As the departure date for the Two in the Blue voyage approaches Leonie and I are working our fingers to the bone getting all the preparations in good order. Many moments I sit back from the desk and contemplate with a smile the idea of actually unfurling the sails, but for now it’s all business and not much fun! While I am tacking my way through the jagged piles of paperwork, Leonie is living through that particularly exquisite form of hell known as the final week of a PhD degree! It won’t be long before there are two doctors on board the ship.

So just in case you were wondering about the silence coming from this end – everything is going well it’s just that the highlight of both our day tends to be shuffling a pile of paper from one side of the desk to the other…. but not for much longer! We will be in the water by late May and before long all these flows of white paper before me will be replaces with floes of white ice!