With just a few days to go before the start of the inaugural Round Britain Challenge, the eight skippers and eight mates have been making final adjustments and changes to the boats before the 130 crew volunteers join them this evening at Ocean Village in Southampton.

The CVs, as they are known, will be joining their yachts which will be their home for the best part of three weeks and reunited with their crews, most having only met for the first time just two weeks ago.

The past few weeks have been a busy time for the skippers and mates, making sure their yachts and their own planning is in tip-top form for the hard and fast racing that the Round Britain Challenge will entail.

Behind the scenes there’s been a hive of activity going on in and around Ocean Village for the 16 professional men and women. This week the skippers and mates attended an extensive medical lecture, with Dr Campbell Mackenzie – one of the official Challenge Business medical officers. A representative from World Cruising Club has also been in Ocean Village reprogramming the Sat C units, explaining: “We’ve been setting up the Inmarsat C terminals onboard the yachts for position report polling. Terminals send automatic reports and are also configured so the race management team can manually poll the yachts.”

“At any time they can obtain positions of the yacht and also allows the website team to display the yacht on interactive mapping with a position table allowing family and friends to follow the event.

“At least three regular position reports will be displayed on the web site each day with the facility of the manual poll allowing the race management to poll the yachts when close to important marks of the course, such as Muckle Flugga and when approaching the Isle of Wight at the finish.”

And don’t forget to keep logging on to “www.yachting-world.com” for all the latest news. Yachting World’s Jessica Daw will be racing aboard Logica and will be posting regular news stories directly from the boat.