Dear Friends, Family & Supporters,

Alex, Ed, Tom and I are delighted to send you our final Oardacity monthly update email. For those that are receiving their first update email, thank you very much for your recent donation and support for our charities through our challenge. We appreciate it hugely.

Race/Covid update: Having held numerous conversations with Atlantic Campaigns (Race Organiser’s), we wanted to let you know this year’s Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge will take place and we will get to the start line. With various contingency plans in place, including chartering a BA flight to the Canaries, we will be heading out to La Gomera for early December ready for the start on the 12th.

Having spent the last three years putting this challenge in motion, as skipper of Oardacity, I personally wanted to say how incredibly proud I am of our team and the boys. It’s very difficult to put into words, how I can truly justify the sacrifices we have made to get to where we are. You are always told as perspective teams that the true challenge is getting to the start line; well add Covid in, it has been a herculaneum effort over the last 6/7 months to get to where we are. We couldn’t have done it without our amazingly supportive other halves, friends and family. I know I can speak on behalf of the boys and say it has been a hugely humbling period in our lives. Thank you for all your support.

Our Boat: fully laden with everything we could possibly need for our expedition, we said goodbye to Oardacity last week, as she makes her way down to La Gomera by container ship. We couldn’t be prouder of her and thank all our Partners and Sponsors for their support. Team shot was after a long final day packing her up at Rannoch Adventure.

To summarise updates from last month:

• Fundraising – We can quite believe we have reached this milestone already, but we are now over… £54,000 for our charities, MIND and CNCF. The support we have had is mind-blowing, humbling and quite astonishing given the current climate we find ourselves in. We can’t thank you all enough. Our target of between £100,000 and £200,000 is on the horizon
• Our Mental Health preparation – we have had a busy few weeks fine tuning various aspects of our expedition, most importantly around our mental preparation. We had a very good Zoom call with Dr Nathan Smith – a psychologist in Security and Trust, who specialises in human behaviour, performance and health under conditions of extreme stress. His credentials are highly impressive having worked with the elite Special Forces, extreme medics, as well as the European Space Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). It was a fascinating insight into controlling our fear. “Controlling the controllables to be confident and rational in the uncontrollable.”
  Alongside this, we also had another fascinating two plus hours zoom call with Ollie Palmer (last year’s winner with team Fortitude4), where we discussed various scenarios from the minor to the major and how we would deal with each. This was hugely valuable and we are incredibly grateful to Ollie for his time.
• Website – Our website has had a makeover, including all our sponsor announcements, please do have a look www.oardacity.com
• Social Media – Our exposure continues to grow with over 1,423 followers on Instagram @oardacity and 383 on Facebook (we need your help driving this channel so please do add us at ‘Team Oardacity’)
• Tracking app – if you would like to follow our crossing, you can by downloading the YB Races tracker app which looks like the below. Once you are in add ‘Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge 2020’ – when we are off you will be able to track us across the Atlantic.

Thank you all for your continued support, we are very grateful.
Alongside all our good news, we still NEED YOUR HELP, so please do spread the word, pass this email onto friends and family, as we look to raise much needed funding for our charities

Please support Harry and the boys here

And online www.oardacity.com
@oardacity
info@oardacity.com