Morning!
So today marks 5 weeks at sea and Bird, Mo and Claire continue to row the Atlantic and we continue to Dot Watch and neglect our work / partners / domestic chores!
What we’ve heard this week
I’ve had much less contact with the crew this week – the weather has been tough again so any sat phone calls have mostly been to Fisherman Dave to talk weather forecasts and sea states. The crew have been more fortunate than some with a couple of boats further North experiencing even heavier weather with ‘knock downs’ where the boat almost but not quite capsizes, and full capsizes.
The girls have made good and steady progress in the last week and as of 8am this morning they have 703nm to go! Their ETA is looking to be around Janury 29th at the moment but don’t hold me to that!
Bird, Mo and Claire took lots of photos and videos before the start of the race for me to use on social media during the row, as they aren’t able to send anything except basic text messages to us. The photo at the top of the email was their ‘miss you Linda’ photo, with them all wearing (slightly scary) Linda masks! The videoo was even funnier! BRILLIANT! Apologies if this frightens any small children who see this email.
#JokeOfTheWeek
Linda is STILL at it with the jokes yet so my favourite one this week is day 30’s.
Q: What cheese do you use to disguise a small horse?
A: Mascarpone! ?
I suspect she has an obsession wwith cheese or perhaps just jokes about cheese as there have been a few!
The view from the land crew
The first two crews have finished The Atlantic Challenge in the last three days. Watching the winning crew cross the finish line and row into English Harbour in Antigua on Atlantic Campaigns’ live Facebook video was quite an emotional moment as I could visualise Oarsome Foursome’s finish too. It’s also very exciting to think that in (hopefully) less than two weeks, the girls will be reunited with their loved ones and dry land. And showers and real food and all the other things they haven’t had for 7 weeks!
Fundraising update
Our total on our crowdfunding page for our three charities is just coming up to the £5,000 mark. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get it to £9,500 before the girls reach the end of the race in Antigua? If you can spare a bit of cash, how about putting it in our collection bucket?
Keep on Dot Watching!
The YB Races App mentioned below and the website version (which we’ve discovered is better than the phone app – it has lots of interesting overlays for weather, wind etc) now updates positions every four hours at 8am, 12pm, 4pm etc.
Details of how to follow everything are below, just in case you didn’t see them before. Keep cheering the girls on in anyway you can. Every single message, thought and donation will keep them pushing on.
Our next email update should be in about a week’s time. Thanks again for all your support!