Recent news that American adventurer Reid Stowe, 56, and his 19 year old girlfriend Soanya Ahmad had to halt their 1,000 day ‘Mars Ocean Odyssey’ an attempt to stay out of sight of land for 1,000 days, a similar amount of time that a manned mission to Mars would take – had me looking at their website.

The sheer quantity of branded merchandise on offer is staggering. You can put Stowe and Ahmad’s faces on, in order of taste: a T shirt (perfectly acceptable), kitchen clock (eccentric but forgivable), commemorative kitchen tile (a little strange), maternity wear (just plain weird) and to top it all, a thong (frankly disturbing).

There’s no accounting for taste, and you have to applaud any novel way of raising funds, but I wonder how many other sailors would be willing to rely on such ‘exposure’ to finance their dreams?