Monday 21st June
This morning was great on three counts.
Number one, we did not have far to go from our hotel to the location on the quayside at Knysna to do our broadcasts.
Number two, it was not nearly as cold as it had been almost every other morning.
Number three, the reason for the relative warmth, cloud cover, produced a beautiful morning sky when the sun started coming up.
Kelvin and Colin, our satellite engineers for the morning had a less easy time.
Something technical had broken in the satellite dish deployment system which meant that Colin had to manoeuvre the dish manually.
Colin and Kelvin start setting up in the dark before dawn.
Colin moves the dish manually.
Dark Knysna marina with a bit of our light on it.
The live broadcasts were all pretty straight forward with not too much stress. in fact no stress for a change.
Dave the technical director in London was having the stress this morning. There were lots of things going wrong with other outside broadcasts in the UK, mainly the one from Wimbledon.
There will be discussions about that I bet. Day one of the biggest tennis event in the British calendar and the broadcasts go down.
I am so glad that ours worked.
The sun's not quite up over the harbour.
A fire in the sky over Knysna.
Mark in his outdoor office keeps in touch with London.
The mini highlight of the morning was Tak, one of the quay’s security guard’s dog.
The frisky little Jack Russell never got tired of playing with a full sized football.
He was running with it up and down the quayside all morning.
We made him a temporary star twice.
Tak on a breakaway down the wing.......
....Shephard makes a world class tackle.
The afternoon was looking like being another exciting adventure.
We were off on a whale hunt.
Whale viewing is a big thing around the seas in this area of South Africa.
Although we were, as usual, quite tired after the normal very early start the excitement was palpable as Michael drove us towards Plett a little way along the coast from Knysna.
Yesterday the people on the boat that we were planning to go out on had seen twenty two humpback whales on their trip.
It would be great.
Then our anticipation was ripped apart like a breaching whale breaking the surface of a flat calm sea.
Mark took the call that told us it was too windy and the whales don’t like wind anymore than we do.
So we stopped, had beer and coffee, or in my case Grapetiser and coffee and admired the view from Plett out to sea.
Lookout from Plett.
The live broadcast from the Elephant Park was confirmed for tomorrow so that should be good.
The plan is for us to have elephants playing football.
Two of them in England flags and two in Slovenian flags.
A serious expedition then ensued to find the Slovenian flags.
Did we find them?
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