"I haven't had time to write any reports for a few days, but that's been happening quite a lot recently with all the strange, bizarre, unpredictable and unpleasant situations on the ocean. And indeed, the most important thing for typing a report is that the waves aren't too high and the rain's not too bad.

I've noticed since my departure from Atafu that there are a few places here and there in the saloon where I'm having problems with leakage. Not much of it, but there are a few drops now and then. When the boat rolls back and forth it can cause the drops to fly around all over the place, including into the laptop. The fact that I left Peru with three laptops and have only got one left bears witness to the fact that they don't mix well with water.

And it's been raining a lot over the past few days, making the dripping pretty irritating during the night. I regularly feel a cold drop on my body, but it's when they fall on my head and in my ears that it particularly disturbs my night's sleep. I can't avoid them by lying more to the right or left of the room either, because the rocking makes them fall there as well. Nor can I lie a bit lower, as the saloon is only 1.9 metres long and then I'd be sitting with my feet against the ship's stern. If it gets too bad I just carry on sleeping with a T-shirt over my head."

"Well, where were we? Ah yes, I'd rowed a total distance of nine miles today; well, Ralph, that's not that great is it? On the other hand, it's a very safe distance; if I keep up an average of nine miles a day I won't arrive in Australia until after the hurricane season. So yet again I'm not making very much progress. The previous evening I was still on 18 miles and my progress was already going sluggishly as I was having to row against the current, which was coming from the west (which almost never happens). It was incredibly hot that day as well as there was no wind at all. I was overcome by the heat half-way through the day, my body felt like it was burning up, my head was pounding and I felt incredibly tired.

The increase in heat has been very noticeable. I sought the only bit of shadow at the front of the deck under the open hatch to recover for a bit. The following morning I saw on my GPS that I'd lost half the distance I'd covered because of the currents, so it was back to nine miles again. That wasn't so bad in itself: I've worked out that if I can manage 353 miles in one good day's rowing I'll be right back on schedule.

I'd already said that my spare iPod is working again after all and that that would have been good news if I still had any earphones. I did find a pair today after much searching, but this still wasn't good news as they didn't make any sound; it turned out they were the old Philips pair that had got broken back on the Atlantic Ocean and had also been in the water for a good while. It was still worth the fiddling about with them, though; unfortunately a headphone cable looks very different to a normal electrical cable. Linking up the plusses and minuses didn't work, so I was left with a working iPod and broken earphones once more. I'll be consulting a headphone cable specialist in Holland over the phone over the next few days, as it would be awesome to have music on the boat again now, but I'm not holding out much hope. So there I sat once more, iPod in hand, staring at the little screen that was cheerfully showing me all those songs I have that I can't listen to."

"It might be Me, Myself & I out here now, but it's been getting pretty lively on and around the boat lately. There haven't been any little fish to be seen around the boat for over a week now, but there are often tunas leaping about. My mouth began to water at the sight of these fresh morsels of sashimi as I sat there chewing on a few dry, crunchy lumps of noodles. I don't know who's doing it, but I neatly reel in the lines I hang outside the boat with a bare hook and some devoured plastic squids. I managed to hook one no less than six times that evening, but lost them all eventually. No idea why they wouldn't stay on the hook. It can't be to do with the hook itself as it went a good way into my big toe today.

There's plenty of life on board as well, however. My coconut in the tray of earth on deck has already grown two new leaves since I left and several roots are forming. If I keep that nine-mile distance up I'll be picking my own fresh coconuts before I get to Australia. I also went looking for food under the hatches, but at the first one I discovered I had fruit flies on board again (oh, joy!), at the second I found a colony of red ants and the third was swarming with hundreds of maggots again. I quickly closed this last hatch before they could escape, remembering that they're quite nutritious and you can eat them raw.

I was back to a more respectable distance again the next day - 38 miles, to be precise - but I'm going a long way to the north again now, so far in fact that I passed close by another island: Funafuti, the main island in the Tuvalu group. I passed it to the south at just twenty miles' distance, but this time I could see the beam from the lighthouse. The wind freshened considerably again in the evening, rising to force six from east-north-east; unfortunately it died down again after a few hours as well, becoming just as insignificant as it had been before."