H2uh0

Hi Everyone,

I have run out of space at Blogspirit and I don't want to delete my archives in order to open up space for new posts. My new home can be found by clicking here.

Here's an article on things to do and see in the BVI. If you are heading that way or thinking about it, this is a read for you.

I have always wanted to try paragliding. After reading this story, I think I'll stick with watersports close to the surface.

A champion paraglider described today her terror at being flung to a height greater than Mount Everest by a tornado-like thunderstorm in Australia.

Ewa Wisnerska, 35, was sucked so high that she blacked out and became encased in ice.

“You can’t imagine the power. You feel like nothing, like a leaf from a tree going up,” she told Australian radio.

Wisnerska, from Germany, was preparing for the 10th World Paragliding Championships above the town of Manilla in New South Wales when the storm struck on Wednesday.

With terrifying speed she was whisked from 2,500 ft to an estimated 32,000 ft in about 15 minutes. “I was shaking all the time. The last thing I remember it was dark. I could hear lightning all around me,” she said.

Her ordeal was recorded by global positioning and a radio attached to her equipment.

When her desperate attempts to skirt the powerful thunderstorm failed, she concluded that her chances of survival were “almost zero.” “I said, 'I can’t do anything. It’s raining and hailing and I’m still climbing — I’m lost.”’

The paragliding 2005 World Cup winner lost consciousness for more than 30 minutes while her aircraft flew on uncontrolled, sinking and lifting several times.

“There’s no oxygen. She could have suffered brain damage. But she came to again at a height of 6,900 metres with ice all over her body and slowly descended herself,” said Godfrey Wenness, the event organizer and one of Australia’s most experienced paraglider pilots.

After regaining consciousness, she felt like an astronaut returning from the Moon as the ground loomed beneath her. “I could see the Earth coming — wow, like Apollo 13 — I can see the Earth,” she said.

Wisnerska landed safely 40 miles from her original launch site with ice in her lightweight flying suit and frost bite to her face.

She spent just an hour in a hospital for observation and hopes to compete in biennial championships which begin on February 24.

Earlier this month a British paraglider survived an attack by two large eagles while flying in the same area.

We are going to be celebrating a half century on the planet next year in the BVI's. A week of pleasure with friends and family on a beautiful 58' cat. Windsurfing, scuba, hamocking, floating and searching for the perfect Mai Tai! Check the boat and crew here.

Check out the ladies and their fun surfing adventures in Hawaii. Surfs UP!

Christmas day in the raging waters of the Southern Ocean, and Raphael Dinelli is hunkered alone in his cabin, hanging on against what will be either baptism or last rites in these cold, violent seas. It's not up to him anymore. He is somewhere near the midpoint of a single-handed around-the-world yacht race called the Vendïe Globe: a 26,000-mile run from Les Sables d'Olonne, France, and back, no stops allowed, you and your boat for more than three months against the worst the open ocean can roil up. And this is the worst. Out of 15 boats in this unlucky race, four will sink in these empty latitudes. Dinelli's will be the first. He is 1,200 miles southwest of Australia, barely a thousand miles north of Antarctica, in the midst of a trashing that his 60-foot sloop, Algimouss, will not survive.

Fifty-knot winds (about 58 miles per hour) have rolled him twice, laid his sails in the water for minutes at a time while 50-foot breakers collapse, burying him again and again in an avalanche of ice water. In a last telex to race headquarters in France he says that the seas are "smoking" as the wind tears the breaking wave tops into driving clouds of mist, that he has all sails down and two sea anchors astern in a vain attempt to slow the terrifying speeds at which he is hurtling down the sheer wave faces. Finally, in the cold, early dark of Christmas night, 1996, a huge breaker sends the 28-year-old Frenchman surfing for the last time. He watches helplessly as his speed reaches 26 knots, braces himself, and then crashes to the ceiling of his cabin as Algimouss slams into the wave trough, somersaults, and settles upside down in the torrent.

Frigid water rushes into the turtled boat through a hole torn in the deck by the shattered mast, which is levering around in the wash. Trapped, with water up to his waist, Dinelli pulls on his immersion suit, gathers survival supplies, and waits as waves roar and crash overhead and fuel from a ruptured tank fills the cabin with a stink that gets him puking. Three hours later, the mast breaks away, the boat comes right, and he scrambles onto the swamped deck. Under pitch-black skies, he sets off his distress beacons, inflates his life raft, and loads it with food and water, only to see the surge tear it loose of its tether and dance it away on the waves. Then, as Algimouss sinks slowly out from under him, he lashes himself to the stub of the mast, faces into the bitter wind to keep himself awake, and thinks about dying, as so many others have died, in the lonely furies of the most treacherous ocean on earth.

Continue reading here.

Richard Spindler is the publisher of Lattitude 38. He has a pretty great life when on vacation, but might work too hard when in the office. He does have a unique vision and has made a mint with his little sail rag.

Here are his latest words of wisdom: If you've read the February issue of Latitude 38, you know that the Wanderer, the pen name for the publisher of Latitude 38, celebrated the 30th year of publishing Latitude by spending six weeks in the Caribbean, most of it aboard the Leopard 45 cat 'ti Profligate. We weren't doing anything particularly grand, just living aboard, doing a bit of work, a bunch of playing with the ocean, and making friends with locals and other cruisers. It was sweet.

Now back, we'd like to share with you the one overriding impression we've gotten upon returning. The Bay Area, where we were born and have lived for almost our entire life, and certainly one of the garden spots of the world, turns out to be one strange and unnatural place. (Of course, we're certain the same can be said for most metro areas of the U.S., if not the world.) For until you've been away for a reasonable chunk of time, we think it's difficult to appreciate how much anxiety and fear-inducing sensationalist crap is pumped into our brains via all the various media, and what mountains are made out of molehills.

Doña de Mallorca and we got our first whiff of this a few days before coming home while at the Bath & Turtle Pub at Spanishtown in the British Virgin Islands. We hadn't watched television in six weeks, but they had CNN with Paula Zahn on, although the sound was off. We'd watched plenty of that stuff before we went to the islands, and it seemed normal. But having not seen it in a long time, it came across as completely bizarre.

For one thing, the set, as well as the outfits worn by the host and guests, were of vibrant primary colors such as aren't found anywhere in nature. As for Ms. Zahn, Wolf Blitzer, and the various 'experts', they looked more like freaks than the normal people. Their teeth were too white, they had enormous repertoires of phony expressions, and the endless over-the-top gestures they made had clearly been drummed into them by communication gurus. Plus, they made every stupid little thing seem so earth-shakingly important.

As for the 'news' itself, what a joke. The astronaut in diapers, Mayor Newsom's sex life, some preacher coming out of rehab for being gay, and God knows what else. We couldn't wait to get back to the boat and sit under the stars and listen to the wavelets slap against the hull.

The bottom line is to recognize that your brain is being inundated with so much bogus information that you can't help but develop a completely unnatural impression of the world and reality. The good news is that there is a real world, and the people who reside in it are much more pleasant than those normally found on television, in newspapers, and on the Internet. Plus the events are far less catastrophic. May we all more completely inhabit that world some day.

What a great tittle. Got your atention, no? Anyway here is some cool info on a white dwarf in the Helix nebula. A dead star similar to our sun that is engulfing its nearby planets. Be sure to check out the extraordinary pics and vids. Check it here.