It was half an hour before the boat was due to be hauled out. The new engine was due to arrive tomorrow. It was all going to be very expensive.

And then a woman I had never met before knocked on the coachroof: “I’ve been reading your blog. Your overheating trouble: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow? That’s what it was for us – just thought I’d mention it…”

I wish I knew her name. I’d like to thank her.

As readers who have been paying attention will know, Samsara’s venerable Nanni 21hp has been running hotter and hotter over the past several years. By the time I arrived in the Isle of Man, I had to sail into the harbour and then get a tow into the marina.

A succession of engineers pored over it at various times. All of them sucked their teeth and shook their heads. They examined the impeller; they suspected the heat exchanger. Nothing they did made the slightest difference.

I tried muriatic acid. I tried citric acid. I kidded myself there was a slight improvement.

I waited six days for the charmingly encouraging Pat Ryan to get one of his lads to have a look. In the end, I phoned Rab McCluskey in Douglas, who had been so keen on the heat exchanger. We came to the mutual conclusion that it was a 20-year-old engine. Maybe the time had come… it had given good service… every machine has a finite life…

The new one was going to cost just over £5,000.

I winced, but what could I do? I emptied the savings account.

Nobody had mentioned the exhaust elbow. Actually, I had never heard of the exhaust elbow.

And yet I heard about it a second time half an hour later. Scott Nelson, the Boatworks yard manager, hadn’t even got Samsara onto the slip when he said: “Before you go to all the trouble and expense of a new engine, I just wondered: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow?”

So we did. Bob the engineer took it off. It really is an elbow – a little right-angled piece of rubber hose, except it seemed to have lost its flexibility – hardly surprising when you considered that it was completely choked with carbon.

Honestly, you couldn’t see daylight through it. The tiny hole in the picture is only there because Scott poked it with a pencil.

“Can you cancel the new engine?” he said.

Actually, that was remarkably easy. It wasn’t about to arrive tomorrow. It was still in Holland.

Now I’m in Torquay, looking at YouTube videos about how to change your alternator and with a new mantra to remember: Diesel engines need to be run hard from time to time…

The exhaust elbow (or if it has another name, I don’t know it). The little hole wasn’t there when we first took it off.

The Aries never had a name.

I did try to call my windvane self-steering “Arnold” for a while, but somehow that didn’t stick. Instead, I called the rat that joined me in Santa Marta “Arnold”. It seemed entirely appropriate. Mind you, he never answered to it, and then I electrocuted him anyway – which made me wonder why I bothered to give him a name in the first place.

But names for self-steering gears are traditional. After all, anything that relieves you of the tedium of sitting at the helm staring at the compass for hours on end is bound to acquire a personality – if only out of gratitude.

The Raymarine Evolution tillerpilot, which brought us home from the Grand Banks to the Isle of Man (and finally packed up four hours out of Falmouth), was a good friend and shipmate whom I called “Eric”. I imagined him standing at the rail with his arms folded, staring out to sea, a sour expression on his face because I was late in reefing.

But the Aries remained “the Aries”.

And then it broke.

Actually, I broke it, we have now established, backing out of the slipway at Varadero in Aruba. It’s just that it kept on working until the servo-paddle hit something (ice?) 300 miles southeast of Newfoundland.

I intended to get it fixed. I sent it to Lean Nelis, who manufactures and repairs Aries vane gears in Amsterdam. But DHL didn’t tell me I needed to describe it as a “temporal import”, so the Dutch customs demanded duty and when it wasn’t paid, they sent it back.

To the Isle of Man.

I was in Ireland.

Don’t ask. It was a nightmare – partly because Lean went off sailing for six weeks (why shouldn’t he?)

Long story short, I cut my losses and bought a Hydrovane.

What a revelation! So much easier to use. So much less clutter in the cockpit – and you can have a Watt&Sea hydrogenator because there’s no servo-paddle to clobber it (or get knocked off by any passing debris).

I was looking at this latest addition, all brand new and impossibly tall, and the name came to me like a flash of inspiration: “Hawkins”.

Hawkins the Hydrovane.

This is Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. Only now he’s grown up – 17 or 18 at least. He’s done his RYA competent crew, a big strong lad with curly brown hair blowing in the wind, standing up there in a T-shirt in all weathers, volunteering to stand my watch if I want to get my head down (or finish When Harry Met Sally on the iPad).

A bit of me feels bad for having abandoned the Aries fraternity – I had one on Largo in the 1980s. It’s a bit like changing religion – or worse, moving to a new anchor.

Getting rid of the remaining bits of the Aries hasn’t been so easy. I did give three vanes, a bag of spares, and some other bits to a Dutchman in Guernsey, but his version wasn’t the Lift-Up. Somebody in Queensland is having the con-rod assembly for £50, which he described as “very generous”. I just want to get shot of it all, yet it seems like sacrilege to throw it in the marina skip.

So, if you’re looking for a base plate and the transom fastenings, or the tiller clamp – even half a metre of stainless steel chain, let me know…

Hawkins, the Hydrovane

The Aries: (just “The Aries”)

Here is an opportunity for somebody to acquire an Aries Lift-Up self-steering vane gear, possibly quite cheaply.
The Lift-Up version of this revered self-steering for yachts up to 50ft is quite the best Aries ever produced. It is the only one that can be upended and lifted clear of the water while underway. Indeed, you can take the whole thing off and stow it below. Jon Sanders took one with him on his record 11 solo circumnavigations (three of them non-stop). That’s all the recommendation you need.
First, the background to the sale: I bought my Rival 32 in 2017, and she came with the gear already fitted, but with the ball-and-socket joints which had worn and would “clonk”, reverberating through the hull. The company recognised this and offered permanent fastenings for the small base bracket. I changed to these early on.
In 2023, although it was still working perfectly, I reasoned that it could do with a service after all those years and sailed up to Amsterdam to deliver it to Lean Nelis, who now owns the Aries Vane Gear company, builds new ones and offers a repair service. He gave mine a new main shaft and some minor bits and pieces, including four new sacrificial sleeves for the servo-oar.
Then last winter, I was backing out of a slipway when the servo-oar hit an obstruction, and the new sacrificial sleeve broke (as it is intended to do).
What I did not know at the time was that while the holes in the new sleeve matched the holes in the new shaft, they were not in quite the same place on the old servo-oar. This may explain why the sleeve did not break until after the shaft had bent and one of the mounting struts had cracked.
But, of course, I didn’t notice any of this. I just replaced the sleeve and carried on. It still worked.
But, a few months later, when the oar hit something while underway, and the sleeve broke on cue, it didn’t work when I put it back together. Now it just wouldn’t hold a course.
When I reached my destination on the Isle of Man, I sent it off to Lean to fix again. However, DHL did not send it with the paperwork explaining that it was for repair and return, so Dutch Customs demanded import duty. When that wasn’t paid, DHL sent it back again.
To the Isle of Man.
Just as I was arriving in Ireland.
So now it had to be sent to Ireland, so that I could send it back to Amsterdam (but this time inside the EU, where it wouldn’t need any stupid-Brexit paperwork).
There was only one problem: Lean only had time to unpack it, establish that he could fix it – and then went off sailing (for the rest of the summer – as you do…)
He was due back at the beginning of September.
But I needed to set off for the Canaries by then. Last time I was delayed in setting off for the Canaries, I got knocked down. I didn’t want to go through that again…
So, I panicked (if in doubt, panic). I ordered a Hydrovane.
This is not to impugn the efficiency of the Aries. It’s just that with a Hydrovane, you can have a Watt&Sea hydrogenator (no servo-oar to clobber it) – and now with Lithium batteries, induction cooking and a Remigo electric outboard (with a bracket on the stern for powering through ocean calms) a Watt&Sea is kind of essential.
So, if you’re still with me, here is the situation: Lean has the main frame and the servo-oar, which he says he can repair. I have given him these to sell himself or dispose of as he sees fit. I don’t want them back.
I have all the rest – the vane assembly with three vanes, the mounting bracket (with cracked strut), the “A-frame” arms and turning blocks for the snaffle lines, stainless steel chain, tiller clamp and a bag of spares. If you have a wheel, Lean can supply what you need for that.
So, if you’re interested, I suggest you contact Lean at info@ariesvanegear.com and see what he would charge for his bits and a new strut to replace my cracked one. You will also need some sacrificial sleeves with holes in the right places.
Once you know his price, you could make me an offer for what I have.
If more than one person wants my stuff, I would put it up for a quick auction on eBay. It would have to be quick (with fast payment from the winner of the auction) because I am currently in the Channel Islands (meaning import duty for shipping to the UK), but I plan to go over to Torquay for a couple of days and could post if from there before heading south.
I’m sorry it’s all so complicated. Blame DHL (I always do…)

383 miles. Six Days, No engine. No self-steering. Two calls from the Coastguard: “Do you require assistance?”

No.

I came to Galway because it wasn’t Killybegs. I had been in Killybegs for a month for what we might call the “Major Works”, and there really isn’t much to the place apart from the boatyard.

Galway, on the other hand, is a favourite – full of music and gastro pubs. The fish and chip shop serves oysters…

Also, it was as far as I got in an attempt to sail to Cobh in County Cork to meet with the family for a weekend’s walking. The autopilot had packed up again – this time terminally. I ordered a new tiller drive and went to Cobh on the bus.

The other reason for being in Galway was that the engine was overheating (again). This has been the bane of my life for the last five years – you may remember the trouble in the Isle of Man. Now I couldn’t run it for even one minute. They had to tow me in.

But, yes, we had a lovely time rambling over the southeast coast, getting just a little bit lost and finding wonderful restaurants in unexpected places. Now it was time to move on. Pat Ryan Engineering had tried for six days to send someone to look at my engine, but clearly it just wasn’t going to happen, no matter how much Pat promised he would “absolutely, most definitely” try to get someone to me tomorrow. I went to the Harbour office to pay the bill. The lock gate would be open until 1541.

I’d love to know what I was doing at 1541. Certainly, I was very busy because, still with no engine, I proposed to put the little Remigo electric outboard on its new bracket on the back and go whizzing out with that. I checked the time. High water was 1400, and the one thing I know about Galway is that the lock opens for two hours each side of High Water – in other words, until 1600.

Except on this particular day, it was going to be 1541, wasn’t it? They’d told me so.

Sure enough, the little Remigo pulled me backwards out of the berth, spun me round (once I worked out that I couldn’t rely on the flow of water over the boat’s rudder and instead had to lean over the back and steer the motor itself.)

Eventually, we got out and into the main channel, where you can see out into the bay. Except, this time the view was blocked by the lock gates – the closed lock gates.

I tried again at 0200. I’d got the hang of the Remigo by this time, and we went humming down the channel to the (open) lock at 1.9kts (and only at half power).

Then it stopped. Since I had no idea why, I did the only thing I could think of and unfurled the headsail. It didn’t help. There wasn’t a breath of wind, but it did give me the time to realise I’d been fiddling absent-mindedly with the outboard’s remote control and turned it off.

Once we got out, the new drive unit for the autopilot packed up.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. As the display pointed out, the real problem was “low power”. I’ve been chasing this for months and spent a fortune on electronics engineers, but that didn’t stop me having to rely on the rather Heath-Robinson sheet-to-tiller arrangement that’s been steering the boat since The Scillies.

As it happens, I’m rather pleased with it: I’ve discovered that it also works downwind (as it’s supposed to, according to the book). It’s just that you’re better off without the headsail, downwind. This might explain why, as I write this, we’re doing only 1.8kts and it will take 26 hours to get to the waypoint off the Dingle peninsular. I sent an email to the Ocean Cruising Club saying I wasn’t going to make dinner on Saturday night.

Day One

Off the Dingle Peninsular.

It really is remarkable how far you can go if you don’t stop and have all the time in the world.  It appears I have now sailed 65 miles. Admittedly, that is in thirty-three hours, but I am now down at the bottom with only 13 miles to go to the waypoint off Tearaght Island.

It has to be said that the apparent wind is 0.0kts. I say “apparent” because the plotter shows us doing 0.71kts in the right direction. So, we will get there.

It’s a shame because I could have left on Monday night when the wind was still blowing. But if I had done that, I would have missed what I understood to be Pat Ryan’s “absolutely cast-iron promise” of an engineer coming out on Tuesday.

Now I’ve had a chance to think about this a bit more logically and realise that I’ve left messages with half a dozen marine diesel specialists in both Falmouth and Torquay, and only one has got back to me (and they’re in Dartmouth). Instead, I rang Rab, the friendly – but equally unreliable – Scotsman in the Isle of Man and had a frank discussion.

Years ago, I had been told that trying to get the heat exchanger off the engine would probably damage both beyond repair. Also, I looked up the previous owners’ maintenance log and found that the Nanni’s first service was back in May 2005. So, it is a full 20 years old. Also, don’t forget the boat has been in commission year-round for the past nine. Maybe this is just anno domini. Anyway, I’ve now ordered a new Vetus 27HP to be installed along with the Hydrovane self-steering and Watt&Sea hydrogenator.

This has all made a big dent in the savings. Another thing: I can’t stay on the boat while the work is done. This means  I shall have to find a cheap B&B – but it seems there’s no such thing on Guernsey. It’s a hotel at £160 a night or a tent (I did investigate campsites, but didn’t find one. Just as well, I hate camping, and by the time I bought enough stuff to make myself comfortable, I could probably stay in a hotel.)

And, I could get on and finish the second edit of The Voyage #3 (these things should be done quickly – ideally in one, intensive session. But it’s never happened…)

Meanwhile, the speed has dropped again. For long periods, the plotter records “0.0kts”. These are just the conditions I hoped would test the Remigo, but it’s cloudy and I don’t want to use electricity for charging – not if it means I won’t be able to make tea.

*

Well, here’s a fine kettle of fish. It’s half past one in the morning and I’m totally becalmed 2.7 miles from an exposed rock called Great Foze Rock (I remembered that because I’ve just entered it as a waypoint on the plotter – not that I ever intend to go there) or Inishtearaght Island, which 1.8 miles away and big enough to have a lighthouse. This is good, because when I woke up to the half-hour alarm, I was 1.5 miles from Great Foze Rock.

Four hours later, I was still floating about in more or less the same place with no hope of any real wind for at least another 18 hours. The predicament puts me in mind of a competitor in the Jester Challenge who was in a similar situation with engine trouble near the Scillies. Of course, they have much stronger tides there. He ended up calling out the Lifeboat.

I won’t need to do that. I still have almost a full charge in the Remigo – and, of course, in extremis, I could run the engine until it explodes. It’s going to be thrown away anyway.

In the meantime, I have tacked and tacked again. This may not sound like much, but remember, I have the storm jib sheet-to-tiller self-steering set up, which means that the headsail has to be furled to get round it, then the jib itself has to be switched from one bow cleat to the other. Next, in the cockpit, I have to pull the sheet out of two blocks (one single and one double) and re-reeve it on the other side – and finally, I mustn’t forget to set up the shock cord to the tiller as a counterweight.

I say “finally”, but it is not final at all: the next ten minutes are filled with tweaking to find the exact opposing tensions on the sheet and the shock cord to steer a course.

Admittedly, I have now added a second double block on the starboard side and another single on the tiller so that I don’t have to pull one sheet out and feed in the other every time (you can never have enough blocks).

In the end, the wind was so light that I ended up hand steering – and the tide still swept us ever closer to the rocks.

When the distance to the lighthouse was down to 1.2 miles, I started the engine. It ran for just over a minute before the temperature got to 62°C, and I turned it off. At least now I know its limits. By 4.30, I had given up any pretence of trying to make headway and ran off to the northwest – at least I was getting away from the lighthouse. As I write this, the clearance is 2.9 miles thanks to the tide (I just looked at the windspeed indicator and it said “0.0kts”.)

When would the tide would turn? I looked for the answer in my current copy of Reeds (current in my case meaning 2021). It told me “three-and-a-half hours ago”. Where did that come from? Anyway, I was just making my third honey sandwich – the apricot jam ran out with the first – when I heard the wind charger starting up, and now we’re 3.3 miles away from the lighthouse, doing 3.1 knots – not entirely in the right direction, but at least away from the damned lighthouse. We’re even heeling. I might be able to go back to bed.

Day Two

Off Valentia

A much better day. At one point, 17 knots of wind, and we’ve been storming along in the right direction. The “string-and-a-prayer” self-steering needs at least ten knots. I got so fed up with it that I tried the autopilot again, just in case all it needed was a rest. As usual, it worked for a minute or two and then announced “low power” and went to sleep.

I didn’t immediately disconnect it because the boat seemed to be managing all right. Then I realised it had stopped with the helm adjusted perfectly so that we just kept sailing along bang on course, so I carried on like that for four hours, eventually substituting shock cord lashings because I thought there might be a strain on the drive unit. Why I never tried this before, I have no idea. It’s much simpler. I left the storm jib lying all over the foredeck. It might fall in the water, but it couldn’t get away. In fact, it blew itself up against the spinnaker boom on the lee side and lay there like a Labrador with its back to a radiator.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. Writing to Boatworks in Guernsey about the new engine, I added a request for an electronics engineer to my email, but what they’re going to do, I have no idea – after all, it works when you test the voltages. It’s only when you use it for a while that it packs up.

When in doubt, I ring Dave Jones, the one-man MarineTech company in Wales who installed the thing – and much else, besides. He seems to think I’m a bit of a hero, so he’s always up for a phone call. I asked him if he had installed a fuse anywhere that might be a weak connection. He didn’t think so, but chatting about it, we decided the switch panel is probably as old as the boat, and so, very likely a weak point. Certainly, it would be worth replacing those two circuit breakers. Better still, a new panel altogether –  better than that even, a total re-wire of the boat. I asked how much he would quote if he was doing it: £3,000…

By pure chance, I enlarged the Navionics screen of the route to The Bull off Dursey Island and was surprised to see The Skelligs in the way. I hadn’t noticed them at all, which would never do because (1) they are hard and rocky and (2) they occupy a soft spot in my heart because last time I was here, I took two pictures a minute apart at sunset and they made perfect covers for The Good Stuff Book One and The Good Stuff Book Two.

I was going to give them a similarly wide berth this time, but it would have meant tacking, and that is a bit of a palaver with the storm jib to move and whatnot, so instead, I went between them – it’s not much more than half a mile, and a perfect opportunity to play with my new Steiner binoculars (a present to myself before Rab told me I needed a new engine).

Great Skellig – or Skellig Michael – is home to an early Christian monastery, and a rather odd one at that. While monks tend to go for a hard life, those who headed for the Skelligs liked their solitude on steroids. Their tiny stone hovels are there to see today. In fact, they’re so extraordinary that they starred in the Star Wars films, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. You can take a Star Wars tour, landing next to the little white hut in the picture and climbing up those precipitous stone steps.

Anyway, it’s cocktail hour. We’re doing five knots in the right direction over a smooth sea, and Tamsin brought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire when she flew in to Cork. Of course, being a liquid, she couldn’t take the rest of it back with her, so I’ve got half a bottle of gin aboard.

Gin is unusual aboard Samsara, because I can’t make ice, and you mustn’t drink gin without ice (all right, if you were in the Navy in the 1950s, you would have ordered pink gin from the mess steward).  Anyway, I’ve got a pack of those little cans of tonic and the fridge makes them passably cold – the slice of lime too. I think I might just have one with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I bought James, the Booker prize-winner which is about an escaped slave who buddies up with Huckleberry Finn, so then thought it made sense to do some preparatory reading. Maybe this will be one Booker prize-winner I actually enjoy.

Day 3

Well, we’re getting there. I woke up to find we had lost the Starlink signal as we set off on the long haul across the Celtic Sea to the Scillies. Actually, it’s only about 150 miles, but a long haul because I can expect calms or light headwinds from tomorrow onwards. Meanwhile, we’re doing a steady three knots over a calm sea, heading to the west of the course so as to be on the right side of the wind shift when it comes (don’t you just love the Windy app?)

Today is Saturday, and the Ocean Cruising Club dinner starts with a welcome drink on the terrace overlooking Falmouth Harbour at seven o’clock. Which I will miss. It’s a damn shame. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t just the engineer not turning up, or whether the lock gate opened two hours each side of high water or one hour nineteen minutes. There was also a small miscalculation in measuring the distance between Galway and Falmouth. Apparently it’s 383 miles, not 300…

So, all of this meant that I had allowed myself only two-and-a-half days to cover all that distance down the west coast of Ireland, across the Celtic Sea, from the Scillies to Land’s End and finally round The Lizard and up to Falmouth. Even at my record of 140 miles over 24 hours in the Gulf Stream, I couldn’t have done it. Anne, the OCC Port Officer, is going to see if she can get me a refund – at least on my half bottle of the wine allowance. It galls me that I’ll miss the port.

One of the last messages to come in before the signal died was Tamsin asking if I had ever been to Zell am See. She’s planning next year’s skiing holiday, and everyone says they’d like to go earlier than Easter, which we’ve been tied to by school holidays, even after all the children left school because Tamsin was working at East Suffolk College. Now she has a new job, she can take her holiday whenever she likes.

But I won’t be back from my South Atlantic Circuit by mid-March – not if Hugo comes to join me in the Canaries, and he can’t do that until sometime in November.

And now the sun’s come out. We should be making some decent electricity. I didn’t mention that on the first two evenings of this trip, I felt obliged to have a cold dinner while trying to preserve the batteries above 50%. I don’t really need to since converting to Lithium, but I don’t want to risk running them flat and losing the lights and the AIS.

By the time I get to Guernsey, I will have completed 1,100 miles without self-steering. By that I mean without a wind vane self-steering gear or an autopilot. I like to think that makes me something of an expert.

Of course, I will tip my hat to Andrew Evans who taught me how to do it, and give a plug to his book Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics for Singlehanded Sailing (Third Edition). The truth is that once you know the basics, you’re only at base camp. The rest is on-the-job learning – and what you learn is very likely only applicable to the boat you learn it on.

I can sit on the lee berth and write this undisturbed because, I have finally got Samsara sailing herself.

The trouble is that there are so many factors that go to make up the perfect balance. For instance, now she doesn’t like it with the jib tacked down to the starboard bow cleat – but apparently it’s all right tied to the tensioning nut on the anchor windlass. Although this is closer to the centre line, it is also a bit further forward.

Here are some other adjustments that make all the difference.

1. The height of the tack above the deck.
2. Whether the sheet is led inside or outside the spinnaker pole.
3. Tensioning of the headsail.
4. Tensioning of the mainsail.
5. Position of the car on the mainsheet track
6. One or two shock cords pulling the tiller to leeward.
7. Tension of the shock cords.
8. Tension of the sheet on the tiller (honestly, two clicks of the winch can mean a difference of 10°.)
9. There is also the option of setting the storm jib on a spinnaker pole ahead of the forestay. This involves a whole different set of adjustments all of its own – and, I would disagree with Mr Evans and say that on Samsara at least, it’s best to dispense with the headsail when running – it wouldn’t do much good anyway, being blanketed by the main.
10. And finally, everything depends on whether or not I’ve just made a cup of tea and settled down with Tom Sawyer – because that is sure to upset the apple cart.

Apparently, somebody called Tony Skidmore got it to work and sailed 17,000 miles in a 24-footer. It’s not a record I plan to challenge.

My father could be a bit of a show-off at times. I remember one occasion: We were all sitting around the table and Father undertook to shake the tomato sauce – you will remember that in those days it came in a conical glass bottle and, when less than half full, had to be shaken down to the neck before the sauce would come out. Father shook with a flourish. Above his head. With vigour.

This would have been fine. We would all have been impressed – if the top had been screwed on securely. It wasn’t – and the result was tomato sauce all over the ceiling, all over the walls, the carpet…

All over Father, come to that.

And us.

I have just managed something like the same effect, although on a smaller scale, with the hoi sin sauce all over the chart table, the Kindle, me…

Day 4

The Celtic Sea

I have hard-boiled the last two eggs. This was an admission of failure. I set out with five, which I thought would be ample – in fact, I only boiled three of them for the fridge, reasoning that I might arrive in Falmouth at night and need them fried with Tomatoes, Marmite and toast for breakfast. In fact, I shall count myself fortunate if I don’t have at least one egg-less breakfast before I get there.

If you’re interested, I eat them with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in one hand, adding more with every bite. The secret is to aim it at the yolk where it soaks in. If you hit the white, it just runs off all over your fingers. Did you know that in Central America, they try to copy it and call it Salsa Inglesa? It’s not the same.

I definitely need a Watt&Sea. We’ve been sailing into 15kts apparent wind with the wind charger whirring away all night, but when I got up, the batteries were still only at 42%. Now that I’ve boiled the last eggs and made a cup of tea, they’re down to 38%. I’ve angled the two solar panels on the guardrails – the “wings” – to face the sun, but it still may be cold dinner tonight. Certainly, it will be a beer instead of a cup of tea for lunch.

And now I’m wishing I had switched Starlink to “Global” mode. It’s crazy. It would have made sense if I decided I didn’t need it and switched it to “Pause”. Instead, I’m still paying for unlimited data within ten miles of land, when after all this time, I’m still 50 miles from land.

No sooner had I written that, than the phone went “ping” and, for a magic moment, I thought I had a connection, but it was only the calendar reminding me it’s time for the OCC raft-up – and I’m 80 miles away (or 200 with the wind as it is.)

Also, it would be really handy to know whether I should tack. The last forecast I had showed calms all over The Scillies by now, but I’m still doing very nicely into 12kts apparent.

Very nicely, but in the wrong direction.

Out of nowhere, a big French yacht. I wouldn’t have known he was there but for a call on the VHF. Before I answered, I checked the plotter, and there he was, just crossing my stern, I didn’t even register the name. Why hadn’t I heard an alarm? I didn’t even have any music playing. Still, there was nothing for it but to answer: “Station calling Samsara. Say again.”

In good but heavily-accented English, he said he had crossed my stern two minutes ago and noticed there was something wrong with my staysail.

I took great delight in telling him: “My windvane is in Amsterdam and my autopilot is broken, so I am steering with my storm jib sheet lashed to the tiller. It works very well, but it looks a little odd…”

I could tell he was impressed. It was just as well I was on starboard tack and had the right of way. Otherwise, he might think I hadn’t been looking…

There is hope: It’s eight o’clock on Sunday evening, and I was planning on getting to the waypoint to tack round to the west of the Scillies before starting dinner. Now I’m not so sure. The wind has veered a little. Maybe I should beat down the inshore passage. It’s only 12 miles and easy if you get the tide with you… which I might manage. If not, it just takes longer, but I could steer for that long (didn’t I manage five hours or something in that gale of the Northwest coast of Ireland?)

The great advantage of this tactic is that it gets me into mobile phone range by about six o’clock tomorrow morning – which means a forecast (OK, so it’s a bit late for a forecast. By then, I’ll be committed to the inshore passage).

Also, it means I can start dinner now.

Day 5

20 miles north of St Ives

If we keep going, we’ll end up in Bristol. Surely I must be able to tack for the inshore passage round Land’s End by now, but I kept waiting for daylight and of course, it’s the end of August, and dawn is coming up later and later. So, when I did finally put about, we could lay the course easily without me having to steer. Indeed, the 60° off the wind which is what the sheet-and-a-prayer system seems to prefer, actually puts us ashore in St Ives Bay. That might be the tide which turns with us in two hours and might just sweep us all the way down to Gwennap Head.

Well, that didn’t end well. In fact, over the next 36 hours, so much was happening that I didn’t get to write a word about it as it was happening. When I finally arrived at the top of the inshore channel, everything seemed to be going swimmingly – but of course, that was only because I had the tide with me. Once it was going the other way at a couple of knots, it was a different story. The Navionics track reminded me of that awful beat back to Mindelo in The Voyage #2. But then I was under threat of arrest and incarceration in a Cape Verdean prison.

This time, I had the option of stopping – and that seemed like a brilliant idea. I could anchor somewhere and wait for the next favourable tide (about 2100, it seemed). I could have dinner… a bit of a kip without worrying about the boat tacking herself. Whitesand Bay looked ideal. But suddenly the good progress came to an end and I fetched up in some place called The Crown, a grim indentation of sheer cliffs with strange ancient buildings on the top – towers and lookout posts, long since deserted… or so I thought…

I heaved the anchor over. I had planned in 20 metres. In fact, when I checked, it was 23. So, I had 90 metres of chain down there. It’s amazing that the sound of an anchor chain grinding its way across rock can be transmitted to the surface loudly enough to drown out Dr Hook while the skipper is frying onions.

It was a morose meal. For one thing, I wasn’t frying onions, I was just overheating the other saucepan because I had got my hobs mixed up (I do this all the time since converting to electricity and getting a twin hob induction cooker.)

Then I tried to get some sleep while aware that the anchor was dragging very slowly over the rock.

The trouble with rock is that not only does it not, some of the time, allow the anchor to get a hold, but there is always the chance that the anchor might get a very good hold like, for instance, being stuck under a rock where no amount of pulling will get it free. What was I to do then? Cut free the bitter end and buy a new anchor and chain (and the very expensive, top-top-of-the-range swivel)? Buoy it with a fender and offer a reward to some enterprising fisherman with a hydraulic winch?

Meanwhile, there was nothing I could do and, at about half past eight, I gave up on the idea of sleep and prepared to set off again. I turned off the anchor light and switched to the masthead tricolour to show I was “under way”. Even if I wasn’t yet.

Clearly, I wasn’t. About ten metres of chain came back aboard (agonisingly slowly) and then stopped.

Of course: I had no engine, nothing to put any amps into the lead/acid engine start/windlass battery while I was drawing 1000watts grinding in the chain. To give me credit (I need all the credit I can get), I had thought of this and had the little 7-amp charger plugged in, drawing from the Lithium bank. Still, you can’t expect a 7amp charger to keep up with 1000W… all right, I never did understand Ohm’s law…

So, there I was with 80-metres of chain out – not forgetting the20kg anchor on the end of it – around 130kg all told…

OK, so I tried pulling it by hand.

It nearly pulled me in, and I lost a couple of metres during the learning curve.

What you do in this situation is use the powerful cockpit sheet winches. I tied a long 10mm line to the chain hook, led it through the staysail fairlead and onto the winch.

And started grinding.

By the time I was out of breath, the hook was back at the fairlead – half the length of the boat… about five metres…

Here is the routine for pulling up an anchor using a sheet winch.

• Once the hook is back at the fairlead, go up to the foredeck and get a rolling hitch onto the chain and take the strain on one of the foredeck cleats.
• Then you can go back to the cockpit and cast off the winch.
• Next, go back to the foredeck and feed half the chain on deck down into the chain locker (it doesn’t want to cooperate in this, and a good bit of jiggling ensues.)
• Pull the chain hook forward to attach it again as far forward as possible.
• Take up the slack on the sheet winch
• Cast off the rolling hitch.
• You have now regained your breath and are able to start grinding again.

Congratulations, you have just pulled up five metres of chain. Only 75 to go…

I got into a rhythm after a while – added little tweaks, like leaving enough chain on deck to get dragged back to the fairlead. I thought I was doing quite well. Then someone shone a very bright light at me.

It came from the top of the cliffs, presumably from one of those ancient structures that seemed to be not so deserted after all. Obviously, somebody couldn’t understand why a vessel showing running lights wasn’t moving. I nipped down and switched them off. Turned on the anchor light instead (after all, I was still very clearly anchored). The light went out. I returned to my routine.

Then I noticed the phone ringing. I well remember the first time I heard a phone ring on a boat, and how peculiar it seemed. When I started sailing, people went off on boats to get away from the telephone – doctors in particular. It still seems an intrusion. I ignored it.

I ignored it when it rang again. Eventually, I looked at the screen. This was Tamsin calling. She was used to me not picking up if I was busy. I would see she had called. I would ring back – but this level of persistence spoke of some urgency. Immediately, I thought of the children and the kind of disasters parents imagine at times like this. I stabbed the green button: “Look, I’m a bit busy. Can I call you back?”

“This is urgent,” said Tamsin. She had received a call from the Coastguard. Did she know where I was? Did I need assistance? Would I call 999 and report my emergency…

I called 999, but they were only interested in Fire, Police or Ambulance. They didn’t appear to have heard of the Coastguard. I tried VHF and got through immediately. I assured Falmouth Coastguard that I did not need assistance: “I’ve got no engine, and so I have no power to the windlass, and I’m having to get the anchor up by hand. Also, being singlehanded and with no self-steering, it’s proving a fairly difficult passage, but I should be underway again soon.’

And yes, I would be sure to inform them when I was… and, when I arrived in Falmouth. Thank you. Goodnight.

It still took me two-and-three-quarter hours of traipsing back and forth to the foredeck, grinding on the winch, feeding the chain down through the hole before the 15metre marker crawled over the bow roller.

Interestingly, the depth recorder was showing 23metres at the time. How do you explain that?

One way and another, I must be nearly there. Maybe the battery had recovered a bit. They do that if you leave them. I was just about to try the windlass again, when I remembered the trip switch. If the motor finds it just too much like hard work and things are in danger of overheating, the trip switch with call a halt to proceedings. Sure enough, that was the problem. I turned it back on and the last 15 metres came aboard in a rush – and with the anchor on the end, I was pleased to see. Not stuck under a rock.

Now why didn’t I think of that two and three quarter hours earlier. Put it down to Not Thinking. But then, if you’ve read my autobiography Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier, you’ll know all about that.

Of course, the tide was turning again. You can’t have everything.

Day 6

It took forever to get round Land’s End and across Mount’s Bay, and then came The Mother of All tangles. By this time, I had lost patience with the “String-and-a-Prayer” system and had reverted to two shock cord lashings on the tiller, pulling opposite ways (which often led to pointing in opposite ways), but I had left the storm jib up, flapping ineffectually.

For sheets, I was using the long, long 8mm lines that normally sheet the Super Zero. They are, in fact 17 metres long, almost twice the length of the boat, so I reasoned they were hardly likely to pull all their length out of the four blocks on each side.

Which is why I did not put stopper knots on the ends.

Which is why, when they did pull out and went flying away in a squall just past the Lizard, they tied themselves into the biggest knot I have ever seen. Really, I wish I had taken a picture of it. If you imagine two 17 metres lines convulsed into a haphazard bundle that would fit conveniently inside the galley gash bucket…

No, that doesn’t do it: Try thinking of what happens when the cat gets into Auntie Nelly’s knitting basket. Now translate that into Liros 8mm polyester braid…

Well, it was a big tangle. Of course, what I should have done was drop the storm jib on top of it, bundle the whole lot down the forehatch and worry about it when I got in. I could have taken a picture of it, too.

But no, that would be too sensible (see the book recommendation above). Instead, I settled down on the foredeck to untangle it straight away. It’s easy enough. All you need are two ends (or in this case, four), a modicum of patience – and all the time in the world. It took me 40 minutes, which I thought wasn’t bad.

Unfortunately, during this 40 minutes, the tide turned again – and began dragging me back to the west… right into the race off the Lizard.

I was vaguely aware of the white water, and how it was getting closer. But it didn’t look that bad and I hadn’t got wet yet…

It was when I was emerging from the cabin, fully suited-up in my brand new Irish Guy Cotten oilskins that I heard the Coastguard calling me once more.

For Heaven’s sake, what now?

A member of the public, a fellow yachtsman, was sitting in a café on the cliffs and had been watching me for some time. He was concerned, so he had called the Coastguard – and, of course, the Coastguard are duty-bound to investigate all reports, no matter that they be made over cream tea…

I assured the man, once again, that I did not need assistance – adding that I would appreciate if he would pass on my thanks to the concerned fellow-yachtsman.

And so, finally, eventually, I anchored under sail in Falmouth Harbour off Trefussis Point where there’s no danger of hitting anyone else since the Harbour Master started charging for anchoring absolutely anywhere in his jurisdiction, so you might as well go into the Haven anchorage and leave your dinghy on the dock instead of climbing up ladders – and then coming back to find the tide’s gone out and you’ve got a walk through the mud.

So, I got everything stowed away, had a cup of tea and popped the Remigo electric outboard onto the stern. It had got us out of Galway – but that was in a flat calm. How would it fare with a 10kt headwind?

Just fine, as it turned out. We whirred the half-mile over to the other side at a steady two knots on half power, turned round (on a sixpence again, thanks to the ability to lean over the back and steer it). Just remember that while the Remigo will keep you going once you have some momentum, it doesn’t have much in the way of stopping power. Still, no harm done and dinner at Balti Currie (it’s a tradition).

Galway nightlife

..and by day

The RemigoOne electric outboard – moving a 5,500 kg Rival 32 at 1.9kts (on half-power!)

The sheet-to-tiller (string-and-a-prayer)self-steering

…and in downwind mode.

…meanwhile, in the cockpit.

Or steering by shock cord…

Great Skellig

..star of Star Wars.

You know you’re in a different league when the shipwright suggests making the new hatch cover out of aluminium.

But I did say that Mooney Boats in Killybegs on the northwest coast of Ireland caters primarily for fishing boats. Big fishing boats. There’s a Killybegs boat working the waters of Chile at the moment.

I came here because it was the only yard I could find that would let me stay on board while the boat was out of the water – and also had the trades available for the long list of repairs and improvements I had been working on in the two years since the last refit at TLC Marine in Conwy.

And what a good choice it turned out to be.

Take a look, for instance, at the bracket for the electric Remigo outboard. I have written elsewhere about my idea for whirring silently through calms as the big 400W solar panel recharges the internal battery almost as fast as it discharges. We shall see how well this works, but it was getting the angles right that worried me.

I had drawn pages of diagrams and even tried to measure the slant of the dinghy transom with the chart table protractor. At Mooney’s they just set up a laser on a tripod.

And note the forklift truck – so much easier than setting up staging to work from. In fact, I didn’t see a ladder in the whole place – let alone the usual boatyard variety with hooks for scratching topsides. Instead, they gave me a steel staircase for climbing aboard (delivered by forklift, of course).

What about freeing the pulpit nuts? They’d been there since the boat was built, and over the ensuing 52 years had morphed into putrid brown blobs with no discernible flat surfaces to hold a spanner. I didn’t even notice they were off. I would have liked to have seen it, only there’s no room for more than one in the chain locker.

That’s why I had to have a new electrician. The first one, an enormous man who had clearly never been on such a small vessel before and had to squeeze through the companionway like toothpaste, pointed out (very reasonably) that if he tried to get under the chart table to disconnect the aerial for the AIS, he would probably cause more damage than I had already. The idea of him getting into the forepeak to move the windlass controller out of the damp was simply laughable.

I got to know most of them over the month I was there. They were called Sean and Seamus and Darron with and ‘o’ and Damien with an ‘e’. They treated me with amused tolerance – especially when they heard what I get up to and that I’m all on my own – and that was before they discovered how easy it was to drill all those holes through Samsara’s fibreglass hull.

But as the days went by, the list grew shorter: The great chunks of stainless steel to bolt through to backing plates for the Jordan Series Drogue; the ingenious washboard-cum-cockpit table and finding a way to stop the chart table emptying itself if the mast goes below the horizontal (like it did 400 miles north of the Canaries two years ago.)

In all, there were 94 hours of labour on the bill. But Mooney’s charge is only €55 an hour.

That’s less than £48!

I can only think I was getting some sort of pensioner’s discount. As Lee Mooney, the Managing Director, gave the OK to put me back in the water, even though the bank transfer hadn’t actually reached their account (“you have to have a little trust,” said Lee), there was certainly a lot of interest in where I was going next.

“Only to Galway.”

I didn’t want to frighten them.

The new aluminium cover for the lazarette

The washboard doubles as the cockpit table – now locked in place by pins holding it into a slot at the back of the cockpit and the pin on the tiller for the autopilot – ingenious.

The forklift, the staircase and the laser for getting the angles just right…

The chandlery is a bit startling…

…and they are just right.

Outboard stowage

The “Voyage” books have become something of a success. People like the “stream-of-consciousness” style. They say it is like going along for the trip (without the discomfort and worries about running out of beer).

So, it occurred to me that when I made a passage of more than a couple of days, I might log them here in the same style. Let me know what you think.

Depart Crosshaven 1100hrs Sunday July 6^th 2025

It’s Ireland. It’s different.

Everything takes a little longer. You mustn’t worry about this – which is why the passage from Crosshaven to Killybegs is going to take as long as it takes.

I was in Crosshaven for ten days. I shouldn’t worry about that because I was planning to be there for at least six weeks while Samsara came out of the water for the engine inlet seacock and the outboard bracket and the anchor plate and… oh, a whole list of things.

But the one thing I hadn’t checked was whether I could stay aboard while it was all going on.

Sorry, that would invalidate the yard’s insurance policy.

And Kinsale Boatyard’s… and the one at New Ross. It was the same at Old Court and Hegarties. Sligo didn’t have a boatyard at all (but an amazing music scene, apparently). The few who would allow me to sleep aboard, like Carlingford, apologised that their tradesmen were booked solid through to the end of August.

So, I’m going to Mooney’s at Killybegs. You really can’t get more Irish than a name like “Mooney’s” – and wouldn’t anybody sail around the whole island just to arrive in a place called “Killybegs”?

It turns out that Mooney Boats is the biggest boatyard in Ireland with absolutely the best chandlery. Fishing boats come from all over the country for a refit at Mooney’s – even from France.

And Mooney’s will let me stay aboard.

So yesterday I caught the bus into Cork to collect my bike, which was supposed to be ready on Tuesday (yesterday was Saturday, but the mechanic hadn’t come in to work on Monday, or Tuesday… or, come to that, at all.)

I was very philosophical about this (these things happen).

I was philosophical about the autopilot packing up just outside the harbour, too.

Regular readers will recall that it packed up just off the Scillies on the way here, and I steered the rest of the way with a Heath-Robinson storm jib and sheet-to-tiller arrangement. You will be pleased to hear this is now much more sophisticated, involving no fewer than three blocks (and works better than ever).

I did, while I was skittering about the decks rigging it, wonder about Eoin the electrical engineer who had spent two hours (at €80 an hour) remaking all the connections into one totally waterproof lump that bypassed the plug-and-socket arrangement that really doesn’t have a place in a small boat cockpit.

After I spent another half hour, hove-to off Roberts’ Head, undoing all his good work and replacing it with my own, the screen still announced “Low Battery”, so I suspect there’s more to it than just a duff connection. Something else for Mooney’s…

I’m not complaining. I don’t want to have to turn north until the “orange wind” on the Windy App has moved off in the direction of Cornwall.

In fact, all the way down the east coast and along the southeast coast, I didn’t even bother with the storm jib system. We were hard on the wind and so I just let the tiller swing free and Samsara plodded on in her own sweet way at four knots, never quite getting into irons and never falling off the wind. Good sailing boats, Rivals.

I was in bed by ten o’clock and slept in 20 minute stints (it would take half an hour at five knots to hit anything). Then, as we drew further off the land, the kitchen timer counted down from 30 minutes and finally, just as I was going into the (empty) Fastnet Traffic Separation Scheme – a whole hour! What Luxury!

Day 1. Monday June 7^th. Off Baltimore.

And so, out into the Atlantic. The wind’s in the northwest, and I’m tracking just south of west. The wind is due to turn into the west (Windy says on Tuesday night.)

Tamsin called off Mizen Head. She’s making arrangements for the family’s Irish Weekend. It’s morphed from a City Break in Dublin to a Walking Weekend in Kinsale at the end of August. Will I stay on the boat or in the Air BnB? (with everyone else in the AirBnB, of course).

Tried the autopilot again. The ram goes in and out, which is better than before, but it won’t hold a course. I did think of cutting more off the unit’s end of the cable and joining it up again. I must say I’m surprised Raymarine don’t use tinned cables for something that’s going to be sitting out in the cockpit in all weathers – and this one certainly did for the last half of the Atlantic crossing.

All day, I headed offshore. At some stage, the wind is going round to the west but not for another day – or half a day, depending on which forecasting model you believe. By six o’clock, I decided 40 miles was enough. I could always put another tack in – although, writing this after tacking the self-steering, I’m not in such a hurry to do it again. Just imagine it:

First you furl the headsail (and discover the furling line has got itself round the midships cleat because you didn’t tie it off).

Then all the blocks have to be moved from one side to the other, while the storm jib flaps like a mad thing. This turns the sheet into an offensive weapon.

Then there’s the inevitable mistake.

In this case, the mistake is in thinking that, if you ease the storm jib halyard a bit, you will be able to transfer the tack from one bow cleat to the other.

Not in a healthy Force 4. Instead, what happens is that the sail seeks to lift you off the deck and dump you in the water – at least, it pulled me right across the foredeck before I had to let go and watch it flying out to leeward on the end of its halyard and very long sheet (really, the spinnaker pole downhaul/preventer line).

Naturally, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place and dropped it on deck (without first dropping it in the water – I was rather pleased).

After that, it was all fairly straightforward – re-reeving the sheet through all four sheaves, gybing round (despite what the storm jib wanted to do) and finally getting down to a lot of tweaking and adjusting to get the needle on the wind indicator up to 40°.

…only to have to do it all again because I decided I had too much sail for 19kts and reefed the main. This was better than winding in the headsail because the storm jib is blanketing much of that anyway.

Still, we’re making quite a respectable course – with a bit of luck, we might clear Slea Head. The wind must change by then, surely. Slea Head is on the end of the Dingle peninsular. That’s 55 miles away.

All I have to do is get used to the sound of the flapping. You’d think I’d have acclimatised by now – that my subconscious would have learned to shrug and say: “Bloody storm jib flapping itself to bits”.

It is too. A new storm jib is one of the jobs on the sailmaker’s list. I only hope this one lasts to Killybegs. I wouldn’t like to have the staysail flapping in its place.

It’s 2.30 in the morning, and I’ve just sat down to a flask of tea with an unintentionally large slug of rum in it (the boat lurched).

I was going to write about the correct way to tack the sheet-to-tiller steering, but:

1. The soft shackle holding the forward sheet block came undone – amazingly, both shackle and block managed to stay on deck. I’ve got a snap shackle on there now.
2. Letting the sheet flap while I move the storm jib across means I get knots in it, which jam in the sheaves.
3. I’ve forgotten what the third thing was. But I did forget to shake out the coil of the reefing pennant on the main – which then tied itself into a fist that I had the devil’s own job to untangle.

All that effort, and we’re almost sailing back along the same track we came up. I didn’t want to carry on sailing towards the coast in the hope that this supposed wind shift to the west would lift us round the Skelligs. What if it doesn’t? Anyway, I shouldn’t sleep very well waiting for the crash.

Now I wish I’d stuck to my course and stayed up all night reading Maeve
Binchy and watching Netflix. It’s not as if I needed the rest – I slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then had another hour before all this became an issue.

At least we’re close enough to connect to Starlink and pick up messages. It was particularly gratifying to find a couple of enquiries about the health supplement – nothing unusual about that, only this time the link opens up the new page with the BalanceOil. I must say, I’m rather excited about that. Is “Game-Changer” the buzzword?

Mind you, I did forget to take it this morning – blame the different breakfast routine at sea. This meant I had to knock it back with nothing to take the taste away… although, it’s not particularly the taste (I think I have the lemon and mint flavour). It’s more that there’s no getting away from the fact that it is, as it says, oil. I believe that if I can’t get used to it, I can take in tablet form.

For the rest of the night, I woke up periodically (for some reason every 50 minutes on the dot) and grabbed the phone to see how we were progressing towards the point at which I judged we could tack again (for the last time) and then have a clear run into Donegal Bay. Then, very late, somewhere around seven o’clock, I had a dream.

The dreams usually kick in after about a week and, as readers of The Voyage books will be aware, the singlehander’s dreams can be spectacularly weird. For a long time I couldn’t have told you what they were about because – famously, the brain is designed to forget them within two minutes of waking up. But I have a secret formula: I grab my phone, stab the “Voice Recorder” app – and then record five minutes of “um’s” and “aah’s” and yawns and grunts.

With luck, sometime later when I’m sitting on the leeward berth with the laptop on my knees, I will replay it and write down something like this:

All my best newspaper articles were going to be published in an enormous book – and I do mean “enormous”. It measured about a metre from top to bottom, like one of those illuminated manuscripts copied by generations of monks.

Except in the case of my book, the illustrations were by Quentin Blake, who did the drawings for the Roald Dahl books. The trouble was that the only copy had been lost at sea for many years and had now been brought up from the sea bed for me to clean up.

It was a dreadful mess – covered in seaweed and encrusted with barnacles. I set out to clean it in a small kitchen area beside the book department of Harrods. I had a hose and a scraper and had set the thing up on a wooden stool and was hosing away merrily. All the slime and encrustation washing off and onto the floor.

That was when the head of the book department walked in – a distinguished grey-haired gentleman in a tail coat and wing collar. You could tell before he opened his mouth that he knew his Goethe from his Gresham. However, what he said was: “What on earth are you doing?”

So, I had to explain, and he said: “Oh, we don’t need any of that. We’ve got our own copy.”

And he was quite right. He took me off to show me. But the problem was that in his copy, all the pages were mixed up. Teams of nurses in starched white uniforms with little starched white caps were trying to make sense of hundreds and hundreds of enormous pages, none of which were numbered. The nurses were getting flustered. I went to the head nurse and explained that all this was completely unnecessary because I had a complete edition. The head nurse insisted that hers was a special edition – it may have been the Manchester edition or the Birmingham edition or something. Anyway, it was special, and I should stop trying to clean up mine and help her get hers sorted out.

Well, this didn’t make any sense to me, so I just shrugged and went back to washing mine down and making an awful mess, which ran out of the kitchen door and onto the sales floor. That was when the head of the book department came back and said: “Really, this won’t do,” all over again.

This time, the problem was that Harrods had Jewish customers and I was hosing shellfish all over the floor.

I protested that nobody was asking the customers to eat the shellfish. In fact, once the book was cleaned up, nobody would be any the wiser. But the head of the book department just flapped his arms about – which made him look even more like a big black crow. In the end, I walked off the job.

After that, it really was time to get up. I was now 30 miles offshore, and the angle to clear the islets of Slea Head was plenty good enough, so time to tack again – but remembering last time, I had breakfast first.

And just as well I did too. This time, I set the stopwatch function to time myself. This time it was going to be done right!

It started to go wrong within five minutes for reasons I can’t be bothered to remember. I know that when the stopwatch had reached 14 minutes, I had to start all over again.

By the time I was finished and we were sailing again, the stopwatch showed 37 minutes. But you have to add the 14 to that…

Day 2 Tuesday 8^th July. Off Bantry Bay

The wind has fallen light.

Not seriously light. If I had the super zero, we would be romping along. If I had some proper self-steering, we’d be doing three knots in the right direction. But with this concoction of string and blocks and shock cord and an old sail flying free, we were all over the place.

I tried everything I could think of, but in the end, the only thing to do seemed to be to motorsail. Actually, it did the trick. With just enough apparent wind to fill the storm jib, we are now heading for a compromise of going close enough to pick up the Starlink signal while still keeping off the rocks.

One of the best things about this sort of life is that you can give in to your whims. I was standing at the companionway looking out and saw the port solar panel had flipped up – the line holding the outside edge down had come undone, and the wind had got a hold of it. So I just abandoned what I was doing and spent the best part of an hour reorganising both panels.

The idea of just hanging them on the guardrails instead of clamping them to expensive custom-made rigid stainless steel tube is something I picked up from a Dutch boat in Colombia. But that boat had a jam cleat setup. It looks messy and, as far as I can see, just complicates the issue. As soon as I get to Killybegs, I’m going to install a couple of little cleats on the deck – nobody walks there anyway. Meanwhile, it was fun to have a diversion.

I think I’m going to enjoy this evening. First, I put on long trousers, socks and a fleece – and here is the really exciting part: I turned on the heating.

Really! I have a little fan heater for use when I’m hooked up to the mains in marinas. Except this evening, there was a definite chill in the air (see “trousers”), and after a sunny day with a steady wind, the batteries were up to 100%, so I thought: “Why not?”

And bingo! In ten minutes, I was as warm as toast. Mind you, it did consume more than 100A, and pretty soon the batteries were down to 96%. But this is such a small space, I just turned it off.

Until I felt that chill again – and switched it back on for five minutes. Meanwhile, the wind charger is going all the time and producing 100W (I don’t pretend to know the correlation between Amps and Watts. Well, I know the theory. But what good did knowing the theory ever do anyone?)

Windy suggests the wind is going round to the south early tomorrow, and the sheet to tiller arrangement is only good down to a broad reach. Beyond that, I have to switch to a sheet-to-pole-to-tiller system. I can’t believe how well the current setup is working. Honestly, I think it has called for less adjustment than the Aries.

All night we sailed quietly up the west coast, past Dingle Bay and Ballybunion. Past Tralee. At times, it was so quiet, I thought we were becalmed, but then I would look at the Navionics app on my phone and see we were doing five knots with the little red line flicking unerringly around the waypoint off Blacksod Bay. The alarm went off at one-hour intervals just so I could check that we were still going in the right direction. Most times, I didn’t even bother to get out of bed. There didn’t seem to be any traffic out here. Anyway, anything I did meet would have AIS, and I seemed to have become attuned to the somewhat apologetic beep of the alarm.

I finished Maeve Binchy’s Nights of Rain and Stars, which ended as happily and hopefully as any Maeve Binchy will (but with just a frisson of uncertainty because that’s life…)

Next is The Wide Wide Sea, the story of Captain Cook’s last and fateful voyage. It’s a bestseller, although I had never heard of it. I think it was a Kindle Daily Deal. Between that and Kindle Unlimited, I get a lot of cheap reading.

Day 3 Wednesday July 9^th.  Off Tralee

How about this? The last alarm went at 7.30 in the morning. I looked at the screen, and we were still on course, sliding over a flat sea at five knots. I reached down and switched on the heater. I didn’t get up until the cabin was a reasonable temperature. Why on earth didn’t I do this when I was freezing south of Greenland with a water temperature of 0.5°C ?

I know the answer. At that time, the heater was buried under the forward berth, which was screwed down against a capsize.

As the morning progressed and we passed the Arran Islands, the wind kept dying, and Samsara would wander off in the direction of Canada. I found that motoring slowly produced just enough apparent wind to keep her on track – and then, a quarter of an hour later, the wind would come back and I could switch off. We must have done this half a dozen times as the arrival time at the waypoint shifted from 2300hrs tonight to eight o’clock tomorrow morning.

As forecast, the wind did go round more and more to the south, until eventually the storm jib steering couldn’t cope. Time for the poled-out storm jib steering. The book had called for the sail to be hanked to the forestay. For one thing, I don’t have a forestay – just a furling extrusion. I could hoist it on the inner forestay, but that’s quite a long way back. In the end, I decided to keep it flying free from the cleat and see what happened.

Actually, it blew back under the crosstrees because without any self-steering, we had come round into the wind. Also, I got the halyard the wrong side of the pole uphaul – and then the tack line the wrong side of the guy. And then, once it was all up and trimmed, I realised the guy was wrapped around the sheet. This doesn’t look so bad when viewed at a distance from the cockpit, but once the wind gets up, it introduces a twisting force and bends the piston. When I first had the boat and a whisker pole, I was forever taking it to metal shops to that fixed.

Eventually, I got everything where it should be and the boat running nicely. She did better with the headsail furled, making four knots under mainsail alone. It did occur to me that I could hand the main and fly twin headsails with each sheet running through a block to the tiller. Wanderer III went all the way across the Atlantic like that a good 15 years before Nick Franklin began experimenting with what was to become the Aries. But, it would mean replacing the headsail sheet with 8mm because I don’t have any spare 10mm blocks. Anyway, if the twins aren’t the same size, would it work?

Besides, it’s going to be a busy night. The prediction now is that we will arrive off Black Rock somewhere in the small hours. This is the lighthouse to seaward of Blacksod (and it still has more rocks to the west). It would be nice to get there on port tack so that if the wind does back at the wrong moment, I won’t be driven onto anything unpleasant.

It does mean I’ll be gybing in the dark. I might just carry on with a northerly course until it gets light – which is pretty early after all.

Then it’s just 65 miles to Killybegs. I should be in mid-afternoon.

Which leaves all of Friday for getting the work organised.

Now I’ll tell you how soft I’ve become. Because of the busy night ahead, I got in three hours of sleep in the afternoon. Then another two after the gybe. So, at about half-past six, when I was just lying there thinking that I do seem to have a habit of getting ropes round each other. It’s like when I was talking to Tony Jones, the rigger, and he kept saying: “You can’t do this, it’ll foul that.” And: “You don’t want to have that like this – see how it’s putting all the pressure on the other?”

How is it that other people see these things and I don’t?

But a bit of judicious time in bed isn’t the really good part. The really good part is that when I did get up, it was early evening, and with the wind blowing straight in the companionway, there was a chill in the cabin. So, I put the washboard in and got dressed in front of the fan heater.

Well, the battery was showing 81% and it would only take a minute.

It was lovely – like I remember winter mornings in London before I got central heating. I would stand in front of the gas fire and burn my shins.

When I went to look at the battery state afterwards, it was only down to 80%. I’m wondering whether I should get rid of the charcoal heater. It’s only sitting there going rusty…

Day Four.

Donegal Bay

At some stage, I was going to have to gybe. I hadn’t wanted to get trapped close to the coast by a wind shift. Instead, I spent the night edging further and further out into the Atlantic. Then it was dark and I didn’t want to gybe everything in the dark. Then I really needed to gybe, but I didn’t want to get out of bed – and then I thought the course we were steering wasn’t so very dreadful after all…

So, it was not until about six o’clock and full daylight that I roused myself and attempted, this time, to get it done without cocking something up.

To begin with, it went rather well. I looked to see where ropes were going, peered up the mast to see where they went up there, followed them under the storm jib once it was lying all over the foredeck.

None of this helped at all. When I hoisted it – and hoisting a free-flying sail in 18knots it not really the sort of thing you want to do before breakfast – I discovered that I had indeed got the halyard the wrong side of the pole hoist (or was it the sheet the wrong side of halyard?) and when that was sorted out – which may or may not have involved dropping the sail (that is, dropping it in the sea this time) there was something else – I think it may have had to do with the sheet, or possibly the guy. I really can’t remember…

I went and had breakfast. I think I’ve got the hang of the BalanceOil – hold a spoonful of Gulf Stream Breakfast within an inch of the mouth as you knock it back (with your eyes shut). It’s a good job, it’s going to keep me alive until I’m 130…

And on we sailed – somewhat erratically – up Donegal Bay. It’s surprising how big some of these West Coast bays can be. When I passed Erris Head, I still had 57 miles to go.

I sailed every one of them, I can tell you. For some reason, the marvellous storm-jib-sheet-to-tiller system didn’t work so well any more. Either we were heading for the shore or we gybed – and if you’ve got the tiller trussed up with double shock cord on one side and four sheaves on the other, avoiding a gybe is a matter of paranormal anticipation.

Somewhere around mid-morning, the wind had veered so much that there was nothing for it; I had to go from storm-jib-sheet-to-tiller steering to storm-jib-sheet-to-pole-to-tiller steering.

This time, I was more determined than ever to get it right. I think I even looked at the time before I left the cockpit, with some misplaced intention of getting it all done and snugged down inside five minutes.

It would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the pole. The pole got the wrong side of the halyard and the pole uphaul (even the pole downhaul, which seemed a needless detail). Even when I’d got the whole thing up and pulling, I just happened to notice the sheet wrapped round the pole-end (again).

Of course, the forecasters at Windy weren’t going to let all this go by without sticking an oar in (get real, there are no forecasters at Windy – unless you count an AI bot with a beard). Anyway, whatever it was, it predicted calms for the evening. I wouldn’t be getting in until after midnight. Andrew Evans and his Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics for Singlehanded Sailing only offered advice for when the wind is blowing. Sails don’t work in a calm. I could see I would end up motoring the last 15 miles. Motoring and steering.

There is nothing more boring than motoring and steering. I just can’t do it – not for longer than it takes to get from the harbour mouth to the mooring. What I needed was the electronic autopilot; the one that had been fixed at such great expense in Crosshaven – and had lived in the cockpit locker for the last 347 miles while I congratulated myself on doing things the old way…

Is it possible that, now it had had a good rest, it might deign to steer us the last 15 miles? I got it out. It buzzed, which was a good sign. Then it steered us straight into a gybe – not so good.

I switched it off and on again. I rebooted it back to Factory Settings. I pressed its little buttons – first one way, then the other.

That was odd: If I pressed the “up” button for the ram to push out, it went in. If I pushed the “down” button for it to go in, it came out. I remember this. This happened 25 years ago – the year of the millennium, when I set out to become the first person to sail singlehanded and non-stop around the British Isles (and came to a very sticky end).

Equally memorable were the interminable sea trials I undertook before setting out, mainly because I had to motor eight miles down the River Deben every time (and then eight miles back up afterwards). The main purpose was to calibrate the autopilot – an Autohelm, before they were bought out by Raymarine. It took me an absurdly long time to realise I’d reversed the polarity. When it should have been pulling, it was pushing and when… well, you get the picture…

This was the same. No wonder we kept gybing. I was loath to experiment by switching the wires but if I didn’t, I had three hours of steering through a flat calm to look forward to – and it didn’t do the unit any harm back in 2000.

And guess what? It did the trick. The thing was as good as new. I dismantled the storm jib-to-sheet-to-whatever construction. I set the headsail goose-winged without getting anything round anything – I’ve had enough practice at that. I opened a beer (and when I have finished describing the resulting triumph, I shall open another.)

The autopilot lasted through the two beers. It lasted almost all the way through dinner. But eventually, sure enough, there would be a beep-beep-beep and the screen would announce “Low Battery”, which was plainly absurd.

I hand-steered the last however many miles it was.

But we got there in the end. Arriving at 4.30 in the morning, just as it was getting light enough to see to anchor in Walker Bay and save the cost of a weekend in the marina.

And thereby hangs a sorry, sorry tale.

But that’s enough of this. I’ll be back with that next time…

*

And I’ve just realised that I haven’t explained about the BalanceOil I mentioned there. This is rather interesting. For years, I had been taking Omega-3 fish oil – and then a vegan version (which didn’t smell of rotting fish) but it seems that was all a waste of money because the process to remove the Mercury also strips out the polyphenols, which enable the body to absorb the nutrient.

This BalanceOil is different and you can take a test to find out whether you need it. It’s all terribly scientific. If you send me an email to john@oldmansailing.com, I’ll send you everything you need to know.

You know all that emergency kit you’ve got hidden away around the boat? The softwood plugs for skin fittings, the underwater epoxy, twin spinnaker poles that you never use but might make a jury rig one day…

I’ve got a book called Singlehanded Sailing: Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics by an American called Andrew Evans. It’s down at the bottom of the list in my Kindle – well it was, because I always ignored it when browsing through old Nevil Shute titles for some comfort reading. It’s not even a proper ebook. It’s a pdf file, so you really need to read it on the iPad.

But it had its moment of glory on the crossing of the Celtic Sea from Falmouth to Crosshaven. This is 184 miles, so a couple of days. Not what you’d call a “voyage”, but on the other hand, you wouldn’t want to be stuck at the tiller all that way.

Which is why I was so glad of the Raymarine autopilot since the Aries was away in Amsterdam being fixed after hitting an iceberg off the Grand Banks – at least that’s the way I tell it. Actually, since the autopilot had steered us something like 1,800 miles (and then some), I had become somewhat blasé about its efficient buzzing to and fro at the back of the cockpit.

Now, just north of the Scillies, it started taking us round in circles.

Nothing I could do would placate it. I cleaned its real gold terminals. I unscrewed its plug and looked at the wiring buried under an enormous blob of silicone. I went and investigated for a chunk of metal that had become dislodged and fallen next to the fluxgate compass…

In the end, I hand-steered us through the passage between the Seven Stones and the Eastern Isles. Somebody had to.

But that still left 130 miles to go. To begin with, it looked like 24 hours at the helm for me – but surely the boat would steer herself. I have written elsewhere about abandoning my “singlehanded self-rescue system”. This involved a line running round the deck that I could pull if I fell over and was being dragged along at six knots on the end of my harness tether. This line was supposed to disconnect the self-steering… except that with the wind forward of the beam, Samsara will just carry on at six knots until she runs up a beach somewhere in Brazil.

However, with the wind anywhere else – like what we had now – she’s all over the place.

That was when I reached for Mr Evans’ Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics. Somewhere in there, I remembered seeing a chapter about sheet-to tiller self-steering. I had always meant to try it, but ended up sitting in the sun instead. There were various different systems described: The Tiller Line System, the Long Line System, the Poled-Out Jib System…

I opted for The Storm Jib System. It seemed the simplest. And indeed it was: It took no more than five minutes to set up, and it worked brilliantly. I didn’t take it down until we were within ten miles of the Irish coast and the wind headed us. I couldn’t be bothered to keep dismantling it for every tack.

Meanwhile Owen, the engineer with the messiest workshop I’ve ever seen (it’s a shipping container) is getting me a new autopilot plug on Monday and the Aries is being sent back from Amsterdam because Dutch customs says I should pay duty because it is a “temporal export” (sounds like the procedure for getting contraband through the Pearly Gates).

In fact, DHL insist I don’t, but it’s now going back to the Isle of Man before coming on here and then, as a new consignment, back to Amsterdam (without leaving the EU – clever, huh? Bloody Brexit!)

*If you’re an avid reader of this blog, you may have noticed this entry replaces one called “Self-steering and Hyena Offal” in which I went on something of a rant about customs and couriers and “The Second Most Stupid Decision Ever Made By Any Country, Ever).

You’ll be pleased to hear I have calmed down, now – and apologised to Angela in the Isle of Man DHL depot.

I told her I suffered from a mental condition and had been a bit mad on Thursday. Well, it’s true: Read Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier. One reviewer said it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. https://amzn.eu/d/geiMNUG

The description from the book

It works too…

The “Storm Jib System” from “Singlehanded Sailling: Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics” by David Evans

By the way, did you notice the new Good Health page? Have a look: https://oldmansailing.com/good-health ?

Have a look.

There, I never thought I would write that as a headline. I hate motoring. It’s noisy and smelly. It’s expensive – also, it’s an admission of defeat. For the sailor to resort to the “iron topsail” just because the wind doesn’t agree to his plans is, somehow, a failure as great as not backing down the anchor or having the headsail fall over the side because you didn’t mouse the shackles on the furling gear.

But here I am, sitting on the port berth – normally, I would say the “leeward berth” but just at the moment there isn’t any leeward (or windward) for the very good reason that there isn’t any wind. But I’m not complaining. I am, indeed, unexpectedly happy with the situation.

I am in Cardigan Bay, on my way from Conwy, where Tony Jones of TJ Rigging replaced the forestay which broke at the end of the transatlantic crossing, to Falmouth where the Royal Cornwall Yacht Club is holding a reunion for the 50^th anniversary of the Azores and Back Race. I competed in Largo in 1987 and again in 1991. I won a decanter. I’ve still got it somewhere…

But the Windy app says that if I sit here and wait for the predicted easterly, I will be waiting for a full 24 hours and miss the “before” party on Friday night.

So, when I awoke at 0700 to a blue sky through the central hatch and the sound of the mainsheet traveller shooting from side to side as the boat rolled in one of those calms so total that you can look over the side and see small and unlikely creatures skipping about on the surface, I had a decision to make.

Samsara carries 55 litres of fuel, and the tank was two-thirds full. The little Nanni 21hp sips about half a litre an hour at just under four knots. The wind is due to come back in 24 hours anyway. It’s no worse than buying a couple of rounds to go with the seafood linguine I ordered from the RCYC booking site.

To my surprise, I don’t mind at all. For a start, motoring makes the boat more stable – something to do with the flow of water over the keel, so this meant a proper breakfast.

Breakfasts are a bit of a thing at the moment, now that I’ve got a real pop-up toaster and enough Lithium to do one slice at a time and not worry about wasting the heat on the other side. This morning it was toast and the new vegan Marmite with smashed avocado, fried tomatoes and a Burford Brown egg – and then another slice of fresh hot toast to go with an enormous helping of Bonne Maman apricot jam.

Now add Colombian coffee (from Colombia) fresh-ground in the new 230volt coffee grinder!

See what I mean? By the time I rose from the saloon table, I’d forgotten we were motoring at all. Maybe the engine is quieter once it’s warmed up – maybe the problem is that I never let it run for long enough.

So then I replaced the length of Dyneema on the end of the topping lift with a soft shackle because the new line is the right length at last – whipped proper markers onto the main halyard in place of the pieces of tape. This was a hangover from having to end-for-end the halyard off the Grand Banks because it was about to chafe through where it passed over the sheave.

It was all going so frightfully well that I thought there might be a blog post in it, and came down to write this. The next thing you know it’s lunchtime and time for tea – which is when I noticed the batteries were back at 74%, where they had been before breakfast – not bad, given that the brilliant sun of early morning had given way to a high-pressure haze.

It was wondering about this that made me realise the wind charger had 12kts to play with – and since there was a one-and-a-half knot tide against us, that meant actually, we were going nowhere… which, in turn, meant that there really was 12kts of wind.

In which case, why wasn’t I sailing?

Well, I am now – doing a good three knots into the bay to get out of the tide. I should pick up a mobile signal, too.

And it went on like this for four days. I motored a bit to catch the tide off Land’s End – and then again to get out of it in Mount’s Bay. The Bristol Channel, as always when heading south, was wonderful with clear blue skies and a beam reach (which I should have used to put me up-tide at the end – see above).

In fact, it was all going swimmingly as I jogged past The Manacles and up to Black Rock, bang on schedule to walk through the town and arrive at the Royal Cornwall for a six o’clock drink with…

Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Who would remember me from 1987? Who would I recognise? I turned the switch one last time to drop the main and come into the Haven Marina.

The engine stopped.

As if to say: “You think you can just use me when you feel like it – get a blog post out of a once-in-a-lifetime moment of appreciation, would you? Well, I know what you really think of engines…”

…and it was right. I said a very rude word. This was going to ruin everything. I would have to anchor off Trefusis Point – chase the blockage back from the injectors. I did think of leaving it ‘til the morning and blowing up the dinghy – but that would put me behind for packaging up the eBay parcels and getting to the Post Office before the opening event at 10.00 a.m – and there was coffee and mingling from 9.45.

I accepted that tonight it wasn’t going to be seafood linguine but a tin of beans – and no fresh vegetables because I wasn’t going to need them once I got here, was I?

So, I established that the main fuel filter was only half full – the pre-filter definitely needed changing – but there was nothing flowing from the breather when I slacked off the nut. We were back to Grenada and Nelson’s Dockyard, and https://www.oldmansailing.com/diesel/

I took the inlet pipe off the filter – nothing. So, the muck in the tank had blocked the outlet again. There is one way to clear that: Blow.

And so it was that with the taste of diesel still in my mouth, I let the engine run for a full 15 minutes while I cleared up, then puttered over to The Haven and rafted up alongside a French Halberg Rassey (always pick a French boat – you can give them a leaflet for the French translation of the book).

It was fully eight o’clock by the time I found three old AZAB competitors round a table on the RCYC’s Upper Deck. I didn’t recognise any of them.

But that’s the thing – they didn’t recognise me either. It’s been forty years. Now we’re just a bunch of old men.

But would you believe it: The 90-year-old who had left his walking stick on the table just where I was going to sit was Peter Phillips (Google: https://policesailing.uk/reports/ostar/ostar.htm)

There was Roy Hart, who went on to lead a sailing expedition to the North Pole – and blamed me for getting him into the 1988 OSTAR (I blamed him).

Brian Dale sailed the other Barracuda 35 – you’ll remember them if you remember the 1980s TV sailing soap opera Howard’s Way.

What a time we had with almost half a century of adventures to catch up on…

… and I had two puddings because I ordered a brandy and got a brownie. I’ve always wanted to order two puddings.

Four old men (L-R: Peter Phillips, self, Brian Dale, Roy Hart)

It was 5,133 miles – 47 days. It was my longest passage yet, from Linton Bay in Panama to Douglas, Isle of Man.

Without stopping.

And it was fairly eventful – which is why, a full two weeks after arriving, I am only just now sitting down to write this.

But then the whole trip happened in a bit of a rush: I was just back from the family skiing holiday in Italy where, sitting at a mountain restaurant at the foot of the Matterhorn, I had reminded everyone about the plan to meet up again in the Azores in July.

“Oh no,” said Tamsin. She couldn’t. She was going to Vietnam in June to visit Lottie (Lottie is teaching English to little Vietnamese children). Tamsin wouldn’t have enough holiday from her new job to spend a week in the Azores.

Thinking on my feet, I came up with: “How about a weekend in Dublin?” There were people round the table who had never been to Dublin. Dublin sounded great – so Dublin it is, sometime in August, maybe…

We settled to ordering Tartiflette and Fonduta Valdostana,

It was only when I got back to Panama and Ramón, the taxi driver, had negotiated the final two miles of dirt tracks to the little French enclave of Panamarina (really – they all speak French and there is a proper French restaurant) that I began to think of the logistics.

I had plenty of time – it was only early April after all. But Donald Trump was talking about “taking back” the Panama Canal, and it would be just my luck to get stuck there with a State of Emergency. Also, if I were to sail all the way without stopping, it would be good material for another “Voyage” book – and I needed one: Old Man Sailing had sold 13,000 copies since I published it on Amazon in 2021. But sales were tailing off and, quite frankly, I needed the money.

The “Voyage” books were a success, but there were only two of them, and you can’t decently have a series with less than three. The more I looked at it, the longer I spent poring over the Navionics chart and the relative benefits of the windward and leeward passages around Cuba, the more the idea started to become a reality – and the thing with reality is that you want it to get on and become one as soon as possible.

And then, for some reason I can’t quite pin down, I thought of sailing straight to the Isle of Man for the TT. I tried to get there years ago – I once had a BSA Bantam (and nearly killed myself on Streatham High Road). I wouldn’t dream of riding a motorcycle now. But I do love to see them – and hear them. Hearing them between rain squalls while anchored in Ramsey Bay was all I managed last time. But if I were to leave now – well, as soon as possible – I might just make it for the last weekend. It would be a challenge (which would add a frisson of excitement to the narrative). All I had to do was sail 100 miles a day for 50 days.

I left on Wednesday, April 17^th – it would have been the 16^th, but Fausto, the immigration man, had to go to Panama City to get me my Zarpe – the essential exit permit.

And so, with a bilge full of beer, several dozen tins of beans and, by oversight, only six sheets of kitchen roll, I set off into a northeasterly Force 4-5 with a “Distance to Destination” of 5,166 miles.

The fact that I shaved off 33 of them had something to do with ignoring the advice to stay 130 miles off the coast of Nicaragua because the fishermen are now so hard up, they’re not averse to a little amateur piracy. On April 17^th, I was 66 miles off Cabo Gracias a Dios in only 12 metres. I blame some idiotic competitive spirit.

The whole point in choosing the leeward passage – going between Cuba and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico – is to ride the Gulf Stream through the Florida Strait. The downside is that it’s a beat all the way, and if the Tradewind is blowing at its full Force 5-6, that’s 350 miles of wind over tide. I’m ashamed to say, I revelled in every cable of it – there is something ineffably wonderful about looking at your track on the screen and seeing that you’ve been tacking through an obtuse angle (check it at https://www.polarsteps.com/JohnPassmore/15574045-2025).

But if I thought that was pretty exciting, wait ‘til I got to the east coast of Florida. Somewhere off West Palm Beach. I sat at the chart table filming the plotter as the “speed over the ground” hovered around ten knots and once, for a memorable second or two, flicked up to 12.1! I could get used to this…

And that’s the trouble. Once you get into the Gulf Stream, it’s hard to leave. Why would you want to? Sea that really is aquamarine, sky the very definition of sky blue, and a screaming beam reach – it’s sailing straight out of the charter company brochures. I recorded no fewer than three 150-mile days – that’s an average of 6.25kts. In all, I was to have 27 days when I clocked more than 100 miles over the 24 hours. At one point, the average was 123.9.

And this included one inexplicable day of total calm, 60 miles off Cape Canaveral. Actually, this was no bad thing: One of the reasons for getting the Remigo electric outboard is because I plan to get a bracket made for the stern. The company website features a 23-footer powering along with one on the back. I reckon it could keep Samsara going at a knot or two, and that’s all you need to keep water flowing over the keel and stop the awful rolling as the ocean reminds you that it never sleeps – no matter what the wind might be doing.

But first, I had to establish that the 1,000W motor could push a 32-footer. I inflated the dinghy, lashed it alongside and pressed the “forward” button of the remote control.

Silently, the motor began to push the Caribbean behind it. Another press of the button, and we were making progress.

I am pleased to say that I managed to record a speed of 1.7kts – hardly surprising since the Remigo has, in the short period I’ve had it, demonstrated five knots (I found it really quite frightening). However, lash it to five tonnes of becalmed yacht, and it tries to launch the dinghy into space – rather appropriate, given where we were – but not much use for progress through the water. Most of the thrust was directed downwards. I was glad when the wind came back.

And the wind took me racing all the way up the east coast of the United States – the Carolinas, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey. On May 11^th,  Day 26, the daily average hit 123.9 miles. By then, we were just inside the tail of the Grand Banks.

The next day, I broke the Aries. This redoubtable mechanical self-steering gear, built in the 1980s – the same model I had on my old Rival Largo – I always considered to be indestructible. However, in trying to match old and new parts, I may have made a miscalculation. The servo-oar hit something, and the sacrificial sleeve didn’t break fast enough. The main shaft bent, and it wouldn’t work anymore.

I did wonder what it had hit – and how big and immovable that object must have been to do so much damage. Could it have been a small ice floe – a “growler”? The water temperature was down at 1°C – and what would that have done to the hull if the course had deviated just a few inches to starboard…

Anyway, I spent the best part of a day getting the gear aboard (it weighs nearly 23kg) and trying to fix it. When I put it all back, it just wanted to take us round in circles.

This left me with 1,899 miles still to go and having to rely on the electronic autopilot. I have written a lot about electronic autopilots in the past, and my very low opinion of them. But this was based on my experience with the cheap little tillerpilot, which has all its electronics out in the cockpit. Every time it rained, I had to pay £70 for a new circuit board.

When Samsara had her 50^th birthday refit in Conwy in 2023, Dave Jones of Advanced Tech Marine installed the much more sophisticated Raymarine Evolution system for me. It was very expensive, appeared to be most complicated, and its various components were secreted all around the boat, connected by miles of wire. But it steered faultlessly all the way home.

Well, there is a caveat with that. Because it has to “think”, the autopilot is not as quick to react as the Aries, which transmits the movement of the vane to the movement of the rudder instantly – all the forces being connected by aluminium castings and Dyneema line. Besides, once the autopilot’s electronic brain has done its “thinking”, the electric “muscle” of the steering ram has to grind its way across the cockpit. It all takes time – and, in a blow, it all takes far too long.

And we did get a blow.

In fact, I had three full gales with wind speeds over 34kts. I never saw the dial at more than 38kts. But they were very useful for experimenting.

In the first one, I wanted to see if I could get the boat to heave-to and drift directly downwind. When I had tried it before, she had fore-reached and sailed out of the protective slick which Lin Pardey talks about in her storm management books. This time, I streamed the SeaBrake drogue from the bow, and it worked brilliantly. It held the bow up between 45° and 60° to the wind, to take the full force of the waves, and yes, we did drift sideways. However, I didn’t think much of the slick. If it had been as effective as Lin promised, there wouldn’t have been any breaking waves – maybe it had something to do with her boats having full keels and the Rival design only a long fin. Still, I sat there for 12 hours, reading, cooking, and sleeping in relative comfort.

Only later did I discover that I shouldn’t have led the line for the drogue through a fairlead. The force of those breaking waves bent the screws and split the teak toe-rail. The SeaBrake is supposed to collapse and “give” when a sudden strain comes on it. Obviously, not enough.

The second gale saw us lying to the drogue set on a bridle off the stern. This was not a huge success. The boat still needs to be steered, and the autopilot, with its limited range, couldn’t really handle it. This gale lasted well over twelve hours, and at the end of it, the circle of rigging wire which holds the drogue open (and distorts to allow it to collapse under strain) had been strained so much that it had broken. Also, the material had chafed through where it rubbed on the webbing bridle.

The third gale was a bit more awkward because we were coming up to the northwest coast of Ireland, and I didn’t want to get any closer. Fortunately, weather forecasts via Starlink suggested this was going to be short-lived, but even so, I had to sit in the cockpit for three-and-a-half hours and steer through it with waves crashing over me and filling the cockpit above the top of my boots.

You would think this would be enough for one passage, but look what happened when we got into the Traffic Separation Scheme: At half-past two in the morning, with a cruise ship coming up behind, there was an almighty bang and the headsail fell over the side. The forestay had parted at the top.

Of course, I didn’t know this at the time. I was too busy rigging the removable inner forestay before the mast fell down. This wire terminates at the masthead, and not only kept everything upright, but I could set a staysail and keep sailing. This was even more important because, among other setbacks, the engine wouldn’t run for more than five minutes without overheating.

So that’s why it’s taken me two weeks to get around to writing this – that and the broken pump for flushing the watermaker – and, of course, the TT: Believe me, until you have leaned over a wooden garden fence and experienced a motorbike flashing by virtually within touching distance, doing something over 160 miles an hour, you really don’t know what excitement is all about.

Well, this is a first (mind you, it took me 12 hours to find it!)

You can follow my track ‘2025’ at

https://www.polarsteps.com/JohnPassmore/15574045-2025?s=B45DE028-9CAF-4BD7-AA23-4771087DDD44