Arrrrrrr, if yesterday was frustrating today was doubly so as the winds remained against us for the duration of the day, which made for an entire day and night of the most sluggish rowing we had endured to date – aside may be form the last time we hit and decided to row through that storm about a week ago.
Over the day we averaged nothing more than 1 knot and in very muggy, warm conditions this was a real test of our mettle once again. To make matters worse there were showers, and heavy ones at that...but then it had been a week since we had been able to dive in for a wash so may be that wasn’t such a bad thing.
If morale was on the low side yesterday today it was rock bottom. The main problem was we just couldn’t see the end in sight. The skies were thick and wer not moving – we could see the edge of the front but couldn’t get to it and each and every one of us knew that the returns we were getting for the efforts being out in were minimal, all the while making us more tired and our bodies weaker...which invariably combines to make tempers and states of mind ever more fragile. That said you could see everyone was trying to put on a brave face and trying to find the positives – and each and everyone of us would almost instinctively take it in turns to deliver the rallying cry of support and encouragement – and there was nothing staged about any of this, there was just a communal desire to get through this pretty dark chapter.
Update from Al wasn’t that encouraging as the front that would eventually clear this system was still no nearer, or at least it could be anything form another 1 or 2 days away. This front didn’t sound like it was going to be pretty but bizarrely we just couldn’t wait for it to arrive – yes it may bring some excitable winds, driving rain and crashing waves but at least it would be over and done with allowing us to get back on our merry way...so there it was, an open invitation for the front to come on down at its earliest convenience to put us out of our misery. Mmm wasn’t to be and so we spent another full day pulling on those oars like our lives depended on it...
The other problem that was now starting to surfacewas that the longer these periods of inclement weather went on the longer our crossing was obviously going to take. That in itself isn’t a problem but what may become one is the lack of food. For the first time during the trip this was now a real concern and called for a stock check to see how we were placed should we be out here much longer than the anticipated 60-70 days. So we got all the food packs, snack packs, gas bottles etc out and whilst we’re not flush with food we should still be ok – but having said that the PM did offer to mobilise the Air Force should we need a refill!
We have already run out of a few things, such as sugar and Milo but thankfully the Endurox powder (chocolate flavour)kindly donated as part of our sponsorship by Pacific Health Labs is now doubling up as a more than able replacement used to make hot chocolate and added to the porridge – as well as doubling up as a protein (thanks Jase)!
So another stress on the minds but one that we just need to keep a careful eye on as time ticks by, and if needs be we’ll just have to cut back on daily supplies to help prolong food supplies. This is the one area i have been paranoid about since this challenge began all those many months ago. I have never been flush with fat but have tried and tried over recent months to put on the necessary tyres/padding that i knew i would require for this trip. Thanks to Dr.Libby Ellis Weaver and Clair Turnbull i managed to go some way to achieving my goal but to hear both Tom and Pete comment independently today that i was going to ‘arrive looking like a stick’ and that if i ‘wasn’t careful they would start using me as an oar’ was none too pleasing or comforting – clearly i was losing weight, and fast. Tom even went so far as to say that by the time i get to Mauritius i would be nothing but a walking beard...charming. mmm i know they were just preying on a weakness but none the less the thought of running out of food was one thing i was really worried about...unlike these fat boys who see this as being the ideal diet regime.
The night shift was equally as torturous and news that we had only travelled some 11 or so miles over the past 24 hours proved a really bitter pill to have to swallow. Once again the skies were over cast meaning our power was again too low for the water maker to run, even in short 10 minute bursts. However such had been the stress on the bodies of today’s efforts that we decided to cut back on water intake rather than do the hand pumping as this may well have been the straw to break an already very fragile camel’s back! Anyway surely this weather must change, i mean this is the Indian right...home of the famous Indian high...yeah right, the only thing high about this place was the propensity to go insane and to get hypothermia. Bah humbug, here was hoping for a better day tomorrow – i promise i will eat the crusts of my toast...never leave my dirty clothes on the floor, will always wash up my dishes and if needs be will go to church every Sunday...as long as there is communion on offer. May be that was it, maybe we were being punished for some undisclosed wrong doings we had each committed in the past but had never admitted – may be this was our penance. Right well not wanting to leave it to chance i thought the best thing to do was for each crew member to ‘come out’...enter the latest recruit to team RFP, father Bannigan – named in honour of all our friends at The Radio Network back in NZ (in particular Stuart D, Sarah B and team and all the presenters from Radio Sport, Newstalk ZB, Classic Hits, Radio Hauraki, ZM and Coast). Much like the Stig on Top Gear Father Bannigan is never seen in public but is always in our presence to offer spiritual guidance and support. The understanding was that we should only call upon his services in times of crisis...and this time had now come as the crew were in despair and we needed to try and find a way out of this stagnant mess. So it was Father Bannigan was approached and agreed to conduct a session of confession...the thinking being this might just help exorcise the ocean demons and bring lady luck back to Glenda.
One by one each of us visited the booth, Tom being first up
Tom: Confessed to Father Bannigan that whilst at King’s College (Auckland) he was talking part in the school house annual run from the house to One Tree Hill and after struggling to complete it in year one he came up with a cunning plan for year two which involved swapping his running shoes for a taxi – something he hailed soon after leaving the school gates. Concerned about it being too obvious he instructed the cab to meander its way around the course getting out at each check point a safe distance from any preying eyes and then waited for the first four runners to come home before bounding through the gates to claim a remarkable 5h place!  
Pete:  Whilst in his job as one of the paper round boys in his home town Pete, aged about 13, had a habit of stealing, i mean borrowing an assortment of adult magazines from the paper shop and then proceeded to sell them at school...pure genius and every bit the ultimate young entrepreneur (for any kids reading this please not i am condoning such unethical behaviour).
Billy: as part of my early wooing programme i used to pinch a collection of mum’s prized porcelain figurines from her bedroom window sill to give to a mate of mine at primary school to give to his sister who i fancied at the time – think her name was Elizabeth and sadly i don’t think she was that in to figurines.
Matt: has yet to confess anything claiming that he has led the near flawless life, and that all mistakes/errors he’s made are well known already – what a load of old cobblers i say (Tim please enlighten us on some of his wrong doings before i start making stuff up).
Anyway there we are, confessions done and now all we could do was wait and hope.
MAKING WAVES:
Arise Sir Hamish Ludbrock, you my friend are a living, breathing and now erg rowing legend! I promised an update on how Hamish was getting on with his row-a-thon challenge on the streets of Wanaka but had no idea i would be delivering this kind of update. Unbelievably Hamo has managed to raise an incredible $10,000 in the space of 2 weeks doing the 2 hour shifts on the Concept 2 machine each and every morning....and just for the record he also has an unbelievably hectic working life so to have the drive, commitment and willing to put his body on the line for us like this has completely blown us away.
 With his very able assistant, Kim, by his side all the way Hamish powered past his goal with breath taking speed and with it got the whole of Wanaka wrapped up in his amazing fundraising efforts.
Hamish, on behalf of the entire team out here in the Indian I cannot thank you enough for what you have done, it’s a remarkable achievement and we look forward to thinking you personally on our return. The success of this challenge and the funds awareness it will raise owe as much to the likes of you as it does to what we are trying to achieve out here so thank you once again. Hope the bum isn’t too sore and the hands too warped 
To get this news on a day like we had just experienced provided an unbelievable boost to the team. However the good news does not stop there as we then had an email from the UK to say that Paul Harriman from the Kel Trust had just donated £5,000 (NZD$12,500) to the cause. Paul, it’s hard to know how to thank you when we are so far away and when all i have at my disposal is a blog but on behalf of the RFP team a MASSIVE thank you for this exceptionally generous donation – not sure if there are any conditions attached via mum and dad, such as that i promise never to do something like this again, but if there are then i will gratefully sign and accept all conditions! I look forward to seeing you soon when next back in the UK to take you through the journey in person but in the meantime we will all raise a glass of desalinated water to toast you and your Trust’s generosity.
Wowzers what an end to an otherwise terrible day – the highs and lows of this campaign never cease to amaze me but surely they’ll never be as extreme as today and all i can say is that regardless of what we’re going through out here the people at home in NZ and UK are making every stroke and every hurdle so much easier to conquer. Now  I’m off to the oars to celebrate...or do i mean commiserate...mmm me thinks we’ll go with the former, so much better for the soul and besides there will be time to celebrate the weather in due course...i hope

Well after a couple of days where it looked like there was promise in the air of us making up some good distance sadly things took an unexpected change for the worse as today progressed...again. it started off ok and we made reasonable progress for the early part of the day but Al had warned us that over the coming day or so we could expect the winds to shift and that these would swing around to a head wind – given the unpredictability if recent forecast this didn’t sound too serious and surely there was a good chance this may never happen – well this time the forecast and the predictions were spot on.
As the day went on so the winds shifted to a South Easterly direction and so started a long hard slog on the oars once again. In short we were now on the edge of anti cyclone, two words which you don’t want to hear if in a row boat especially if you’re the wrong side of it – which i’m not sure we were but whatever it meant we were now in a weather system and would have to go with it until the conditions changed allowing us to make forward progress once again. Al said we would have changeable winds for the next 3-4 days before it should all be back in our favour pushing us in a north easterly direction once again.
After the weather we had been delivered over the past 2 weeks this was just the kind of break we didn’t need. Morale was already strained and when we heard there could be 3 or 4 days of rubbish it went down like as cup of cold sick. What was it that we had done to deserve this incessant barrage of rubbish weather – on a personal note i was brushing my teeth twice daily, being civil to my team mates, minding my p’s & q’s, washing up my dishes, saying my prayers before bedtime (the content of which shall remain a secret!) and generally being a good ocean going citizen. Why oh why was this happening to us or was this just the latest episode of drama in the Truman esk show we were trapped in? Whatever the reason this was now becoming soooooooooo frustrating and i was worried about how we as a team might cope with this, if indeed there was to be 3 or 4 days of effectively treading water at best, or potentially even going backwards.
Anyway we had a team chat and decided the best way forward was to attack and so we took up an aggressive line to see if we could battle our way through the elements and at least make some forward progress – the theory being once again that any forward momentum was good no matter how much it took out of us physically. So that’s what we did...hour after hour after hour as the conditions got worse so our speeds got slower and our progress further curtailed.
The real problem in a situation like this is the feeling of helplessness mixed with anxiety that you could be missing a trick. None of us were experienced in these conditions so we didn’t really know whether to ride with the conditions and head south west or keep soldiering on knowing we were making probably 700-800 metres per hour at best. If we headed south west then we wouldn’t be getting any nearer to Mauritius but we would be knocking off the westerly latitude and then we could ride the northerlies if and when they arrived to help bring us back in line with our racing line – but was this the right thing to do? Arrrrr the frustration of not knowing is almost worse than knowing you are just in the poo and that you should stay put. Mmm all part of the learning curve and once again all part of this great adventure.
Last night was much like the day and had us wrestling the currents and the winds but the good thing was we were actually making forward progress...not as much as we would have liked but it seemed to vindicate our decision to take it on.
The other drama today was the lack of power again thanks to over cast skies which meant yet another return to the dreaded hand pump – so there we are morale already down, the bodies taking a hammering and we have to hand pump...mmm there’s a time and a place to inject some humour to the blog but this wasn’t it!
There was one uplifting moment though when at approx 4am we passed the ½ way mark. Admittedly this was a good week after we would have liked but whilst we can control many things the weather we can’t and we just had to keep telling ourselves that the next half would be better and that we could still catch up on the lost time! well here’s hoping anyway and here’s hoping tomorrow brings and brighter day where this anti cyclone finds something else better to do elsewhere on this ocean.

Started off ok with some light assistance during the day enabling us to clock up some reasonable mileage. Sadly much like the day before this was all to change with the onset of darkness and from having a steady course all day suddenly Glenda a complete hissy fit making it nigh on impossible to hold a course for any length of time – massively frustrating form the chauffeurs, namely Tom and I!
This was really one of those very forgettable days where nothing out of the ordinary happened. There were a number of angry squalls that came and went giving us a good old fashioned fresh water wash but aside from that we just kept plodding along. Hand pumping was again on the cards with sunlight but a distant dream for us today.
Sad news is that in my over exuberance to get the condom on for one of the many shifts today when it was required I managed to put a hole in it...oops,not the best especially if i have to use it dor anything other than sheltering from the Baltic conditions out on deck  – fingers crossed this wont happen, although thankfully we have a puncture repair kit for our seats so i will get to work on that to see if we can re seal it.
The mood inside the camp is ok at the moment if a little frustrated. There’s definitely a feeling that we’ve had our share of bad cards dealt our way but i’m sure every other crew feels the same. Hitting the 2,000 mile mark was a big one for us but since then it seems to have been doubly hard work making any progress and i think this is starting to get to us all. That said like Ranulph Fiennes said upon conquering Everest at the third attempt it’s all about just keeping going and knocking the miles off and not focussing on how far you have to go...something we need to learn from.
For me personally the night shifts are definitely the most challenging and they come around so quickly that no sooner have you got over one that the next one is here. For those of you who know me will appreciate just how much i loooove my sleep so this particular challenge is not exactly ideal in that respect, although in many ways that’s the beauty to it. Anyway with little more than an hour’s sleep possible at any one given time it has led to some very strange sleep behaviour amongst the team.
Without fail every night shift i wake up totally disorientated and more often than not i am absolutely adamant that i’ve just been on the oars – this has led to a number of interesting ‘conversations’ with Pete, my shift partner, who every night has to break the bad news that the ’Bills, Pete 10 minutes lads’ warning bellowed from outside actually means it’s 10 minutes til we’re up on the oars again! The other weird thing is the amount of times i wake up thinking i am actually outside on the oars...it’s only when Pete again alerts me to the fact that i am actually lying on a bean bag with padded walls around me and not an oar in sight that i believe him (and the depression sets in) – oh the highs and lows of one minute thinking you have a fresh 2 hours of kip ahead to the next and the stark realisation that you’re up...again. All in all if i had to put a figure on the number of times i thought the ’Bills, Pete 10 minutes lads’ call didn’t apply to me it would be high 90% - most of the time i just think it’s weird they are giving themselves a 10 minute warning...but one thing’s for sure it will forever be etched in my mind as a message set from the devil!
I’m told Matt has been experiencing similar attacks of sleeping weirdness as has Pete who on hearing the dreaded ’10 minute lads’ call duly ignored it because he didn’t think it applied to him because he was apparently driving home in his Peugeot car full of rowing kit with the oars out of the window. Not sure about Tom but given his very confused look on the oars each time he takes over from me i would say he too is having a roller coaster ride inside that head of his – oh yeah i nearly forgot but he does lay claim to have seen a UFO as well so clearly he too is indeed a little unsettled up top right now!
Apologies once again for the probs we’re having with the tracker but we are trying to fix this. At the moment we’re not sure whether it’s all part of our general power shortage or whether there’s a fault we (as in royal ‘we’ because i doubt i’ll be fixing anything) can fix. In an attempt to be proactive and to show the team willing in the technical side of the boat i phoned the main man Tony at Woodvale to see if we could resolve the issue...mmm error me thinks as it wasn’t long before Tony was throwing around words like ‘multimeter’  ‘fuse’ ‘connections’ ‘circuits’ and other such words that normally cause me to break out in a rash. I tried but alas will have to pass this on to Tom....then, and only then ill we have a chance of getting the dot up and running again!
That’s it for today’s instalment, over and out for now.

Beard Day
You may dismiss this as being a purile little game but for the lads on board this a huge moment  fail this and it pouts a big question mark on your masculinity, and no one wants that tag around their neck. In line with our obsessive attention to safety we have the ‘Man Over Board’ contraption at the ready just in case one of us should fail and then decide it’ all too much and take the plunge. Personally i was feeling pretty good about the inspection, and on the basis i seem to be losing vital pieces of vegetable in my beard during meal times i would say i should be fine.
As the beards have developed so have crew nicknames to help best describe what each one looks like. These include:
Pete – OAP Wolverine. He is one big ball of hair, from the microphone on his head to the fast developing fur ball on his face. Currently a bit left sided he is starting to lose the function of the left side of his mouth which has been invaded by the dreaded ‘over hang’.
Tom – Stig of the Dump...he just soooo looks like him.
Matt – Shaggy (as in Scooby Do because to quote Pete, “he had some sh*t on his face just like Matt”) meets George Michael
Me – Steptoe...i was hoping for a Ewan McGregor call but it just wasn’t to be. Still an aggressive amount of hair growth that shows no signs of stopping any time soon. All in all good for the cold although can retain a bit too much water for my liking. As for the Steptoe lookie likie i’m as lost as you are...i hope.
Anyway that’s it for today, i’m off to treat the claw hands which are fast making this typing business quite difficult. Before i go though we’ve just heard we’ve caught up with the Angels...woooohooooooooo.

Well last night was yet another tough one dressed in rubber, although word that the other teams were also struggling made this easier to stomach. It appears the weather system that was supposed to arrive yesterday never did but instead was blocked out by a cold front meaning the winds that Al had forecast never arrived but instead were superseded by a strong southerly instead –not sure if Michael Fish had such an easy get out clause but this would suffice for us, even if it didn’t help our cause.
Good news was that change was on the way, and change for the good as the wind we had been promised yesterday finally arrived...wooohooo happy days and time to have some fun on the waves.
The next goal for us was to reach the ½ way mark, something that had been on the horizon for way too long but for some reason we just couldn’t reach it! Whilst winds were looking good the power wasn’t and the 100% cloud cover wasn’t helping meaning our solar energy was again running dangerously low. As a result it was sadly a return to hand pumping...ugh. None of us wanted to do it but we all knew it was our only option save cracking in to even more ballast, so we got back in to the 2 hour row, 1 hour hand pump 1 hour rest routine for the rest of the day, far from ideal but just something that had to be done.
All in all a mixed day really with some reasonable progress made on the oars but you couldn’t help feeling a little short changed after a day that promised so much and then fissled out so quickly as conditions once again deteriorated during the night shifts undoing much of our good work – that along with more hand pumping took the gloss off the day. Still once again we needed to remain positive as we had more miles in the bank and were getting ever closer to ‘M’...