Maurice's Blog

Panic, panic my flight to the USA takes off today and I have a lot of packing still to do here in my home in South Wales. I am returning to Florida first and plan to fly down to the Bahamas in a wee 'canvas and tube' aircraft  with the hope of finding and rescuing Liberty Girl.

She was last seen at the end of February drifting tail up, like a fisherman's float, north-west from the spot where we ditched her in the ocean some half way between the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands. I hope to scour the beaches of the lower Bahama Islands and call in to the US Base on Great Inagua, and try and track down the helecopter crew who fished me out of the drink, I owe them a beer!

Sun 'n Fun Airshow, Tampa, Florida, is on the 8th April so I hope to get back for that as someone wants me to give a talk. A chance to catch up with old friends from all over the world and do a bit of 'bar flying' with guys still flying aeroplanes who are twenty years older than me.

After that maybe Trinidad via Martinique for the Falklands or the overland route straight for Mexico and Panama possibly. It all depends on a little project we are onto in the woods of central Florida!

Welcome to my third web site!

My first site was knocked up in 2000, and was the catalyst for my entering the London Sydney Air Race in March 2001 after a certain American, Lyle Campbell, read the website and laughed so much he gave me £25,000 to cover the entry fee. Since then I have flown three quarters of the way around the world with my dear old WW2 Piper Cub. The website and all of you out there were hardly able to keep up with my progress, due to the chaotic and disjointed nature of my reporting and for an old dog having to learn new tricks and weird technologies...I'm still learning!

So how about this new site then?

It's much better organised with many more ways to get at things and I can do a lot more with it and not break it...so much! I can almost hear the sigh of relief from where I sit in South Wales!

The site will be faster, taking in visitor comments, we'll bring back the forums once I have time to nurture them more than I did with the old site. Over the next year relevant information will slowly be transferred from the archives omitting the ‘turn off material' and I will be blogging again about my next leg of my trip once I get to grips with the new system. For a time this will be put on hold while I go in search of Liberty Girl who I lost to the sea in the Caribbean last month, but when I get around to it you can expect a much easier read.

A ‘Time Line' of my solo flight around the world is desperately needed to link together all the material I have collected over the years against the back drop of my life story. My trials and tribulations will be closely vetted this time! So, get involved and leave me comments to encourage me on my way. I can now post up videos and it's easy for you to browse them on the home page. We've also got a much better photo gallery which I will be re-organising and captioning over time..