UPDATE 2: I've added a 15 minute video cobbled together from the footage I took during the ride! Click on the last picture in the list or search for 'east west bike ride ness point' on youtube.

UPDATE: I've done it! I watched the sun come up at 04:34 at Ness Point on 30th June, the eastern most point of the UK. Then I cycled 91.5 miles, rather more than I intended, in glorious sunshine right across Norfolk and watched the same sun set from the green in Hunstanton. It was a wonderful day out and a bit of a challenge but it went very well.

Thank you for all your support. We still need to raise as much as we can towards our new lifeboat so please, please feel free to  put in a small donation still if you think I deserved it :) - Max

On the 30th June, I'm aiming to ride my bike from sunrise over the sea in Lowestoft to sunset over the sea in Hunstanton. This 80 mile coast-to-coast epic* across Norfolk (and a bit of Suffolk) will start at dawn at Ness Point (which is the eastern-most point in Britain) and will finish on Hunstanton beach (which is one of the few bits of the UK's East Coast that faces west). The route includes roads, lanes, paths and bits of old railway.

I'm riding to raise money towards a new RNLI all-weather lifeboat to be stationed at Wells-next-the-Sea in 2016, to replace our much-loved Mersey class boat, 12-003 Doris M Mann of Ampthill, which is coming to end of her service life. I volunteer on the crew at Wells and have my own boat and a kayak so I suppose I have a bit of a vested interest. However, when I'm not all dressed up in yellow on a big orange and blue boat, I'm just an ordinary person in our town and the RNLI's lifeboats have always been funded solely by the generosity and support of the local community and the public across the UK... so really I'm just trying to do my bit.

Being on the crew does mean that I understand how the next generation Shannon class of lifeboat will help us to reach people and vessels in trouble sooner and more safely in the years to come... and that it will make it much easier to accomplish some tasks, like getting an injured person out of the water, once we arrive on scene. 

This is a personal challenge for me because a) it will mean cycling about four times further than me and my old Raleigh usually manage to go on a ride and much further than I have ever cycled in a day even when I was young and invincible, and b) I'll have to get up very early.

I'm going to try and film my ride and some of the pretty and interesting bits of Norfolk I'll pass through for youtube so you've got that to look forward to... though I suspect there'll be a great deal more filming and enthusiasm at the start of the ride than there will by the end. For this reason, I've said 30th June but I might move it by a day or two either way if it would mean riding in sunshine rather than rain.

Finally, I can assure you that any money you sponsor me with on this page will go directly to paying for the new lifeboat and thus will, at some time or other in future, directly help to save someone's life.

Thanks for reading. If you could put in a small donation that would be great.

* Other coast-to-coast routes are available but this one is sufficiently daunting for me for now!