“I woke up at around 7am, just before sunrise. The Sea Me alarm had gone off and I scanned the horizon. The sea was still quite calm so I could see for quite a long way, but I couldn’t make out anything that looked like a boat.

I started off the day by pumping some water. The two 10-litre jerry cans on the deck were empty and I’d decided not to get any more full ones from the hold, instead choosing to save the remaining 90 litres for the last few weeks of the journey, so now the ones I had on deck were finished I had to pump some more water. This was a job I had to get down to straight away this morning as the lack of water meant I couldn’t have breakfast or make a brew. I’d resolved to keep pumping until my stomach was rumbling from hunger and my tongue was dry from thirst.

The session was briefly interrupted when a freighter came along. That’s strange. Now the Sea Me’s not going off. Could that have set it off this morning? Maybe the captain had got so totally sick of that immobile blip on his screen that he just turned off his radar or switched to another frequency. He wasn’t on a collision course with me in any case!”

“One of my fixed lines suddenly went tight at some point in the afternoon. I’ve got another bite! It’s not breaking any more as I’ve put a bit of rubber in between. I quickly grabbed the line and reeled it in. Oh no, not another shark! I’m not eating shark twice a day. I lifted it slightly out of the water and cut through the line just behind the hook. It won’t cause the shark any problems; it’ll just rust away in the salty water and fall out by itself.

I had another freighter come past in the afternoon actually, a container ship that passed me a bit further away. Whereas the one from this morning was heading north-west, so probably to Asia, this one was going north-east, which would make its destination somewhere in North America. The Sea Me didn’t go off yet again, even though it seems to be working. There’s nothing I can do about it out here!”

In the photos: “Tanker Naohi, the first of the two that happened to go past today. It was a relatively calm sea with three-metre-high waves, but notice there’s a much taller one beginning to break between them, which is annoying, and you can see it fully breaking in the next photo taken a few seconds later. And no, it’s not a bow wave.
Waves like that can be a bit of a nuisance when they’re heading straight for a little rowing boat!”