As part of the Woodvale mandatory kit list each boat is equipped with a para anchor. We have a 12ft rowers modified anchor and a 9ft spare. With a headwind of anything more than 5/10 knots it becomes impossible to row on a chosen course. The boat is forced beam on and becomes extremely difficult to handle. This is where the para anchor plays a part. With approximately 4km of water below us a normal anchor is obviously not an option and so in order to avoid losing ground the para anchor is deployed. It looks like a parachute and is suspended on the end of an 80m line. It fills with tonnes of water, sits a few metres below the waterline and minimises drift in the wrong direction. It is unable to prevent drift with the current, but the drift as a result of the wind, which is far greater, is massively reduced. The boat is held bow to the waves and she sits locked into this position. There is a floating retrieval line which attaches to the head of the anchor and runs all the way back to the boat where it is securely fastened. When it is no longer needed it can be collapsed and brought back to the boat using this retrieval line. The para anchor is one of the most crucial bits of kit as it provides both minimal unwanted drift and a safety precaution by preventing the boat from sitting broad side on which could lead to a capsize.

The weather became as calm as we have seen it yet on the 25th Jan. It was like rowing on a lake and absolutely silent. The only sound that could be heard were the oars steadily moving in and out of the water. This was great at night as it made rowing very comfortable. When the seas are big at night and its very dark it becomes pretty uncomfortable as you can’t see where the waves are coming from; suddenly we’ll be launched in one direction, Heritage will then role violently from side to side as she stabilizes herself and the repeated process equals a sore bum! With the weather so calm a few days ago it made the night a pleasure, but the day more difficult with no wind to reduce the intensity of the sun. After this calm period at about 0700 UTC on the 27th the wind turned to a westerly and so out came the para anchor. We have now been sat on anchor for the last 84 hours and it looks likely that we won’t be rowing again until the 2nd Feb. Life has become even more basic than before; it’s literally sleeping, eating and then finding anything we can to entertain ourselves. We’ve watched a few films on our laptop, read a bit and basically got seriously bored! Our rat hole of a cabin has become pretty disgusting and we’ve begun to wonder what it must smell like to someone who has showered more than once in the last 26 days! The messages of support are brilliant to read and we wish we were able to reply to them all individually.

We have now passed our third waypoint which means we have gone far enough south to be in the established trade wind belt. We are now heading on a westerly course and our next waypoint is set for just outside Antigua.

The weather is in our favour for the next four days, so we hope to make some quick progress west. We have decided to reset Christmas day to coincide with when we reach 40 degrees west, which is approximately half the journey as we have been given presents to open which should provide a good boost to morale.

Our wildlife count is steadily rising, we were greeted with 50 dolphins or so one morning, swimming around the boat and jumping in and out of the water, which provided us with some quality entertainment to row to.

Heritage has continued to perform faultlessly so far and long may this continue. We are however slightly disappointed that we haven’t yet had enough solar power to use our deck speakers which we worked hard to install back in the UK. We are hoping that our new westerly course will increase the panel output so that we might be able to treat ourselves to music at some point in the day.

The temperature increase has certainly been noticeable as we have come south, during the hottest part of the day there seems to be no escaping the sun’s rays, if you aren’t on deck being baked then you are in the cabin which isn’t too dissimilar to a sauna! The rear hatch does allow some respite by providing ventilation providing the swell isn’t big enough to break over the back hatch, need I say we learned this the hard way and have had the bedding out on deck several times drying!

It’s also worth mentioning that our custom made beds and bedding sponsored by Richard Soper of British Waterbed Company have been invaluable. They are light weight air mattresses with foam support running down either side which have so far prevented us from rolling around in the cabin as we rest and allowed us some quality sleep, thank you Richard!

On the 13th we celebrated Tom’s 22nd birthday with a wash in the sea, a coke each and some fish jerky whilst the sun went down, which was great.

We are making steady progress whilst the wind tries to push us directly west when we obviously want to be going south west. We have been enjoying fair weather over the past few days which makes rowing comfortable but not particularly fast. We are waiting for some more north easterlies to push us down to 20 degrees north, which we hope to make around the 17th Jan.

We are still very positive and enjoying being out here but the lack of sleep is possibly the most demanding part of the trip at the moment and as a result has provided us with some pretty entertaining moments. A bit of a cycle has developed whereby I (Tom) tell Will that he has 10 minutes until his turn to row – this leads to a some rather interesting questions as he tries to wake up, about where we are, what we’re doing and where we’re going?! A couple of nights ago he asked where his brother was and why there were only two of us on board?!

Yesterday was one of the best days yet as we caught three fish in the morning, 2 herring and another tuna, and had a long swim in the afternoon. We now have masses of fish jerky drying out and intend not to be without it for the rest of the journey! Whilst we swam we cleaned the barnacles off the bottom of the boat for the first time and took some great photographs underwater with our waterproof camera.

We have been marking the days off on the bulkhead and are looking forward to marking on the 14th day as we feel the 2 week mark is a considerable milestone. Hopefully no less than a fifth of the journey but we’ll see!

Although life on board Heritage Explorer is basic, so far there always seems to be something happening. The last 3 days since our first blog have been quite eventful.

 Whilst we were in La Gomera, Will decided that we needed a fishing line with a breaking strain of 125 pounds, which basically means that we can catch a whale! I was unconvinced as to the chances of getting anything at all, at our slow speed, but we got it anyway. However, it appears that I was wrong as we have already managed to catch 3 fish, one being a small tuna of some kind (we can’t work out exactly what it is from our little ‘North Atlantic Wildlife’ book). We gutted it and had fresh fish with lime juice and coconut puree. We also have some thin strips of tuna drying in the sun to make fish jerky.

The following day, yesterday, we saw what looked like a swordfish, two large fins came cutting through the water and disappeared below. Despite the seemingly large presence of wildlife we have not been put off from swimming and have enjoyed getting in the water with our surf boards leashes attached to our ankles. The water is warm and it’s very refreshing after hour upon hour at the oars.

 Last night was our toughest yet with a choppy and confused sea making it difficult to stay on the seat, let alone row effectively. We have been mixing the seating arrangements up trying to relieve the various pressure points which are causing the problems. The seat state and wind, despite being confused, are pushing us in the right direction and we believe it will continue to do so for the next 5 days. As we ended up being pushed further East than we hoped we now have a new way point of 20 degrees North and 25 degrees West which we hope to reach in the next 8-10 days.

 This morning (12th Jan) we had a brief visit from one of the support yachts, Ocean Planet. They just checked that we were ok and then left but it was good to see another boat of a more similar size as all we have seen for 6 days other than water is a few cargo ships.

Again, thank you very much for the messages, they are great morale boosters!

We are now five days into our journey. We got off to a reasonable start and seem to have settled into the routine of life on board. For the first two days we got blown further East than we would have liked, but decided that we should run with the weather to get clear of the Islands. On Thursday we made the decision to put out the para anchor to limit our drift towards the African coast until the weather changed to a more Easterly direction, which it did on Thursday evening. We are now managing to make up that ground and the weather looks promising for the next 4/5days.

Although we haven’t been at sea for long we have already seen and experienced some amazing things, rowing at night under the stars is great and we have seen several shooting stars already. Tom was rowing on Thursday evening when a huge whale came out of the water about 20 meters from the boat and surfaced several other times around us, which was incredible. We also saw a dolphin as we were leaving the Canaries, a turtle this morning and caught a fish this afternoon, so our wildlife count is pretty high!

Moral is high and we are making reasonable progress. A very big thank you for the messages to our email address and on our website, they are hugely appreciated.

We will write another blog in the next few days.

We have now been in La Gomera for 43 days and finally the race is due to start at 1330 UTC tomorrow (4^th Jan). Today we are just tidying and cleaning the boat, programming waypoints in to the GPS and making a few small adjustments. Tomorrow we will say our goodbyes to the other competitors, have final radio checks and leave the marina at around 1230. A flag raised on one of the support yachts will indicate 5 minutes until the start. The flag will then be taken down and a horn will sound the start of the race.

We will begin our 2 hours on, 2 hours off routine immediately and should be out of sight of land within the first 48 hours. We will begin our blog from the boat over the next few days.

We would just like to thank everyone once again for helping us reach this point and will keep you updated as to how we get on. We will hopefully be back in the UK sometime in March and look forward to seeing everyone then.