This is Jo-Jo, Dick / Ricardo / Richard’s daughter. I’ll be keeping the page up to date with all his news and blog entries while he’s away.

Here’s a picture I took yesterday showing the Tower Bridge lift times – the bridge lifted at 13:00 for dad’s boat (CV22) and again at 13:30 for him to come back through and set off for Southend.

You can follow his team (Qingdao – CV22) on facebook on the official team page or on the friends and family page, on clipper’s twitter feed or hashtag or on the live race tracker where you can see the position of the boats and who is winning – Team Qingdao are the yellow boat.

News of my trip went out on the radio waves this week!

My good friend Neil from Phillips Hill was on Radio Oxford last week doing a live wine tasting, recommending his best wines for summer drinking.

Skip forward to 1 hour and 30 mins into the recording to hear him talk about Les Dauphins Rose wine, followed by a special mention of my trip just after 1 hour 35 mins 30 secs!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01c520f

A massive thanks to Neil not only for highlighting my trip, but also for raising awareness across Oxfordshire about the importance of early detection of prostate cancer.

Les Dauphins and Phillips Hill are both generous sponsors of my trip – another thanks to them.

2 weeks ago I spent a week doing my final training sail in the Solent. It was hard! I spent half the time thinking ‘ this is bloody brilliant’ and the other half thinking ‘oh god! Remind me why I’m doing this again…’

At one point I had only 4 hours sleep over 48 hours. But it was really nice to be sailing in warm weather; rather than being stuck out in the freezing cold trying to hoist sails or even just tie knots when your hands will barely work!

We were on our brand new 70 foot yacht trying to work out how to sail the thing, whilst at the same time trying to fix the stuff that must have looked great in the design studio, but when it hit the water didn’t work

Not long now until my big race on 1st September – please forward this website on to your friends, and please please dig deep and donate to support my fundraising.

Thank you so much to all who have donated so far – I’m humbled by your generosity and kindness.

Ricardo

Earlier this week, I found out that instead of setting sail for Brazil from Portsmouth as expected, the launch will instead start at Tower Bridge in London.

Clipper and the Mayor of London made the announcement on 31st May. It’s the first time that London has ever hosted the start and finish of a global yacht race.

So it looks like I’ll be waving Bye Bye to Boris as I set off down the Thames to begin my sail!

You can read all about it here – https://www.clipperroundtheworld.com/newsitem/london-to-host-worlds-longest-ocean-race

This is my first blog post on my new website. I’ll use this site to update everyone on my progress during training and the big sail.

To kick things off, here’s a photo of me up a very tall mast during my 2nd training sail.

And if you haven’t already, please do donate to help me raise fund for prostate cancer research and care. Click here to go to my JustGiving page and donate online, or you can text the word ‘SAIL72’ followed by the amount you wish to donate (eg, £10) to 70070