Firefighter Kristopher Elliot and his brother Blair from Dunblane, set sail seven weeks ago for the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, a 3,000-mile endurance race across the Atlantic Ocean.

The brothers are sailing a 23 ft boat across the ocean to raise money for our Charity and in memory of their boss, colleague and friend, former Watch Manager John Noble.

John was tragically killed in 2008 when the fire appliance he was travelling in was involved in a road traffic collision. The crew was responding to an emergency call at a local school.

Almost there!

Here the brothers give us an end of journey update on their challenge of a lifetime.

“Well we’ve broke the back of this now. Providing we have good weather and fair winds we should be in Antigua around the 6th February.

This week is also the week where John Noble was remembered. As you all know, we named the Team after him and on Tuesday thoughts were with him and his family, a good man and much admired by everyone.  We took this task on to prove we could do it, to raise awareness and funds for The Fire Fighters Charity and to honour John’s name. All of which we hope we are doing.

So, how are we doing? Great, we’re in good spirits and having a laugh, even though the good food has gone and we are on to the freeze dried stuff, not as good but still eaten with enjoyment, we put that down to being starving. Our work rate has changed as well, in the early part of the week the sea conditions were good to row, then they calmed down considerably, so much so we decided to change our watch pattern and during the day, on every other day, we both row together. Quite tiring but getting us closer, which is worth it. We then give ourselves a treat…….well we did, of Haribos, but as we knew would happen they have run out. Well nearly run out, so we have rationed them to two a day. The rowing is hard but when Saturday came it increased again, it has now become necessary to go with the waves as we don’t want to put ourselves in a position where we could capsize.

It has also been a bit of a wildlife week, we have seen Minke whales but they disappear before we can film them. Dolphins aplenty which appear to be following us, never realised they could swim that slow, really nice to see though.  We have seen turtles and following us are two different types of bird, a White Tailed Tropic Bird or Boatswain Bird as it makes a call similar to a sailors whistle, quite eerie actually.  Also we have a Storm Tern following, obviously it knew that the weather is turning next week. Always nice to get a heads-up. There is also a lot of yellow and green seaweed in the water, very strange.

The pair have been battling the weather

On Saturday we turned and headed for Antigua, now that’s a great feeling, and yes, we did sing “and I will row 500 miles and I will row 500 more.” We also noted at that point that our AIS (automatic identification system) is not working, though it appears you can still see us on Yellow Brick. Not much we can do about that though. We have had to patch up the auto helm, a few weeks ago we had to fix it, well now it’s patched up.

Thank you all for following and for your support, it is much appreciated.”

If you would like to support Team Noble you can donate here.

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