A pedalo?! You must be quackers!

And so it would seem!

As the training continues on our bikes, I thought it about time that we went down to see the kind people down at Southsea canoe lake, who are kindly allowing us the use of one of their pedalos for our voyage of destiny.

As I got closer to the lake, I could see some Swan shaped pedalos and some in the form of Ducks. I looked around and saw more swans, more ducks, more swans....... Hmmm.

After the staff at the lake all stopped laughing about our ridiculous challenge ahead, adding the odd comment of "You'll never make it..." and "The Solent?!..." I managed to question them as to which of these two beasts would serve us best on our epic journey. It seems the duck was slightly more sturdy than the swan, plus to be honest, the Swan had a bit of a nasty temper and suffered from seasickness.

Therefore, it is with great honour, pride and slight nervousness that I proudly present you with our naval assault vehicle. Forget Lord Nelson with his Victory, Drake with his Golden Hind, I give you.................



Now then imagine two fat blokes battling the tides, container ships and ferries of the Solent, in this! Tell me that's not worth £2 of your money for a great cause.

Please donate to http://www.justgiving.com/greatsolentpedal

The power of Twitter

We're experimenting with various forms of social media in an effort to raise the profile of The Great Solent Pedal and hopefully as a consequence, more donations to the cause.

One of these was Twitter, the social networking and micro blogging site. You can follow us here
We posted a few messages and as we started to get a small following, some very kind people starting sending out "Tweets" to their own followers pointing them to our site. This snowballs as more and more people then "Retweet" this on to their own followers, and so it goes on.

Yesterday evening Nikki Pilkington sent out a tweet to her followers for us and then wrote this fantastic article which asked people to donate just £2 (or more if they wished!) to us, in return for some Twitter publicity. Within 24 hours, around £400 was donated to the site, including celebrity comedian Alan Davies. Not only that but we have also been contacted by a celebrity photographer, offering to take some publicity shots for us!

Now of course I'd have to agree that The Great Solent Pedal is an unusual idea which seems to be catching people's imagination, but the power of Twitter has been amazing. Long may it continue, more followers please and keep those donations coming in!

Once again, you can donate via the event website here

Human Frogger

I realised over the weekend that, in effect, what we will be doing on the 6th June, is playing Human Frogger. Remember the old Atari game "Frogger" where you had to try to cross the road/river, but had to judge your timing to perfection to avoid getting run over? Well, container ships can't stop/turn very quickly, therefore it is down to our judgement as to when to go/stop.

Oh and look what Mark found to really make me feel better.....



Come on, that's worth a couple of quid of your money isn't it?!

Donate here