Richard

"In the event, as the television pictures around the world showed, when Branson reached the shore, the tide had dropped a little too low and he needed a lift from some bystanders to get the back wheels on to the ramp. It was only a problem because we’d been held up by two things. First, he and I had taken off in the Aquada when I took a message on the radio to tell Richard that some guy called John, evidently a journalist, wasn’t on the flotilla. ‘Oh, we can’t go without him,’ Branson said. So we stopped and floated around in the harbour for 20 minutes waiting for this guy to arrive from London. Then because it was the twentieth anniversary of Virgin Atlantic and Branson had taken possession of his first Boeing 777, he wanted a photo of the plane swooping above the car. We reached the precise spot using GPS coordinates, but there was no sign of the plane. It had been delayed by air traffic control. That left us waiting another 20 minutes or so for it to fly by."

"Richard had been requested to get the boat carefully to Calais and instead he yahooed around, roaring up any wake he could find and leaping from the water. I could see our poor Aquada smashing down from waves with huge walls of spray stretching out before it. Neil, who had fully tested it in such conditions, was obviously confident, but I still can’t believe Branson didn’t break it. When I finally caught up with Richard in Calais and upbraided him — ‘What were you doing?’ — he casually replied, ‘Oh, I wasn’t worried; you get much more publicity the second time you try things!’"