So then Clipper had within a week to find a mate who had a B1B2 visa, Chinese visa and the yacht master.

And when Nikki and Sophie knew each other from racing before, and then Nikki contacted Sophie, who was in the French Alps with her sister skiing.

And I was like, oh, would you fancy racing crossing North Pacific in late winter?

And she was like, sure, when? Friday.

On the Wind is presented this season by two old friends of the podcast.

Rutgersen Marine, a hardware company in Sweden, close to home for me.

And OPO, offshore passage opportunities run by our good friend Hank

Schmidt, fan of the podcast, friend of the podcast, former guest of the podcast, which is a place

where you can join Hank's mailing list and basically sail for free as a crew member on various

deliveries that Hank organizes. It's a great way I kind of started my career doing deliveries,

and obviously we'd love for you to come sail with us at 59 North, but if you don't have the time or can't afford it, you can pay, I think it's up to 150 bucks a year now to join OPO and you get lots of opportunities to go on deliveries as a crew member. So check that out. That's saleopo.com. As for Rutgersen, I am in the process of ordering a new rig for Spica, a new rig and sales. And part of that project is going to include

installing a bunch of Rutgerson stuff on the mast and sales. So we use the Rutgersen

bat car receptacles for the sales. We use Rutgersen clutches for the mast and a bunch of other

hardware items. A good friend of ours, Ludwig is the designer at Rutgersen, so it's really

cool to basically have access to that. And unlike most other hardware companies, everything at

Rutgersen is designed and built in Sweden. Ludwig's office is upstairs at the factory,

and the factory is downstairs. So when there's like a design question, Ludwig walks downstairs to the production floor and they can sort stuff out. It's really cool. We've had a lot of fun using Rutgersen stuff over the years. They make really high quality stuff. And yeah, I highly recommend it. So check out Rutgersen marine that's's M-A-R-I-N. There's no E on that.

Rutgersenmarine.S.E to see all that stuff. And I'm sure next time you go to your local channel, look around and see what the Rutgerson stuff that you can find there because it's quite ubiquitous, really high quality. And a very cool story. Those of us in the U.S. know more about Harkin.

Harkin's kind of a ubiquitous sailing brand.

Well, Peter Harkin and Yaron Rutgersen were buddies back in the 70s and kind of started these hardware companies on a similar sort of timeline. And there's a really cool little story there. There's a, there's a, an iceboat hanging up in the factory in Sweden that has the Harkin and Rutgersen logos on it because they were doing

that kind of stuff together back in the day. So really cool story. I love working with these small

family companies as you know. And I hope you'll buy their products to support them because they

...