Post-log:
Sensational effort by Ian and the team to have pulled this off. The boys and Trooperdog arrived back in Geraldton yesterday afternoon and we spent the afternoon editing photos, fielding calls and of course, sharing a few coldies!
A fun celebration dinner here last night and a few bottles of red. Post-brekkie this morning, the crew have headed back to Perth.
If you want to catch up with Ian and congratulate him, he'll be at the after-party for the WAKSA downwinder tomorrow (Sunday) afternoon in Scarborough, Perth. Ring the WAKSA folks for details or look on their web page. (He was quick to point out when we invited him to attend "Love to go to the after-party, but I am NOT doing the downwinder!") ;-)
GWN ran this story today:
www.gwn7.com.au/news/ A lot of folks in Exmouth put out a lot of personal effort on Friday to pull together and get some video clips and very nice stills of Ian arriving at Jansz yesterday so the TV stations would have footage of the finish and the newspapers would have content for a story that they'd promised to do. Ben for the Visitor Centre, Emma and Scott from Ningaloo Kite&Board, Tom from Exmouth, Jimmy, Peter Burns, amongst others.
In the end, after a lot of work scrambling to meet their deadlines, none of the media outlets used any of the new content that was provided. However, The West Australian ran a great Page 3 article on Friday and had told us that they'd do a feature article in today's paper but nothing there turned up today that we could find.
GWN7 interviewed Ian on the road on the way back from Exmouth yesterday and used some of the Geraldton footage (link above). The Sunday Times had committed to do an article for tomorrow's paper but after they saw the Friday article in the West, we got an email saying:
"
Unfortunately The West gave Ian's story such a good show on page 3 today that it has killed our story for The Sunday Times. The nature of news is that we don't tend to publish each other's stories. Hope you understand."
Disappointing, to say the least. Especially for Soldier-On.
Never mind. We have loads of great (yet unseen) photos and video that we'll used to compile something ourselves and it won't go in mainstream media.
Kiteworld has approached us to do an article on the mission so we have plenty of unseen footage and photos for that!
Ian has written a detailed blow by blow, daily blog of the trip that will soon see the light of day when we decide the appropriate outlet for it -- the most important factor being which opportunity will give the greatest benefit to Ian's wounded warrior comrades that he took on this mission for.
Open to any proposals or suggestions for how to best do this.
Feel free to post them here or PM me and I'll discuss any ideas with Ian and the crew.
Best wishes,
Rob
