It was a pretty overcast day with squalls threatening all day, we missed most of them but got caught on a few occasions.  One of the worst came in around 1200 noon when Matt, Mylene and I were at the oars.  It blew pretty hard from the south and our auto pilot struggled to correct our course, this resulted in the boat loosing speed and us rowing hard to go nowhere, it last about 30 minutes and we finally got around the edge of the cloud to some reprieve, not before we all developed some serious back ache from the effort going into each stroke.  Just another small reminder of how we have to respect mother nature.

We also had a close encounter with a rather large Tanker in the afternoon.  Pedro spotted it off our starboard (right) side when it was about 3 miles away.  From early on Pete and I were convinced we would clear his bow.  Matt managed to hail him on the Radio and he spotted us from over a mile away and changed his course to be sure to miss us.  In the end he passed about 600m off our stern, pretty close considering the miles of empty ocean surrounding us.

At the same time as all this excitement was happening I was due to finish my shift and do an interview for News talk, in the commotion I didn’t get to the phone until about 5:20pm only to discover the battery was flat, so after a quick charge I tuned it on, unfortunately I missed them, hopefully they will get through tonight.

We finished the evening with a spectacular encounter with the last big squall of the day, we watched it from miles away as it gained on us, for a while we thought we might just out run it.  At the last minute though it swept towards us and as it did so we could clearly see the effect of the wind and rain on the water then it engulfed us for about 15 minutes before moving its way swiftly across the ocean.