurricane and a flood a couple of weeks ago. There's also been car bombs and bandits trying all sorts of things every couple of days, and today we boarded a small vessel who had stowed about £3 billion pounds worth of illegal.... sherbert. Pah- these Plymouth barbarians.

Little Sullage Pump

So, the other day I was duty, and we had to empty one of the sullage tanks. The Sullage people came to us, and gave us a pump to boost the suction at our end, and, after leaving it to do it's job, I suddenly realised IT WAS ALIVE.... (and hence I filmed it, wrote some music for it, and put it all together in this comical little production...)