It’s the night before the race and all is well.  Bodacious Dream is in great shape for the race thanks to huge efforts from Emma, Matt and Mark. It’s an amazing process that’s hard to explain, but there are various levels of checks and safety checks, loading of water and food, packing and planning…. and then the meetings and events…. all of which are in French, which makes it extra hard to get all the details down….especially for such a detail-orientated guy!!

The actual start is 11:20 EST on Sunday the 22nd, but we’ll be leaving the harbor by 8:45 or thereabouts and do a tour up the river to the starting area.  Once the start goes off, we point the boat to the North East and head for open water…..but wait, not so fast.  There’s about 400 miles of the St. Lawrence to traverse first before we get into the Atlantic and to make things interesting, there are a number of buoys that we have to round on our way there.  This adds excitement to the harbors along the way as the boat come close off their harbors and sail past.

I was a bit challenged by time and a camera, so I really don’t have any exciting photos of the fleet as they set in Quebec City, but I’m sure you can find more photos on the website   at www.transatquebecstmalo.com where you can also find the tracker and follow our progress and our race position along the way.  (Here’s the live link for following the race)

There’s a great group of competitors here and there is a chance that any number of boats could have a great race. I expect lots of lead changes and interesting tactics for the first three or four days after we get out of the river.

In the meantime, to satisfy some visual desires, here’s a photo of one of the spectacular sunsets we saw on our way up here a week ago.  The sun broke through at the horizon and lit up the underside of the clouds as we moved along into the night.  Sometimes these things just take your breath away, and you forget all the trivial things about life and realize how rich and beautiful the world is.

Hope you’re all having a good summer.  The Chicago Mackinac Race started Sunday and all our cohorts are on “Bodacious IV” working their way up the late.  Check in on them too and see how they are doing.

So stay tuned.  We hope to get into a regular rhythm sending out an email post every other day.   Check onto the website www.bodaciousdream.com. We will be putting the news up there with some regularity as well as our Facebook page.

Thanks to everyone for making this a wonderful experience.

Dave, Matt, Emma and Mark