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|THE JOURNEY||THE ROWERS||THE BOAT|
LOG 1: 17 May
LOG 2: 22 May
LOG 3: 5 June
LOG 4: 26 June
LOG 5: 10 July
LOG 6: 25 July
LOG 7: 16 August
LOG 8: 18 September
Log 6: Wednesday 25 July
Pacific rowers Dom Mee and Tim Welford have now spent more than 80 days at sea. Dom tells BBC News Online that when they aren't rowing they both pass the time playing chess and planning their victorious arrival in San Francisco harbour.
You can find out lots more information about the voyage and rowers by clicking on the tabs above the map.
"It’s hard to say when we will reach the half-way mark - at the moment we are back on the sea anchor because of headwinds. We have another day of headwinds tomorrow and the forecast is looking pretty good after that. If we get the weather, it is no more than 12 days away.
As we row towards the half-way mark - at the moment we are just below 40 degrees - we want to get up to around 45 degrees. To get there we’ll be going in a north east direction.
The weather here is phenomenal. We want to get embedded in the sub-tropical high which is a consistent and trusty weather system. What we are in at the moment is like a storm belt - a right cooking pot of different weather systems - and we’ll probably continue to be in this storm belt until about 165 west longitude. Once we get in the sub-tropical high things should start speeding up and we should start making much better progress.
Everything is fine with the boat. Tim’s has been making different bits and bobs - he’s made a chess board and he’s just been making a model of the boat out of wood - just to kill time really. When you are sat on the sea anchor, it’s a little frustrating and you’ve got to fill your time with something.
I tend to read to pass the time but the stuff Tim has made is spot on. The chessboard is fantastic. We’ve played loads and I’m getting absolutely annihilated by Tim at the moment - but I’ve just won my first game in ages.
We've seen less animals over the past few weeks. There have been a couple of small sharks that have been circling the boat - and we had a great day rowing when we had about 20 dolphins with us and they were surfing the waves as we were surfing the waves . It was absolutely fantastic - that was really a high point of the trip right there.
There are also a lot of little small fish underneath the boat which we haven’t identified, they are quite pretty with a zebra pattern on them. I think they seek protection under the hull of the boat.
Thanks very much for all your e-mails. We’ve had a lot of moving messages and hopefully the voyage is inspiring people. It makes it all worth while really and, in turn, it inspires us to keep on going."
Q: Geoff Freer from Australia asks when you get to San Francisco, will you be putting any flowers in your hair?
A: We are yes - we’ve got them with us! We’ll definitely be wearing flowers in our hair when we get to San Francisco. When we row in, we’ll be wearing our corporate colours but we’ll also have the odd flower too. We’ve got it all on board - we’ll just whack it on when we row in - just like the song - and we’ll play the music as we come in too!
Q:Tony Volpe from the UK asks do you ever have periods of time when you were unable to keep in touch with the rest of the world? How does this feel?
A: We’re lucky - we can get communications any time of the day. The differences between what we can do are: live TV but not if it is too rough; voice comms - the phone can work in a bit of a swell; the bullet proof system is Inmarsat C which even if it is rough as anything we can still get through and we use that a lot with our base station.
Alasdair Keir, Tim and Dom's communications expert, says: "Inmarsat is the generic name for systems which use a certain satellite system, C is the type of device they are using over the satellite. The Inmarsat C is very slow but is capable of doing email - even when the boat is almost upside down! The great thing is that this means we can virtually guarantee Tim and Dom will receive our short emails and can reply when the weather is good enough for them to be able to type. The system allows them to send a distress message whichever way up they find themselves - they simply press the big red button on the front of it."
Q: Michael Shortt from Australia says he would imagine you would get blisters forming on your hands with the constant rowing, if so, what treatment do you use? Or do you wear gloves all the time?
A: I haven’t suffered with my hands and neither has Tim since we started. I do a lot of rope work on racing yachts and my hands are pretty rough at the best of times and Tim has done stacks of rowing. The only uncomfortable thing we get is a spotty backside - and that can be slightly uncomfortable!
Q: James Innes from the UK asks how much food do you have left?
A: We don’t always eat the rations every day . When we are not rowing we don’t eat anything like as much as we do when we are rowing so what we are doing is saving those things just in case we do need them. We’ve got full suplies for 180 days and with all our rationing we could do 200 days - but hopefully we won’t need to do that.
Further details of Tim and Dom's daily rations can be found here.
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