This was Wednesday 8th August, day 2 after setting off from Tromsø. We rowed through the night alternating 2 hours on, 2 hours off. Rob really struggled to sleep but I managed to get a few hours. The decision about whether to go for it and try and beat the storm or whether to wait it out was playing on both our minds, but possibly more on Rob’s than mine.

Rob’s lack of sleep was evident. He had a string of bad luck and blunders that were really putting a dampner on his day. He’d cracked his head several times on the various ‘mind your head’ areas of the boat. He also failed to put the lid properly back on the 1kg tub of peanut butter in our snack pack dry bag, and it had gone everywhere. An absolute nightmare because it took him about half an hour to clean it out and because we’d lost half a kilo of the stuff.

One thing we couldn’t complain about was the weather. As you’ll see in the video we had tip-top conditions. All our gear is cold weather gear so we stripped off to boxers (apologies in advance) and got a taste of what the equatorial ocean rowers experience. By the time we had decided to wait out the storm we were taking the long way round to Torvåg. We rowed together for nearly 10 hours which wouldn’t have been sustainable but we knew we had rest coming when we got there, and we also knew a strong easterly wind would be picking up from 11pm, which we certainly got a taste of as we finished the row around 10pm.

So here’s the video, and apologies for the accidental ? word that made it into the last one, won’t happen again ? ? ⛰