Blake crew ready for jungle journey

By PHILIP ENGLISH

A jungle team from Sir Peter Blake's expedition to the Amazon River are to leave their base on board Seamaster on a journey to the Orinoco River in Venezuela.

The eight-member team will take about four weeks to reach a rendezvous point on the Orinoco where they will reunite with Sir Peter on Seamaster before Christmas.

The team, including Auckland travel doctor Marc Shaw, will leave on a local boat tomorrow (NZ time) and travel by river and road to the border of Brazil and Venezuela. Then, accompanied by some Venezuelans, they will voyage along the Casiquiare Canal to the Orinoco.

Sir Peter said the jungle team would carry extensive equipment, including dive and climbing gear. They hoped to meet local Yanomami Indians and planned to report back every second day for the expedition's website, www.blakexpeditions.com.

Sir Peter said that as far as he knew Seamaster had travelled further than any yacht up the Amazon, in spite of the river being low because of a dry season.

"We could get further but that hasn't really been the aim. We have been aground once and we have sneaked across the bottom a number of times. People here can't remember the river ever being lower."

At anchor this week, the crew decided against swimming because they had seen several snakes and a 5m crocodile-like caiman nearby. Instead they fished for piranha.

"You have only got to drop a line over and the piranha are there. Boomph. You've got to be very careful taking the hook out. Use pliers. Don't get your fingers anywhere near them. If you do not use a good hook they just bite through the metal shaft," Sir Peter said.

After the jungle team leaves, the Seamaster will travel down the Rio Negro and Amazon, visiting places the expedition missed on the trip upriver, before heading into Venezuelan waters and up the Orinoco River.

Sir Peter said he hoped the Seamaster would be in Tobago for Christmas before preparations for its next mid-2002 expedition to the Arctic waters of the North West Passage.

"We have got to be in Greenland having been refitted and all ready to go by mid-June," he said.

"There's a lot of sailing, a lot of miles to cover and a lot of changes to make getting the boat from tropical back to polar yacht with everything serviced and kitted out and under way again."

Seven- and nine-year-olds at Chelsea Primary School in Birkenhead are putting their pocket money together to buy pens, pencils and paper for a school on the Rio Negro visited by Sir Peter and mentioned on the expedition website.

Sir Peter said the school had little more than a blackboard, some chalk and an enthusiastic teacher.

The Chelsea schoolchildren have followed Sir Peter's progress in the Amazon as part of environment and rivers studies.