July - Sun and Sea

Welcome to July's newsletter. It's been an action packed month!

We started off the month with a bit of a low moment. Tom, our fourth rower had to leave the team due to personal reasons. We are sad to see him leave the team, but we are still more persistent than ever, an we are going to continue to row the Atlantic as a trio. This means we could potentially be slower and we'll have to work harder, but on the plus side, we'll have more room!

Now as a crew of three, we pushed harder into our training at sea where we tested our navigation skills and practiced operating the boat as a three as we prepared ourselves for our Pre Shipping Inspection.

The Pre-Shipping Inspection is a major milestone along the journey. This is where the race team come and look at your progress to and make sure you are on the right track while there is still time to make any changes. While it wasn't a pass or fail, inspection, it was a good indicator as to where we are compared to where the race team think we are, and to compare ourselves against the other teams in the event.

After some sleepless nights pouring over operating manuals, power charts and making sure we knew all the boat equipment we took the boat to Westpoint Arena and laid everything out for the inspection.

We did good. We have a few things still on order that had yet to arrive and at the end we felt pretty good with what we had accomplished. The The boat was structurally signed off and we had 95% of what we needed and now an official list of things we needed to get to be completely compliant.

The following weekend we took to the sea once again with the aim to tick of some of the Pre Shipping Inspection Drills we needed to do. The big one for this weekend was the Man Overboard drill. It's aim was to ensure that we could get back into the boat unaided. We all succeeded. It wasn't pretty, or elegant, but we got in. The weekend ended with more than half our mandatory sea hours out of the way.

The month ended with a boost from GlastonBeoley as our first Gold Sponsor, which was a massive boost to our morale, and then another Oar Sponsor from AMPA foundation which was just amazing. We are buzzing for the month ahead now. We are so close to being ready that the start line feels really close now. 4 Months to go.