Virtually Virtual

As Steve Bunts said on Fighting Talk a couple of weeks ago, exactly what planet was Ellen MacArthur sailing round? It's as if her parents put her on the boat to get rid of her - they told her it was a round-the-world voyage, but actually she's sitting in one of those virtual reality environments at the Earl's Court boat show with servo motors wobbling it about. This quote from Today's Guardian says it all for me:

Robin Knox-Johnston, a MacArthur supporter who plans to be at Falmouth for the formal welcome, has drawn an instructive contrast between his round-the-world voyage in 1968-69 (the first non-stop solo circumnavigation) and MacArthur's. "My boat, Suhaili, was small and wooden," he has said. "MacArthur's boat is three times as long as mine, half as heavy and has sails three or four times larger. To navigate, I had a sextant and a chronometer. The equipment had changed very little since Captain Cook's time. MacArthur has GPS, which updates every three seconds, telling you where you are, what speed you are doing and what direction you're going in. You don't need to navigate.

In other words, she has so much technology at her disposal, she might as well have an engine and be done with it. The full support team, the webcam, the satnav, the live radio interviews... where's the challenge? When I was a boy, I had a model boat I called Suhaili, and I used to float it on the Harpenden boating lake. Perhaps she could try that.

She's not exploring, not a pioneer, and it's all a bit sterile, like reality TV, like virtual reality TV; there's nothing to match the real excitement and danger of being out of radio contact (remember when the Apollo capsules would come back from the moon - all those minutes of silence as you wondered if they'd made it?). As for the B&Q sponsorship, honestly. It makes me sick to my stomach.