I have been busy walking the Virtual Trans Canada trail and am working on crossing saskatchewan. Presntly 7.1 million steps into the walk and have worn out another pair of walking poles shoes. They seem to average out at about a million steps per pair or very close to it.

I left yellowknife this aftyernoon and arrived in Edmonton about 19:00 hrs and the temperature was a warm +28 C, great. Yellowknife was looking at some serious rain by the looks of it, the black louds were rolling in and winds were predicted at 40 kpm. Jonesy was looking forward to some good wind surfing tonight if the winds stayed up. I think he didn't have to much to worry about wind wise.

Yellowknifers will be looking forward to squeezing in as much water related activity as possible as Old man winter isn't that far away. seems as I grow older butperhaps not wiser that summers are shorter and thats unfair as I have less ahead of me than behind.

Stilll we will make the most out of what we have and enjoy each day upright to the fullest.

Looking forward to getting as much kayaking in as possible and the squirt boat needs to get out there and do some shredding. In my case the shredding will be very limited but we will see what we can get away with.

Did a little rope practice the other day and remastered my Spanish bowline and the Mathew Walker knot single variation. The Spanish Bowline is a handy knot for slingimng laddders horzontially and as a emergency rescue harness. Fun to tie and not as difficult as some would think. The Matthew Walker knot would fall into the decorative stopperknot class and there are now a few different versions. I use it to finish off key chains and stuff of that nature. There is some interesting Nautical folklore bhind this knot and you can read about it in Ashleys book of knots.

I have some plans for making rope boat fenders this winter for something to do in the old shack as th winter winds howl around the house.

Hoping to be able to do some virtual sail racing again this winter.  In 2008/09 I circumnavigated twice virtually taking part in both the vendee globe solo non stop race in which I placed 23 and something thousand out of 460.000 virtual racers. I also sailed in the Volvo crewed global race and came 13,000 out of 220,000 virtual racers. I was within the top ten thousand when I n agound about 50 mles from  the finish.

Vitural; racing is as close as I can afford to get to the real thing and is much tougher than many realize. The competetion is tiff as there was a ten thousand euro prize for the Virtual winner in the Vendee and a volvo C0 in the Volvo around the world.

The racing was fun and I met some very intereting people during the race and we raced against each ther throught both circumnavigations.

Thats about it for now . I order two books from England and they arrived in time for me to bring them along for the plan ride.

One is a techinca ook on sea kayak handling skills and the other a climbing games book to improve your climbing skills. Both looo gfreat and I have just glanced through them. Already I see my paddling and climbing skills improving. Cheers from the Big Smoke, Greg