“The sun’s been coming up a bit later on recently, at around half six. Will that be to do with my tremendous westerly speed, or will it be the curve of the sun working its way around towards the winter?”

“The weather was fairly calm, so I decided to take a dive. Rubbed myself all over with shampoo. Lovely to feel my hair soft again and not to smell so bad. I grabbed my snorkel and hovered around under the boat. No sign of fouling. As the boat weighs much less now than at the beginning of the Pacific crossing the water line’s just right again as well, so there aren’t any barnacles growing there any more. That’s a shame as they were good to eat. The advantage is that the boat moves quicker through the water though, but the lack of fouling also means fewer fish will be attracted to it.

Looking underneath the boat I could only see the mini-dorados and the trigger fish. The latter are particularly irritating with their razor-sharp teeth. They were quite happy to try biting me as I was swimming through the water. When I held a knife in front of them, they just bit that too. When I seriously wounded one of them with it underwater it just came back again and kept biting the blade. Those creatures are just crazy.”

“At five o’clock I saw a fishing boat going past about a mile away. I quickly leapt to the oars and tried to head it off, which didn’t work as its course was heading away from me. I’m pretty sure it must’ve had a rowing trainer on board.

In the evening the wind began to curve around a bit to the north and I could finally spend a few hours getting some useful rowing in to the west, which was about time. I’m now in around the same area as where I was just under a week ago!”