"The weather is coming in from the south east which isn’t too good for us at the moment.

The skies have generally been overcast and we’ve had storms for about 80% of the time we’ve been out here, so the weather hasn’t been brilliant, to be honest.

Basically we’ve had two reasonably big storms and one big one. Generally what we’ve done is lash down everything on deck and myself and Tim just get in the back and batten down the hatches and get out the way. We can spend up to three days in there.

It’s not good. Because it all builds up with condensation as well, you’ve got to try and open the hatches all the time to try and get some air in. On one particular occasion we got a huge wave through that flooded the cabin. It wasn’t particularly pleasant, to be honest.

Shark surprise

We have to clean the bottom of the boat all the time to make sure that no marine life grows on it because it will slow us down. Tim went over to inspect the hull after the storm and he was under about five minutes when he came face to face with a shark.

He came straight back on deck really quickly! I normally keep a watch on deck, with a high powered rocket flare and if there was a shark that looked like it was going to attack then we’d use it, as a last resort.

Tim had a look of shock on his face when he got on board. But the only thing we tried to do was get a photograph of it. It was obviously a friendly one though, and just came for a look and then went away.

Up till now we’ve mainly seen sharks both big and small and today we’ve had dolphins around the barrel for this morning and this evening, and we saw a whale earlier as well. We’ve also got albatrosses that follow us since we left Choshi.

The plan

The main thing we are trying to do at the moment is get about 20 miles south because the winds have taken us up quite far north we’ve got to try and get south because there is a good current that flows east.

Then we’ll just see from then. We are at the mercy of the elements in this boat and we just take every day as it comes.

We are out here for the duration and we are going to get this cracked."

Q: Michele Prins says what kept our crew in form when crossing the Atlantic under sail was good food - what do you have as a treat?
A: We’ve got a really good food selection of Italian foods – they are really tasty and we look forward to them. We’ve also got pepperami and Mars bars – all sorts of food that are mostly high energy. When we are rowing we will stop for two minutes and then just chuck a mars bar in the mouth and you’ll get enough burst from that chocolate to keep going. But we don’t really have that many treats to be honest – we are out here to slog it out really and we are so limited as to space and weight we have to be really choosy about what we put on the boat.

Q: Steve Wilson of the UK want to know if, considering the scale of this challenge, how you think you could better it?
A: Tim is going to take a bit of a break for a while, but not for too long and I’ve been planning an expedition to go on from this one – but I can’t tell you what it is yet! But it will be an equally big challenge, if not more so.

Q: Simon Adams in San Francisco asks will you be able to inform the Us coastguard of your position prior to entering the golden gate to enable sailors in San Francisco to motor out to welcome you?
You can follow our position on our website and when we’ve got more of an idea of when we are going to arrive we’ll be announcing it there. Definitely anyone who can get on a boat and come out and see us - we’d like to see them.