B&Q gears up for the Cotton Record

Midway through their stopover in Qingdao, Ellen and the team are gearing up for their next challenge on the Asian Record Circuit – to establish a new record time between Qingdao and mainland China’s largest city, Shanghai. In Qingdao, the sailing venue for the 2008 Olympic Games, Ellen’s project has been making headline news from front-page news articles in the daily newspapers to appearances on CCTV – the state-controlled national broadcasting channel, the equivalent of the BBC but with viewing figures in excess of 500 million! An average audience of BBC’s Eastenders stands at around 16 million viewers.

MacArthur and her crew are set to depart on the ‘Cotton Record’ this coming Sunday, 9th April and expect to leave at around 0700 GMT (final departure time to be confirmed). Leg 4 of the circuit from Qingdao to Shanghai is named the Cotton Record in recognition of the notorious cotton textile industry that was built up during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) to boast the largest cotton textile centre in China, thereby boosting the city’s economy.

Based on the latest weather information available from Commanders’, the team have set themselves a benchmark time of 28 hours to cover the course distance of 308 miles and establish this new record, which will be record number 5, taking them to the halfway point of this Asia tour.

FROM ELLEN:

“We are expecting a little bit of everything on this leg starting with the wind from the south-east which is a bit upwind for us, then it will shift further into the east for some faster reaching conditions, before a complete shift into the west then north-west for some fast downwind conditions through Sunday night and into Monday. Winds will hopefully be pretty fresh possibly peaking to near gale force Sunday afternoon, then dropping through the wind shift, and finally picking up again on the home run. Latest routing shows that by leaving at 0700 GMT will hopefully give us the quickest trip. Hopefully, it won’t be as cold as the last leg as the temperatures will get slowly warmer the further south we go.

There is also a massive sandbank jutting out from the coast and if you took a pencil and drew a straight line from Qingdao to Shanghai, you would see that we would run straight over it. So we have to keep to the west of that, further offshore, which works for us and the weather forecast we have. [Check out Google Earth – the sandbank is clearly visible.]

Qingdao has been a great experience – it feels a bit more westernised than Dalian which was 100% Chinese. Here you see the odd international brand you recognise but really our cultures our worlds apart. The biggest barrier is the language but we have learnt some of the basics and hand signals seem to go a long way! You need a translator for virtually everything – taking a taxi ride may seem simple but when you can’t pronounce the destination, it takes on a whole new meaning! You can’t imagine the planning that has gone into this tour – and the team have done a great job on that front – because everything, and I mean everything, has to go through official channels. But the right planning has paid off, and the awareness of our project here has been great. Going to Shanghai will, I’m sure, be another totally different experience – the scale of it is immense, and a big worry for us is the heavy shipping going into Shanghai, we will need to be pretty careful.”

As the official sailing venue for the 29th Olympic Games, Ellen has been meeting with the sailing organising committee and a number of the Chinese sailing team. Tomorrow she will be dinghy sailing with some young kids before seeing off Sir Robin Knox Johnston’s Clipper fleet who have also been based at Qingdao’s Olympic Marina – the 10-boat fleet will be led out by the B&Q trimaran to the start line of their next leg of their round the world race.