After the disappointment of yesterday, where we lost three out of four races, we did better today, winning four out of six. We even won a race where we had no jib up at the entry of the start and lost our main trimmer, Marco Constant over the side. He held on to the mainsheet and Paul and Peter got him back on board, while Taito took over the helm from Paul for a few hectic seconds. See the video below made by Pierre from Valencia sailing who was our guest for that race.

No wind on the first day of racing, but these two didn’t seem to mind….

The IFDS worlds 2010 in Medemblik was an amazing event. Disabled sailors from around the world were competing in three different classes; the Sonar, The Skud and the 2.4mR. It is very inspiring to see these sailors compete on all different levels. For the Netherlands these worlds were very succesfull, with two worldchampions. Thierry Schmitter in the 2.4mR and Udo Hessels and his team in the Sonar. Congratulations!

Nice to see one of my photos on the cover of the latest Seahorse. This photo was taken during the Louis Vuitton Trophy in Auckland where I was working as the official photographer for the Artemis. In fact you see Artemis bowman Andy Fethers shouting back to the mast man. He wants the pole to be removed from the mast in order to get the guy in the pole-end.

There will be a press conference by BMW Oracle on Friday evening beginning at 19:30 local time in Valencia (13:30 EST, 10:30 PST) from the team base featuring team founder Larry Ellison (USA), team CEO Russell Coutts (NZL) and the skipper and helmsman of USA, James Spithill.

And best of all, you can watch it live here, and probably on a lot of other locations on the web….

Update: the feed below will also have BMW ORACLE Racing’s live coverage from the 33rd Match.

A photo from James Boyd (www.thedailysail.com) taken during RC 44 PORTOROZ CUP last month in Slovenia. Good to be sailing again! Still hard to decide if I like sailing more than photography…..luckely I will do both coming month. First I am going to Dubai for the  SEA DUBAI RC 44 GOLD CUP. I will be sailing again on the Katusha. The crew might arrive quite late as most of the pros are sailing the Louis Vuitton series in Nice. After this I will go straight to Malaysia for the Monsoon Cup photographing for the event organizers. A great event. The only problem is that the water is really brown. Not the best color for photos….

For this years website they found a nice solution for this problem: Photoshop.  A lot of my photos form last year look like they have been taken at a different venue. Have at look at www.monsooncup.com.my and compare this to 2008-Monsoon-Cup-Malaysia by Sander…..see any difference?

I am joining the Green Dragon team on the last leg of the Volvo Ocean Race! I was the lucky one who was chosen by bwin to be the “12th person” on this leg. On behalf of bwin I will report on the progress during this last leg. If you are interested in a regular update you can follow me on Twitter. I will try to update as often as possible. This might be a nice experiment for the future of ocean racing. Without delay updates from the boat to your screen, iphone, blackberry or any other smartphone!

Some Green Dragon photos I took at the start in Alicante. Must seem like a long time ago for the crew…..

Armchair experts have sailed the same 5 legs as the real boats in the Virtual Volvo Ocean Race 2008-09. This virtual race mirrors the 37,000 nautical miles of the world’s premier ocean race and there’s a Volvo C30 up for grabs for the winner along with a number of other prizes. During the winter season in Europe I had the time to compete myself in the addicting game with my boat “sandersan”.

Prize
Upon till now all prices were only handed to top finishers. Together with Marijn Harinck, CEO of UnitedGames, we thought it would be a nice idea to have alternative prices for the more artistic or creative sailors. 

Since the start of the game, boat tracks have caused huge discussion on the forum. Should you follow someone else’s (no), do they smooth out over time (yes) do they come out at weird angles from your boat sometimes (yes!) but it seems that boat tracks have become an artistic tool for some sailors.

The last leg (5), the honor of the best “track drawing” must go to aididit2 & Peace on Earth II with a combined effort to create this wonderful picture. They say: We, who made this have never met and live in separate parts of the world. We crossed paths (on LEG 4), exchanged some greetings and thoughts via boat radio and made this symbol on either side of the dateline without losing any sleep!

Can you do better? We’d love to see the results of your creative sailing. Together with United Games Sander van der Borch Photography awards the best track with an original full size photo from my gallery!

About half a year now I am using Photoshelter to archive my photo’s and power my gallery part of my website. I must say I am very impressed with all the functionality you get for the price you pay. Last month the Photoshelter introduced some new functionality. One of which can be especially interesting for marketing you own work on the Internet. They now offer the possibility to embed a gallery through a Flash-based widget.

If you want to copy this gallery, click the up arrow button in the lower right corner. This reveals the code needed to embed the gallery slideshow widget in your destination of choice.  Once you copy the gallery slideshow widget, anyone can embed the gallery elsewhere. This is part of the virality of the widget, which effectively gives me free marketing.

Feel free to copy my gallery anywhere you like.