Much of this journey has been a fight against wind and tide. Just a week ago, it seemed that I was at least three weeks away from closing the loop of the circumnavigation. A double dose of typhoons could easily have prevented completion. In actuality, I got lucky with the weather. A string of days with settled weather and kind south-westerly winds set up a trio of crossings that now puts me one short hop away from Onjuku, where the journey began.

No movement for a few days as we let big seas calm down. Before that I had a very satisfying trio of days.

Groundhog Day section. Wind is a distant memory. Every day since forever is paddled in part or in full. Trickles of breeze come and go, and are almost always on the nose. I no longer stow the paddle, since it will soon be needed again.

A great run yesterday down to Kushimoto, the southernmost tip of Wakayama Prefecture. This comes after 2-days-previous when I only made 4 nm, before nearby thunderstorms and my own tiredness advised as early stop; and yesterday when I put the hours in, but the very light headwinds limited progress to about 9 nm.

Lots of paddling lately. The last bit of wind was before a rainy rest day at Kochi City. Kochi sits in the middle of a roughly 150 km wide semicircular bay. The east side of the bay runs out along a peninsular - Cape Muroto - that juts out into the Pacific Ocean and is triangular and pointed like a shark's tooth.