We now have our shipping date and its 9am on Tuesday 20^thOctober. We’re extremely busy making the final preparations before Heritage Explorer leaves the UK, buying the last bits of equipment and making improvements to her. We’re adding extra solar panels to take our total wattage to 195 – much more than the race requirements, which should ensure that we don’t run out of power, new foot straps, a new GPS deck repeater, painting and padding out the cabin and replacing one of the gudgeons on the rudder, etc, etc.

We have been following our training programmes set out for us by Pat Fox, the Head of Sport at London SouthBank University, and ‘eating up’ consuming five meals a day and lots of Progain Maximuscle supplement – between us we’ve put on 9 kilos and have been set targets weights of 82.5kg and 91kg by the time we leave, which we should be able to achieve.

On Saturday 26^thSeptember we had the launch party at Hornet Sailing Club in Gosport. We had about 45-50 people for a curry lunch and drinks, made a speech and then had Heritage Explorer officially named and blessed, kind courtesy of Rev’d Felicity Heal, a cousin of Tom’s grandfather. This was followed by trips around the harbour. We were very lucky with the weather and the day was a success, a big thank you to all those who were able to make it.

We have now spent nearly a week squashed together in the tiny cabin, getting used to life on board and spending as much time as we can on her before she goes, in amongst this vast administration and organization period that we’re currently working our way through! We have one more training session planned before she is shipped from Tilbury Docks in London and then that’s it before the race starts.

In terms of sponsorship we’ve been extremely lucky and raised about 90% of our target thanks to some very generous donations and support. We have been fortunate enough to be sponsored custom made air and foam mattresses from British Water Bed Company, antifoul from Pedros Yacht Refinishing who painted Heritage Explorer, vinyls from Funky Monkey Designs and financial backing from Tom’s University, Oxford Brookes and also from a small boats company named Boats 4 Fun who built a boat, from which the proceeds where kindly provided as sponsorship.