Collision reports

Between the Canaries and Cabo Verde, Yellowbrick tracker, our little GPS transmitter, started sending out collision reports to our friends and family. We didn’t know about any of this at the time.

It turns out that Yellowbrick has some sort of deceleration measuring device in it. When you activate it, this will tell the world if your plane or Paris-Dakar motorcycle has crashed. In Tainui we each deny having altered the Yellowbrick settings but altered they were.

Although you’d have to ask how YB knew Tainui had had a collision, there was some consternation at home. In London Dirk contacted Canaries search and rescue authorities, in Australia Rosie and Jenny were worried too, although Chris concluded that someone on board had been fiddling with the controls of the unit and ignored the messages.

As Dirk later wrote to Maxine:

“That makes four collision reports:

a.. 21 Jan from 024′ 43.545 N 018′ 33.391 W,

b.. 22 Jan from 022′ 35.124 N 020′ 37.981 W,

c.. 24 Jan from 018′ 12.904 N 023′ 20.200 W,

d.. 25 Jan from 017′ 01.872 N 024′ 54.044 W.

Getting used to them now and less concerned. In any case they show progress being made. We’ve been considering what might be amiss. In order of increasing likelihood: technical error, angry whale ramming you every 24 hrs, helmsman DUI. Instructed the salvamento maritimo to stand down.”