Time for repairs as progress is slow

Well the observant amongst you will have noticed that it has taken us 34 hours to do 18 miles! Painful to say the least! Now as much as I’d like to attribute our slow progress to excessive partying following the Welsh win or over indulging upon arriving at the 500 mile mark, sadly it is not the case!

There are three other clear reasons.

Firstly, following my accurate prediction of a Welsh win, I’m afraid that I have a rather sad sponsor on our hands! Now I don’t know if the average Joe Blogg out there knows how difficult it is to find a corporate sponsor for an Atlantic rowing race, especially since neither of us rowed or had previously been out to sea (not to mention the failed attempt statistics!!). So when you get a sponsor the key is to keep him happy at all times! With that aim in mind, we decided that if we stayed out at sea a few days longer, he’d think that he was getting more “days” for his money!!!And hopefully, it would give him time to recover from the English defeat! (Sorry Jamie!)

Secondly, our fundraising campaign! Everyone by now will know how passionate both of us are about metabolic medicine, our patients, and the much needed research in the area. So potentially the longer we are out here, the more time it allows for news of our attempt to be shared amongst the “masses”! The more people that get to hear, the more people that will donate (hopefully!). So for every day we are out here, please tell another person (your great Aunt, the person sat next to you at the bus, your ex, we don’t care who, just tell everyone) and fingers crossed . . . . we’ll soon reach our target!!

Thirdly, the wind! We have once again found ourselves stuck with strong north easterly winds, seriously pushing us off course, so all we can do (whether we want to or not!) is to hang on tight!
So with nothing much to do today, I had a play with the steering, and found it didn’t work so well. On further inspection I found that two pins on the rudder had snapped and the wooden padding on the bracket had fallen off. Nothing major, but repairs that needed attending to, and called for another trip “down under”! An hour later, with some success and the barnacles (can’t believe how quickly those little rascals grow!) once again scraped off …it was no wonder I was feeling “jet –lagged”. So now we’re happy to sit here, top up our sun tan and pray for that elusive easterly!