We should hit land on Thursday morning

Atlantic Diary: Paul Gleeson and Tori Holmes are nearing the end of their remarkable adventure and, not surprisingly, they are getting excited

Paul: We're so close now it's getting exciting! We were going to try to get a push on for today (Wednesday) but it's more than likely we won't get there until Thursday morning, about 8 o'clock.

On Monday we came across a section where our speed suffered an awful lot, and we weren't really sure why. We rang the support boat and they told us that a lot of the boats when they get to about 100 miles out were passing through an area where there seem to be a lot of back currents. They told us that when we'd get to about 50 or 60 miles away our speed would pick up again and that's how it was for us. We were so pissed off on Monday. Losing a day at this stage seems like losing a week.

So much has happened since the last diary. We saw a massive sperm whale a couple of days ago. This huge thing - I stopped rowing and just looked around and saw it 50 metres behind us. I'd say it was 10 metres long (30 feet). It was enormous. It was drifting, coming towards us on the swell, and then it just stopped and went on its own way. It was kind of cool. It was worth waiting 80 days to see something like that.

On Saturday, the day after I'd dived down under the boat to clear barnacles, we spotted a shark, the first one we'd seen. It was literally a couple of feet from us and coming towards us. It moved fast. It wasn't very big, maybe four to six feet long, but I said, right, the barnacles can take care of themselves from now on.

A couple of nights ago we had a close encounter with a tanker. It was about four in the morning, Tori was rowing, and she spotted the lights. We got onto the radio and made contact. They were only two miles north of us. The funny thing is we had drifted two or three miles south - if we had held our course it would have been smack bang in front of us: all 150 metres and 18,000 tonnes of it. The second officer who we spoke to was very taken with the name of our little craft - he's getting married in two months to a woman called Christina.

Last Wednesday we had our best day and won some money on it. A friend of mine rang us from home over a week ago and said he'd give us 50 quid if we hit 60 miles as recorded by the official website. A couple of days later he upped it to 250 quid. On Wednesday we did 64 miles and I rang him. He was on holidays and hadn't seen the mileage. He said: "oh damn," then "fair enough".

Technically we've already crossed the Atlantic as we've crossed the line of longitude which marks that point. It was kind of meaningless for us as we were about a hundred miles away from where we're headed. It's a question of pride to make the actual finish line.

Before this trip, based on the times we had done in training we thought we could do the trip in 60 days - in fact we passed halfway after 54 or 55 days! A couple of things happened to us. I think the barnacles killed us. We were probably rowing for three weeks with half the Atlantic under the boat. And adjusting to the whole thing took time. I still don't think we could have made 60 days because of the awful weather.

We haven't thought about where we'll actually finish in the race, but somebody said to us the other day that once we finish, if we finish, we'll be ranked ahead of eight or nine other doubles, because six failed to finish and a few more which crossed the ocean didn't make it to English Harbour. I don't think anyone would have seen us in that position at the start.

Ideally we would have liked to come in ahead of a few pairs which finished. But we won't really give a monkey's about that. We'll have done what we set out to do, crossed the ocean. We'll be proud to have done that, because these have been the worst conditions the race has ever had.

There was no reason for us to think we could do this. We're not rowers, we have no ocean experience. It was out of self-belief that we thought "we can do this". It's a bit mad when we think about it. We look back and wonder why we thought we could do it, and it was just self-belief.

There was luck, of course. The boats that went down, that was bad luck. And there's a lot of mental toughness involved.

One of the first days we went down to Arklow and met Eamonn Kavanagh, who'd rowed the Atlantic in 1997, and we told him we weren't rowers so were we crazy to try and do it and he said no, this is about mental toughness.

He was right in the end.

(In an interview with Liam Gorman)

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