Well unfortunately the weather really didn’t help the turn out for the London Boat Show. When the news says, “Don’t travel unless you have to,” they really ought to say, “but you have to go to the Boat Show”!

This year I was giving my “Be Your Own Sailing Coach” talk in front of a huge 60 foot screen all microphoned up like Madonna and there seemed to be cameras and lights everywhere!

It was certainly different from my usual club based sessions which tend to be around a couple of hours (usually with a beer break somewhere in the middle) and with just 25 minutes to talk I really felt I could have said a lot more… With such a limited time I had to choose my topic carefully and I decided to go for starting. Although hard to quantify, this is a very important part of the race. My aim was to go through approximately twenty slides (one a minute), taken from my book, but in the end I got only about half way through the material I thought I could use. Perhaps next time they might give me an hour!!!