Coming to the end of Italy, my mind has started wandering to the next thing, the journey to Bari just the road to get there. Yet at the same time the knowledge that this will all end has made me hold on to it, and appreciate it more than ever.

With a strong headwind forecast for the next day, I pushed on and completed a 65km day. At the start of this trip a 65km day would’ve been a real grind, but today it felt easy, like I could’ve kept paddling forever. Having said that I’m definitely not completely recovered from the crossing, it took a lot out of my body.

A power station loomed on the horizon and I stopped in the town just before it, buying some amazing cucumbers, before carrying on to the beach just beyond. There was some flashing in the sky above the power station and I wasn’t sure if it was an airplane or lightning.

Lightning maps, a website that displays all the lightning strikes around the world live, confirmed it was lightning, and by the time I’d packed up my boat a vicious wind was ripping across the beach sending deckchairs and umbrellas flying. I ran to the nearest beach club and helped two guys tie everything down. It was a bit disappointing when no thunder arrived, but we watched the storm travel south, lighting up the sky and the container ships in the channel.

It’s about the same distance from here across to Albania as I did across the Gulf of Taranto. I imagined if I’d been 50km out to sea when a lightning storm rolled in. It easily could’ve happened – this storm wasn’t forecast. At one stage in the early morning when the sky was black to my south I thought a storm was coming.

As I write I’m still lying in that beach club. There’s no point wasting energy today (28th) battling in to a 15 knot headwind so I’ll rest up today. Plus I’m feeling too exhausted even to write properly. Last night I met Martina and two other girls who worked at the beach club and we sat around eating and talking till quite late. Then I went high in the night and must’ve injected too much insulin, because the next thing I knew my Dexcom alarm woke me at 3 in the morning and I was on 4.0. It takes a while for sugars to be absorbed into the blood, so since I was already at 4 when I started eating, I dropped to 2.1. it’s scary when you’re levels are plummeting and you know they can only go so low, so I overdid the sugar and then shot back up to 22. Ahhhhhhhhhgggggg. Managing t1d is tricky, there’s no wonder only about 20% of people achieve the glucose targets set by the NHS.

I never started documenting my diabetes management to say ‘look at me with my perfect sugar levels – this is how I do it’. I do think it’s possible to have good control whilst doing a trip like this, I just haven’t got there yet. My point is that I’m not letting it stop me – diabetes has to adapt to you, and not vice versa. If nothing else, I hope I’ve educated some people that t1d is a lot more than just sticking a needle into yourself many times a day.