ROWING: After reaching halfway in their Atlantic quest Paul Gleeson and Tori Holmes celebrated with the obligatory bottle of champagne and a couple of cigars, discovered just why they were going slower than they thought and got the freaky feeling of being watched

Paul: A good week. We passed halfway on Monday - I think it may have been Sunday there and a mate of ours had put in a little present to mark the occasion. There was a half bottle of champagne and a couple of cigars with a lighter, a note and some chocolates. It was savage, just gas - there we are in the boat necking the bottle of champagne and smoking the cigars. And these huge dolphins come up to the boat and arc up into the air and back into the water. It was pretty cool.

We had a bit of a rest and re-energised ourselves.

We organised the boat, tidied up and changed a few things around to make life easier, and had a bit of a wash down ourselves, a good shower. I had a big, woolly beard and I shaved it off and Tori washed her hair for the first time since early on.

She was so happy. "I feel like a new woman!" she was saying.

Being clean again was nice.

We might have found out why we were going so slow. On Friday Tori was throwing the toilet contents over the side of the boat and noticed that there were barnacles just at the bow. We started wondering was the boat covered in them. I rang the support boat and asked what the story was with the shark attacks. They said we should be grand.

Tori kept her eye out for any big creatures with fins and I put on a safety harness and a survival suit just to keep warm and went down underneath the boat and spent two hours scraping barnacles off. The bottom was littered with clusters of goose barnacles - they're about the size of your thumb. After about 10 minutes I forgot about the sharks.

Tori started to row after I came up and straight away she said: "I can see the difference." We took the GPS (Global Positioning System) out and we could see that we were averaging nearly another mile an hour more than we'd got used to. In the next four hours we rowed more than we had in the seven before. It was like: 'Oh my God, we're not that shit after all!' Now every week or two we'll go down and do more scraping if it's needed.

We changed our rowing regime as well. We had a pattern, taking an hour together for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but now we're rowing right through and freeing up a four-hour stretch at night to sleep. We're still rowing 20 hours a day but we think this is more efficient.

We figure that if we do 36 nautical miles a day for the rest of the race we'll cover the second half in 35 days. That's our target. On Saturday we did 36 nautical miles and on Sunday we did 40, taking 40 directly off the distance to Antigua. That was our best day yet.

Monday was the first day of the second half, and even with a long rest, we did some mileage. By the time we do this next week we'd hope to have under 1,000 nautical miles to cover. We'll have little milestones.

We are conscious that we are going more to the south than we'd like. The swell and the wind is pushing us there. I spoke to the support boat people about this and they said there was nothing we could do. We're crossing the swell as much as we can, but we're about 40 degrees west and between this and 50 degrees a lot of boats have had trouble. I wonder did they have the same trouble and cut back a little bit too much and ended up capsizing.

We want to get back on track, but we're just trying to be safe, and the rule of thumb seems to be that the more west we get the more the waves will push you west.

We got a lovely text from Gags Towey - I actually kept it - saying: "Well done guys, enjoy every minute. I know it's hard, but it's a very special thing." He told us not to be in a hurry to use the drogue. At the end, and it was very nice, he said: "I'm really proud of the two of you." In the next few days we'll pass where Gags and Ciaran and American Fire capsized, so we'll be very conscious we'll be in the danger zone.

I felt really, really sad when I heard about the two guys in Spirit of Cornwall going down so close to the finish. They were probably talking about what they were going to eat when they landed, stuff like that. You're not safe until you step off the bloody boat!

I was talking to somebody on Saturday about the rugby match between Munster and Sale. I'm from Limerick and rugby would be my main sport. Tori said: "I don't think Munster will beat Sale." I asked her did she want to bet on it. We had a few fun-size Mars bars left, which were hers, and I said: "Go on, put you're money where your mouth is." She did, and she lost. It was like she'd lost her wallet or something. She was saying "Nooo!"

There have been an awful lot of people - people we don't know - texting us about the shadow. On Wednesday night - this is really freaky, and I'd be quite sceptical about these things - Tori was out rowing on her first night shift, from eight to 10.

She got this awful feeling - y'know when you feel there's someone standing straight behind you? She said she was too scared to turn around. When she came into the cabin she didn't say anything about this to me.

I was rowing from 10 to 12 and I got this real feeling that there was something behind me. I had shivers down my spine. I turned around and I got a flash of a black pair of pants and a black pair of shoes just on my left-hand side. I was, like: What the hell is this? I came back into the cabin when I was finished and told Tori about this and she went: "Oh my God, I don't believe it!" And then she told me what happened her.

We've got a load of messages. It seems it's well documented with sailors and explorers that they've experienced a sense of someone with them or a guiding presence. I don't know how true it is. Tori thinks it might be her great granduncle Jack Chalmers who sailed across the Atlantic twice.

In the book Touching the Void, by the climber Joe Simpson, he tells of how he felt when he was coming down the mountain that there was a little voice telling him: Get Out! Keep Going! Move! Maybe we're just under so much stress that we're getting spooked, and our senses are getting blurred. But Tori says that when you're out here your senses are heightened.

Peter and Eamonn Kavanagh, who did this in 1997, told us that before we see land we'll smell it. And every sense does seem to be really, really sharp. Tori thinks that maybe our senses are so sharp we're sensing something else, something that if it happened at home you wouldn't be conscious of or think anything of.

Of course we could be just going mad! If it is a guiding force I hope it's a good one. My Dad says that a lot of people in Limerick seem to be taken with this shadow. Yeh, maybe he's that 16th man - Munster's secret weapon!

(In an interview with Liam Gorman)

To contribute to the Gleeson/Holmes Concern Appeal text Row to 57252. Each text costs €2.