The Sea Otter festival was hard work as usual,

even though this year we had lovely sunny weather, I managed to eat something that gave me food poisoning. Luckily the bad stuff only came out one end, and not both. Who knows where it came from. Maybe it was the deep fried Squid, that were standing in the sun for too long. Or maybe the tartar sauce was overheated in the sun. I'd also like to thank our very generous neighbor stand for keeping us supplied with 'raw' energy bars throughout the day. I don't want to be rude, and blame any of his yummy food, but they were standing four days in the warm sun and constantly coated with a thin layer of dust. Yum! As we have become accustomed to, the main theme a the show was everything being renewable. Green this, green that, everything having a net negative impact on our environment and being recyclable: as people say, dust to dust. SRAM created a huge 'footprint' with their plethora of brands (Avid, Zipp, Rockshox, Truvativ) and showed much less interest in green than their SRAM red. They even brought out two huge Italian espresso machines in SRAM red in order to keep their personal and team riders fully charged. The Pirate team in California also enlisted two new members for their permanent crew: Ian Edwards (20) from Berkeley, CA and Karen Wood of Oakland, CA. Both can be seen in the pictures of our Pirate fort at the show. Ian likes to show off his fashion tastes and could be observed mixing and matching all the pirate clothing and colors with different cycling caps and sunglasses. His debut at the stand was his "sink or swim" introduction for his future work in the office for SRM Trading, the importer of Pirate-Hamburg team gear from Germany . Ian was fearless of the crowds and made a great salesman. His comment, "I've never worked for such a nice boss before," sealed the deal for his future employment. Karen worked the aisles around the booth with her Pirate umbrella and sexy-look, which really helped bring in the middle-aged customers looking for gifts to take home. We are planning the first official Pirate race team showing at the 2011 event, where many of the German riders will make the long ship journey over to visit their brethren for some dirty days of riding. If you are interested in travelling with the team, contact Captain Ron for details. Captain Ron Stephen Maris

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