My heart sank when Alan Priddy called me yesterday to say that he’d been told there was a fire on the industrial estate in Dudley where the round the world powerboat Accomplish More is being built, with four fire tenders tackling the blaze. It was a tense hour before he rang back to say that the fire was actually in an adjacent unit, on the end of the one where the boat is. But the fire was intense enough to melt machinery and vehicles, and as I write this on Tuesday morning, the fire service are still in attendance damping down what remains.

The good news is that apart from a film of soot from the smoke, Accomplish More has come through the exposure to intense heat unscathed.

“I designed Accomplish More to be as tough as old boots,” says Alan, “and I guess she’s proved her worth. She’s been to hell and back even before she gets into the water!”

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You can read all about it in this month’s Accomplish More newsletter.

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In fact, it was the Jetpacker that gave me my first introduction to a Saunders tent. An incredibly lightweight sloping ridge tent, with the hollow upright pole sections neatly packing away one inside the other.

Just over 20 years ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of putting together a small booklet called “Every pitch tells a story” for Bob. It was more than just a sales aid – it gave an insight into the thought processes that went into his tents. The booklet started off with a list of Bob’s “Top Ten Firsts”, something which I had to persuade him he ought to include. But read through them now, and you realise just how important the Saunders contribution was to the development of lightweight tents. His firsts were pretty fundamental features which are still to be found in tents today.

There was one development in tents which Bob never saw eye-to-eye with, and that was the taping of flysheet seams. “If you’ve designed the tent properly,” Bob would tell me, “you don’t need to tape the seams.” By proper design, he meant that any leakage would run down the seam to drip onto the ground at the edge of the fly. And he even came up with a flysheet main seam which contained an absorbent core which when wetted would expand and prevent any through leakage. Why the pathological dislike of taping? Simply because it’s applied using hot air, and heat prematurely ages the Nylon flysheet fabric and reduces its tear strength.

Bob Saunders was both a gentle man and a gentleman. And while at times he could be accused of hiding his light under a bushel, he had a wonderfully wry sense of humour. When Bob stated his long-term goal of designing a tent that weighed nothing and would pitch itself, I asked him to put me down for the first one. “When I truly achieve that,” he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “I’ll send you a dozen!”

You can read all about it in this month’s Accomplish More newsletter.

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I flew out from Brize Norton in a Royal Air Force “Timmy” Tristar. They didn’t have Club class, but row one was always allocated to the top brass, and so I found myself sitting there with a Wing Commander heading out to pay his Tornado fighters a visit on one side of me, and someone from the Admiralty on the other. It was a long flight out, refuelling at Recife in Brazil (the runway on Ascension Island was being resurfaced), and then half an hour out of Port Stanley, we were met by two Tornado fighters, and escorted in with one just off each wingtip! It was a trifle odd to see people holding large cards with numbers over their heads once we’d landed at Mount Pleasant Airport and begun to taxi to the terminal. It seems bored squaddies took delight in scoring the landings of the Tristars when they came in three times a week.

More bizarrely, whilst still a captive audience, waiting for our baggage in the arrivals hall, passengers were given a compulsory safety briefing on all the different types of unexploded ordnance that might be found in the islands. There were 117 known minefields laid by the Argentinians (30 years on, these are still being cleared), but there were many other places where unexploded hand grenades, mortar bombs and small arms rounds might turn up, along with the beautiful but deadly coronet-topped cluster bombs dropped by our own Harriers.

While in Port Stanley, I stayed in the Upland Goose Hotel, in a room overlooking Stanley Harbour, a five mile stretch of water, home to the remains of several beached ocean-going square riggers. In the days before the Panama Canal, ships had to negotiate the dangerous waters around Cape Horn. Many of them limped in to Stanley for repair and never got any further.

Everywhere outside Stanley is called “camp”, and access is either by Land Rover, such as the day I went to Volunteer Point to see the colony of King Penguins, or by the Trislander aircraft of FIGAS, the Falkland Islands Government Air Service. I spent one night on Pebble Island, scene of the daring SAS raid, and where 11 years on, wrecked Argentine Pucara aircraft still lay beside the grass strip runway. And I spent another night on Sea Lion Island, visiting Elephant Corner, where huge elephant seals lie on the beach in a heaving mass of blubber.

Apart from the amazing wildlife, the Falklands provide some terrific walking opportunities, although with no footpaths, it’s definitely a case of blazing your own trail. I hiked one day up Mount Tumbledown, scene of one of the fiercest battles of the war. When I visited, 11 years after the conflict, the mountainside was still littered with communication wire, plimsolls, bits of tents and sleeping bags, and a couple of field kitchens. But while appreciating the view from the summit, I realised there was none of the birdsong to be heard elsewhere – the birds never came back!

I became something of a celebrity when I was interviewed on Falkland Islands Radio by Patrick Watts, who in 1982 famously continued to broadcast as Argentinian soldiers burst into his studio. And not to be outdone, the British Forces Broadcasting Service had me on their programme for service personnel. The Falkland Islanders themselves were incredibly friendly, hospitable, and genuinely interested in their visitors. They remain very grateful for being rescued from the Argentine dictatorship, and left me in no doubt of their desire to remain British!

So we took off instead from the backup launch site at Old Buckenham airfield, some 14 miles south-west of Norwich. The sun was just peeking over the horizon as I arrived, and already there were skylarks up above. I tried to imagine what it must have been like here between 1943 and 1945, when Old Buckenham was home to the B24 Liberators of the US 8th Air Force’s 453rd Bombardment Group. Hollywood movie stars James Stewart and Walter Matthau both flew on bombing raids over Germany from here.

I’ve done a few balloon flights before, but the most recent was in 1990, when I took part in the first ever hot air balloon meeting in what was still Soviet Russia. It made for some interesting and amusing experiences, recounted in my latest book One of our Balloons is Missing. More to the point, it was fascinating to see how the technology of what is still essentially a Nylon bag and a laundry basket had improved over the years.

Back then, I had to take off my shoes to avoid damaging the fabric of the envelope in order to get a dramatic photograph taken from inside a partially inflated balloon, looking outwards. This week, there was no question that my walking with shoes still on might damage the modern siliconised Nylon fabric. The basket was a good deal bigger than ones I’d flown in before, taking 16 passengers and the pilot. The passengers were grouped four to each of four compartments, equipped with a soft bench and padding to make the landings a little less lumpy. Luxury indeed!

Once the cold air fans had partially inflated the balloon, the burners did the rest, and in no time we were clambering aboard. As we floated aloft, we quickly appreciated the way the wind picked up as we climbed – the result of something called a nocturnal jet, where cold air inversion layers had very little wind at ground level, but moving more quickly just a few hundred feet up.

When the burners weren’t roaring, you could really appreciate the quiet, drifting serenely across the countryside. We saw hares, deer and a fox, all oblivious to us as we passed overhead. While Norwich was hiding tantalisingly in a distant haze, we could make out the two towers of Wymondham Abbey, and ahead of us, we could see the sun reflecting off the North Sea. We could even make out the distinct outline of Sizewell power station on the coast some 25 miles away.

All too soon, it seemed, our pilot was spying out a landing site. He did a magnificent job of parking it in the corner of a field right next to a junction of small roads just south of the village of Hardwick. In total, we covered some 10 miles in an hour of flying. Passengers helped the crew roll the vast red envelope back into its storage bag, and then we enjoyed a celebratory glass of champagne. And I suppose as I was standing on the public highway whilst quaffing my bubbly, I might have been ever so slightly breaking the law…

A hot air balloon flight makes a brilliant gift for someone, or a means of celebrating something special. Virgin Balloons fly from locations all over the UK. More info at www.virginballoonflights.co.uk.

Going off at a slight tangent, I was reminded that Friday 16th March is the 100th anniversary of the death of Captain Lawrence Oates – he of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole, who bravely walked out of his tent into a blizzard to give his fellow explorers a better chance of survival. Of course his last words “I am just going outside and may be some time” have since become the stuff of legend. Scott’s ship, the Terra Nova, set sail for Antarctica from Cardiff, and it was from here, 10 years ago, that Alan Priddy and I departed on our first circumnavigation of the world in Spirit of Cardiff.

We actually set off from Cardiff Bay for Gibraltar on Easter Sunday, March 31st 2002. The preceding few weeks had been pretty manic – getting the boat ready, sorting out provisions, including some supplies which had to be freighted out to stops ahead of us. And we were still checking details with various refuelling stops, and keeping a keen eye on what the weather was doing. It hadn’t helped that circumstances had forced Jan Falkowski to pull out from the crew at the beginning of the month, but we forged ahead regardless.

Neither could we have known that our big day would nearly fizzle because of the death of the Queen Mother the day before. But in the end, the good people of Cardiff gave us a wonderful send-off, officiated at by Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan, Cardiff South MP Alun Michael and Welsh Assembly Member Lorraine Barrett. There’s still some way to go before we get to anything similar with Accomplish More, but we’re thinking about it, and everything else that’s going to happen in between.

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You can read all about it in this month’s Accomplish More newsletter, along with what happened when I met Michael Palin!

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While we want to show it’s possible to make boats which are less demanding on the earth’s resources, we’re also very keen to ensure our environmental balance sheet doesn’t go into the red. Ultimately what that means is the process of carbon offsetting – not just contributing money to schemes such as planting sustainable forests, but actually working out very precisely what our carbon emissions will be (including all ground crew movements around the world), and then deciding on appropriate projects to provide the offset.

The plan is to have a complete audit trail, and for the expected emissions for the round the world trip to be fully offset before we depart on the great voyage. But we will continue tracking our emissions on the way round so we can make up any shortfall once we complete the trip.

We’re in talks with some experts in making boats completely carbon-neutral, and once the appropriate dotting and crossing has taken place on anything that looks vaguely like an “i” or a “t”, I’ll tell you more about it.

We also have some interesting developments with manufacturers of fuel additives which we can’t yet say anything about, and we have a top TV producer straining at the leash to sell a documentary of the story of Accomplish More’s incredible endeavour to major terrestrial and satellite broadcasters.

But what I can say about it for the moment can be found here, in the latest newsletter.

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