“It was another calm day for the wind again today. Early in the morning, or actually towards the end of the night as it was about 4am, a particularly annoying little breeze came along. It had got worse by the morning too, and I was thinking it could only get worse, but no, it died down again to wind force 1, where it still is now (late in the evening). Well, if there are ripples in the water and you can see the boat being pushed back by the current, it’s very difficult to make those miles towards the last stage of the journey in the north.”

“How far have I got to go? About seventy/eighty miles. And with daily distances of up to ten miles – which I’ll still be lucky to get – my progress to the pick-up will be very slow. I was in contact with Peter Sharp again today, who will be towing me in. He wanted to talk about the weather situation as well. “Terrible little breeze, wind force 1,” I said. He answered that the wind would be dying down even further over the next 48 hours, which means another two days of windless weather so I won’t be able to get very far at all. I’m going to be struggling to make any slow progress for a bit, then, and meanwhile the question becomes whether or not it’s worth it in the grand scheme of things. Float around for another week or just get an earlier pick-up? I think I’ll decide tomorrow.”

“Today was the 277th day on the Pacific, which is a very special one. If you add the 88 days spent on the Atlantic Ocean to these 277 you end up with exactly 365 as the total number of days I’ve been rowing on the Zeeman Ocean Challenge. So I’ve been rowing for precisely one year today – the Zeeman Challenger and I, together on the water for a whole year. If you add up the total number of kilometres rowed from all those days you get around 24,500 rowed in that year. That’s well over half the world, as its full circumference around the equator is about 40,000km. So if you took any point in the world, the journey from Holland to there will always be shorter than what I’ve rowed. That’s obviously a huge distance, and once the last few miles have been added up over the next few days… the Zeeman Ocean Challenge will definitely be over.”