Open water swimmer Ben Lecomte has narrowly avoided confrontations with sharks on two consecutive days as he enters the second month of his bid to swim 5,500 miles across the Pacific Ocean.

It is 35 days since Lecomte entered the water on the Japanese coast and began his ambitious six-month bid to swim all the way to San Francisco, known as The Longest Swim.

He’s spent around 135 hours swimming and has covered more than 400 nautical miles already, but the 52-year-old Frenchman admitted he’s been finding the going tough over the past few days.

Two shark alerts were raised by his support crew within the past week, but Lecomte has prepared himself well and said he reacted quickly when he heard the shouts.

“I very quickly lifted up my head out of the water and looked into the direction they were pointed,” he wrote on his daily blog. “I couldn’t see anything. Maks told me it just passed about 50 meters behind us and kept on its course. They could see its fin and approximated its size to 2.5m.

“We stayed a couple of minutes at the same location and I tried to look below me for any sign of it but I didn’t see anything, so I decided on resuming swimming.”

The next day, he described the feeling when he heard the same alert from his crew: “I swam toward the RHIB, Ty was pointing in the direction toward my right saying ‘it is there about 20 meters away’.

“I looked but couldn’t see anything. Mark was trying to capture it on camera. We were all looking for it. And then in the waves, I saw the fin for a split second.

“I stayed in the water and looked under the water for a few more seconds and then I put a shark repellent bracelet on my ankle and resumed swimming. This was our only encounter of the day.”

Shark sightings haven’t been the only problem this week. Of greater concern to Lecomte was an ear infection that kept him out of the water for an entire day.

When he did return to the water after keeping his ear dry for 24 hours, he was able to avoid a swarm of jellyfish which were swimming around two metres below the surface.

Lecomte is also encountering increasing levels of ocean debris, but that has come as no surprise. He is heading for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and is using his swim challenge to highlight the issues of plastic pollution in the oceans.

Of his most recent day in the water Lecomte, who is wearing a TYR wetsuit for the swim, wrote: “The conditions started relatively good for the rest of the day.

“We still found plastic, I retrieved a big water bottle wrap floating right under the surface. This foreign object caught my attention when passing by my right and made me realise that there is no human life on or in the ocean, but yet every day we find the presence of humanity at its worst.”