Passing Through – The Scilly Isles 

There is no closer bond than the one between the singlehanded sailor and his boat – until he rows ashore, that is. Then he wants to be joined at the hip to his dinghy.

Mine was on the beach at The Gugh, the smallest and least-populated island of the Scilly Isles – that charming archipelago off the south-west tip of England. To say The Gugh is small is to say that it measures half a mile by less than a quarter. To say that it is the least-populated is also accurate: It has two houses. One is empty and the other is home to a man called Alan – and thank heavens for that…

Mind you, The Gugh is only an island at high tide. The rest of the time, it is joined to the much larger island of St Agnes by a narrow sand bar. This means that it is easy to think of them as one island.

That is a mistake. I went to look at The Gugh and its prehistoric standing stone and two peculiar houses with the curved roofs (so they don’t blow off). Then I planned to go and look at St Agnes which is twice the size and with a population of more than 80. This means that I left the dinghy on the Gugh side…

I did pull it up well above the tide line, I tied it to a rock … with three or four other rocks holding down the first rock … and then another couple in the dinghy itself to stop it flying away. Believe me, that dinghy wasn’t going anywhere.

And so, without a care in the world, I set off for The Old Man of Gugh and Obadiah’s Barrow (where they found a skeleton buried in the sitting position surrounded by a dozen urns full of human remains).

St Agnes was much more cheerful. For a start, it had the Troy Town Maze. Now, I don’t know what sort of image this conjures for you but surely something involving theme parks or stately homes: Certainly a major “visitor attraction”. According to the guide book, it was laid out by a lighthousekeeper in 1729, adding to a much earlier maze. That one may even have had Viking connections since similar designs have been found in Sweden. However, now we’ll never know because in the early 2000’s a well-intentioned visitor took it upon themselves to rebuild the maze with new stones from the beach – thus completely thwarting the archaeologists’ attempts to date it. 

Troytown Maze

Actually, when you see it, you can’t blame the helpful visitor. This has to be the most unimpressive maze ever to make it into a guidebook – even if walking around it is said to promote well-being.

Ha! (see below).

Still, if I hadn’t gone looking for the maze, I would never have found Troytown Farm Ice Cream which has to be absolutely the best anywhere – made from milk from Scilly’s only dairy herd (11 cows).

So, what with one thing and another, it was a contented old man who dawdled back picking blackberries and wondering if you could make crumble with cooking oil instead of butter. That was why it was quite late by the time I returned to the sand bar and the dinghy.

Except, the sand bar wasn’t there any more. Now there was only a maelstrom of churning white water as the spring tide raced between the islands at upwards of four knots. As the guidebook says, helpfully: “It is dangerous to attempt the crossing at such times.”

Over on the other side, the water was lapping at my dinghy. Instantly, the singlehander’s primal urge kicked in: Surely, if I went to rescue it now – before the tide came up any higher… I bet I could walk across. It would only be knee-deep… perhaps thigh-deep – but I didn’t mind getting my shorts wet. Even if it was waist-deep…

There must be some medical term for this instinctive rejection of all common sense.

Fortunately, the prospect of drowning acted as an antidote – or rather, drowning and being described in the local paper as “a pensioner” – not to mention the lifeboat coxswain’s comment about “weekend sailors”. 

With considerable effort, I hauled myself back from the brink and made for the pub. If in doubt, make for the pub.

Simon, the landlord, listened sympathetically as if he had heard this before (which he had – many times). He and Angela had been corporate IT geeks until they sailed here in their 35footer four years ago and found The Turk’s Head looking for new owners. Simon put all the other customers on hold while he searched for a phone number for “Alan”. I hoped Alan would be at home. Of course, he was at home – where else could he go at high tide? He promised to have a look.

After that, there was really nothing for me to do but sit in the pub for the next four hours while the tide finished coming in and started going out. So I had a beer – and then another beer – that took twenty minutes. Then Simon showed me all the artefacts he had brought up from wrecks around the islands – can you imagine an entire cargo of bells, the sort that summoned the servants in Victorian households?

After that, it seemed to be time for another beer – and, considering the way the evening was panning out, I had better have dinner and was joined by a couple from Devon who were similarly marooned. The Scillonian, the Scilly Isles ferry from Penzance, had suffered double engine failure. People were having to bunk up where they could.

As for me, I rushed back to reclaim my dinghy as soon as I could without drowning. Shame –  had I obeyed my usual instinct and stayed in the pub until chucking-out time, I would have been there to join the celebrations at the safe arrival of Safe Arrival, another Rival 32 like Samsara. Her crew of three lads from Falmouth had sailed straight from Greenland – 16 days – at the end of a four-month climbing cruise. Angela broke out the rum.

These guys deserved it. They had been by far the smallest boat in those northern waters – and almost all the others had been steel and aluminium and kitted out for “expedition sailing”. Safe Arrival’s only modifications were a solid sprayhood and a couple of windsurfer masts for pushing the bergy bits out of the way. 

But then The Cove at St Agnes seemed to be a gathering place for all sorts of interesting boats. There was an ancient lugger with a bumpkin sticking out the back which must have been half the length of the rest of the boat at least. They hung the ensign off the end of it – with a lead weight to hold it down.

Then there was the brand new Rustler 57 I mentioned in the “Experts” post – but I wasn’t in their league. However, I had already made a friend of the Frenchman in the peculiar catamaran with a mast on each hull. I had anchored rather too close to him in Tresco and then drew even closer as I went to move the next morning. 

“Don’t worry, I am here,” he had said as he stood by to fend off. Now, here he was again – and, whatever you think of big cats, his boat was something really special. 

Marc had been around multihulls all his life – building them, designing them, sailing them. They’d all been called Kalim – ever since his first when he sailed the Atlantic as a young man to sit at the feet of his heroes, Dick Newick and Mike Birch. In the end, he spent most of his life out there refining multihull design.

Now, with Marielle, he has his ultimate boat – as he put it, his “Old Man’s Boat” – simple, spacious, light and fast – designed for sailing in the tropics and, actually, very beautiful.

How fast would she go with her two wing sails? 

At 15metres overall, her designed top speed is 24 knots but that’s not important. What matters is the average and the latest Kalim is designed for daily runs of 200 miles – which means the Galapagos to the Marquesas in not much over two weeks … while the crew relax on the park bench. Yes, they have a park bench at the back of the cockpit in the sun. 

Le Kalim.

Le Kalim.

If you fancy a Kalim yourself. You’re out of luck. For the first time, Marc’s design is not for sale. As he said: “As soon as you start selling your ideas, you have people wanting to know where they can put a second head or a washing machine… I’m done with all that…”

He doesn’t even have an outboard – instead, a slender rowing skiff he designed himself. Marc likes rowing – doing it properly with crossed hands.

On the other side, there was Jimmy the tree surgeon, in a tiny junk-rigged Corribee. He didn’t have a dinghy at all, just an inflatable paddleboard with a fish crate for the shopping.

I felt rather ordinary rowing the rescued dinghy ashore to thank Alan – who, of course, had his own story to tell: Turns out he’s an old Thames bargeman. He goes back to his boatyard in Faversham in the winter. As he said: “You’d have to be really odd to want to live here in the winter.”

The Scillies were always going to be full of interest – if only because of the anticipation: I had been trying to get here for forty years. The trouble was that the pilot books made the islands sound so terrifying that I ended up sitting in Falmouth or Penzance listening to shipping forecasts and biting my nails. Writers of pilot books love this sort of thing. Even Reeds, not given to hyperbole, says: “The Isles of Scilly are exposed to Atlantic swell and wind. Weather can be unpredictable and fast-changing. Thorough planning and sensible precautions especially with regard to anchorage and ground tackle are recommended. Boats have been known to drag on fine sand…” There follows a whole column of dangers to avoid.

New Grimsby Sound from King Charles’ Castle, Tresco

The first time I came here was on the old Scillonian in 1965 as a 16-year-old biology student on a field trip. Mostly I remember the New Inn on Tresco where I ordered my first pint of beer (my father would only buy me halves, saying that no Gentleman would be seen with a pint). We stayed in a bothy and were served fiery curries by an old sailor who dropped ash into the pot from the Capstan Full Strength glued to his lower lip.

Obviously, I had to go back to the New Inn. But, it’s all changed now: The old bar was demolished in 1997 – conveniently just as a German cargo ship on autopilot hit the rocks off Newfoundland Point while the crew were asleep. It was loaded with wood and, in the best traditions of the Scilly Isles, the islanders helped themselves. The new, extended and wood-panelled bar looks lovely.

Don’t criticise: As the Rev John Troutbeck, 18th Century vicar of St Mary’s, put it: “We pray thee, Lord, not that wrecks should happen but that if any wrecks should happen, Thou will guide them into the Scilly Isles for the benefit of the inhabitants.”

Shipwrecks and the Scillies go together like crab and mayonnaise. In the Abbey Gardens, you can find a museum of figureheads retrieved from the sea – and of course, it was the Scillies where Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet piled up in 1707, prompting the race to find a way of determining longitude.

Sculpture, The Tresco Children in the Abbey Gardens

As a 16-year-old, I couldn’t see the point in spending good beer money looking at exotic plants and museums but I do remember looking longingly across New Grimsby Sound and wishing I had a boat. For there was Bryher – as tantalising as a tropic isle on the other side of a sparkling lagoon. 

Actually, Bryher is well worth visiting anyway: First, there was the island gig in it’s shed. Gig racing is very big in the Scillies, maintaining a tradition that goes back to the days when the first pilot to reach a ship got the job. And it really was a race because they were limited to six oars apiece – not out of any sense of fair play but because any more would mean they could outrun the revenue cutters which flitted all over the South-West after smugglers.

If you walk up the hill you come to what is billed as “the smallest museum in Britain”. It’s probably the smallest museum in the world. It’s the old phone box and is dedicated entirely to the 1989 film When the Whales Came based on the book by Michael Morpurgo. The best part of the story is that, having signed Paul Schofield and Helen Mirren for the leads, the director needed a child to play the central character. After scouring the mainland stage schools, he found her on St Agnes. 

All the island people had been recruited as extras – simpler than trying to find accommodation for outsiders. One of those extras was eight-year-old Helen Pearce. All she had to do was play herself – a half-wild nymph of the sea and sand. The critics loved her. 

Over on the other side was the Hell Bay Hotel. I mean, you just have to go and have a beer in somewhere called the Hell Bay Hotel. It’s not actually in Hell Bay as such. As the barman explained, there wouldn’t be much left standing after the winter gales – and the guests didn’t look the type to rough it. In my shorts and crocs, I took my beer onto the terrace.

So, out of Scilly’s five inhabited islands, that left only St Martin’s and St Mary’s (I wasn’t going to start on the 50 uninhabited ones.) 

I got lost on St Martin’s trying to work out the difference between Higher Town, Middle Town and Lower Town, not to mention Lower Town Quay and Higher Town New Quay and Higher Town Old Quay. Signposts would have helped.

St Mary’s has lots of signposts. It needs them because the typical St Mary’s visitors are devoted couples of a certain age who walk slowly from one commemorative bench to the next where they sit down once more to admire a slightly different view.

Maybe that was why the 1970’s Prime Minister Harold Wilson liked it so much – you can imagine him sitting there puffing his pipe with Mary beside him, making up her poems. He’s buried in the churchyard now – among all the poor, dead sailors.

Back in the early 90’s when I used to write the Dogwatch column in Yachting World and had just moved aboard for what was supposed to be a life-long cruise (for what happened to that see “The Old Man’s Story” page) the then editor, Andrew Bray, came up with the idea for a second column – a three-monthly series on the places we visited. 

It was to be called “Passing Through” and the idea was to give a flavour of the port – the characters, the pubs, the boats, the history… and some pictures,  of course.

I think it must have run for about three years – until we stopped moving and finally gave the whole thing up as a bad job and rented a house. But it was well-received while it lasted.

Well, I’ve been looking back over the photos of the week in Galway and thought to myself: “That would have made a great “Passing Through”.

The next thought was how sad it was that there was no point in suggesting to Yachting World that I should start writing again. Yachting magazines aren’t what they were. Does anyone read them now? It’s all video blogs…

And then, gradually, the suggestion filtered through that I had a blog…

Passing Through – Galway

You’ll like Galway. You don’t have a choice – the lock gate only opens for two hours on each tide so once you’re in, there’s nothing to do but drink Guinness and listen to traditional Irish Music.

Actually, I can think of worse ways of spending a week of gales.

Because that’s what we did, my 16-year-old son Hugo and I. His flight out from the UK had been booked for months – carefully scheduled to get him back in time for his GCSE results – and of course, I had to make darned sure I was there in time to meet him.

So I sailed straight from Falmouth, pausing only to wait out a force seven headwind in a protected little pool at the entrance to Portmagee Sound.

In fact, I arrived early enough to stop at Inishmore, the largest of the Aran Islands. There are two things you need to know about the Aran Islands: Aran Sweaters and ruins.

Every day the tour boats disgorge swarms of Americans and Italians and – well, tourists from everywhere. As soon as their feet touch the ground, they split up and head off in two different directions – half to the cycle hire shop to pedal off to the medieval fortress of Dun Aengus, the other half to the Aran Sweater shop.

I looked round the sweater shop – after all, I wear a sweater all through the winter and there are holes in both elbows. However, I couldn’t see the beautiful and unbelievably soft woollens on display lasting much past the end of November.

So it was off to the fortress. They charged for entry, of course – and the entrance was a 20-minute walk from the fortress itself. Alternatively, there was an award-winning ice cream shop…and anyway, I’d be coming back again with Hugo, wouldn’t I?

For culture, I pedalled off to the “Nine Churches”. It would be easy to miss these. I managed to find two surrounded by a neat graveyard with Gaelic inscriptions continuing long after the churches had been abandoned. But despite clattering all the way down the track to the sea, there was no sign of the other five.

When I got back, feeling a little cheated, there was a minibus waiting. The driver, an obvious character in a baseball cap and a Zapata moustache, sat biding his time while his passengers milled around the ruins.

So I asked him for directions to the other seven.

“Ah,” he says. “There are only the two.”

– Then why do they call them “The Nine Churches?

“Well, that’s just what they call them.”

I did think of asking why but sometimes in the West of Ireland, it doesn’t do to ask too many questions…

I still had two days before Hugo arrived and wanted to look at Samsara’s hull. There was a convenient quay at the entrance to the Kinvara River. So there I was in the middle of the night poking around in the mud beside Parkmore Quay (built with money sent by the people of Canada, apparently) when suddenly there was a “hello” from the top.

Since I might look a bit suspicious, I explained that I would be drying out in the morning and wanted to check that the keel wouldn’t be resting on a boulder or something. The pair of dog walkers, as they turned out to be, understood completely – that was their boat out there, the green one (it was pitch dark).

In the morning, as I knelt in the mud with a packet of scouring pads and discovered my very expensive Coppercoat anti-fouling was falling off, the couple returned. They came down and looked. They were sympathetic about the state of the bottom but complimentary about the Samsara’s lines and, seemingly on the strength of no more than this, invited me for dinner.

Being an Englishman and not used to invitations from people I hadn’t been properly introduced to, I made some excuse. 

But later, I wondered had I done the right thing? After all, people were different over here. They were friendlier…

I called and left a message – and that evening Anne came and collected me and I presented her with a bottle of wine that had survived six months in the bilges and a loaf of boat bread – and Alan returned from selling a guitar and another couple turned up – and we had a very convivial evening.

It was the same in Galway. No sooner had I met the harbourmaster than he was whisking me off for a Guinness – four, actually.

Hugo arrived on schedule – and so did a whole string of Atlantic lows, one after another. 

Well, if you’re going to get stuck somewhere, I used to recommend Dublin. Now I recommend Galway. First, there was the Guinness which is not the same as it is in England because they pour two-thirds of it with Nitrogen and only the last third with carbon dioxide. Then there is the music- everywhere in Galway there is music: In the pubs, in the streets – Tig Coili is the famous music pub but right outside any day, you can find the Galway Street Club, a loose group of enthusiasts who play just for the love of playing (although they don’t do badly out of the equally enthusiastic crowd).

On every corner, you will find someone with a guitar or fiddle or just a penny whistle. Some of them barely into their teens – others old and grey and stooped but still going…

I was keen that we should see a game of hurling – the peculiar Irish sport which seems to owe something to hockey but also to basketball and tennis with maybe a bit of rugby thrown in – and certainly the egg-and-spoon race… 

After messing up the buses (Galway has three bus stations), we took a taxi to the Gaelic Athletic Association’s Pearse Stadium and saw Kinvara beat Carnmore – so narrowly as it happens, that the final minute had the entire Carnmore team crowded round the Kinvara goal brandishing their hurleys in the hope of snatching the vital three points. It didn’t happen but it did give a very good impression of what the Battle of Lough Neagh must have looked like.

This gave us such an appetite for this most exciting but unrecognised sport that we simply had to go and find a spot in the Front Door pub and watch Tipperary snatch the national title from Kilkenny. No wonder they wear helmets. 

There was a day when it stopped raining – although it didn’t stop blowing. So we hired another bike from the West of Ireland Cycle Hire, stuffed it into the cargo bay of the bus and set off for the Burren. This is a huge and rocky chunk of landscape on the south side of  Galway Bay which might look pretty barren but in fact, is home to 70% of Ireland’s collection of wildflowers.

If you’re cycling, be warned, it does go up and down a lot but we stopped at St Fachtnan’s Holy Well and dropped a coin in for the GCSE results. We could have taken The Old Bog Road but there was a small sign saying “This road is subject to flooding” – well, it would be, wouldn’t it?

Later, over lunch and more Guinness at Cassidy’s Bar we discovered that the Old Bog Road runs across the bottom of what is Europe’s largest “disappearing lake” – that is to say that it’s five metres deep when the rain finally stops and then takes a couple of days to drain away through underground caves and “swallow holes” before the weather turns “soft” again. 

Cycling the Burren was a grand day, as they say over here, apart from one tiny detail: Our bus back to Galway was due at 4.50. By 5.20, the locals who were waiting, scattered up and down the pavement, sitting in doorways, poking at their phones, assured us that it would be here directly (sure, it’s a bit late sometimes).

After three-quarters of an hour, when it still hadn’t turned up, Hugo and I repaired to the pub opposite – whereupon the bus arrived. The driver – the same one who had taken on the outward trip – appeared resolutely unconcerned: “Sure, it’s been busy today,” was all he offered.

We were too late to get the bike back, but the guy at the hire shop let us off. He was a Londoner, but London Irish so that counts.

In the end, we did get to sail. There was a 48-hour gap in the weather towards the end of the week – enough to dash over to Kinvara, about seven miles, take the tide up to the village and go to the pub. The pilot book says “The passage should be undertaken with great care and continuous use of the echo sounder.” 

We crept up,  just about maintaining steerage way, the tide doing most of the work and our noses pressed to our phone screens and the Navionics app.

Of course, after a couple of pints in the Pier hotel, we went back a lot faster – but then Hugo was driving, exhibiting all the resilience of youth.

I missed him when he left.

Then Con Brosnan turned up from Dublin half a day late and complaining about the traffic. Con is another Rival owner but his boat seems to have taken root in the yard in Gibraltar so it was back to Murphy’s bar and then, walking along the pontoon and feeling that Ireland had got the social juices flowing, I stopped in my tracks at the sight of biggest, most solid, most classically beautiful boat you can imagine. 

This was FlekkerØy, a 1936 Norwegian pilot boat with not a winch in sight, fabulous woodwork, a 10ft clinker dinghy stowed upright on deck, deadeyes…

And yet there was an enormous Rocna anchor, a full-size Raymarine plotter in the cockpit. Modernity where it mattered – tradition where it belonged…

Bjornar Berg and Klara Emmerfors had met in a boatyard – he was the mechanic and she the shipwright. FlekkerØy started life in 1936 as a pilot boat for the island of the same name and carried on in service until 1968. Bjornar bought her in 2005 and now they have cruised to the Shetlands, the Faeroes, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia – all the way down the coasts of Canada and the USA to the West Indies.

But the Caribbean was not a success. FlekkerØy’s 12m (by 4.6!) of woodwork absorbed every Joule of heat and promptly released it into the already-sweltering cabin. The two Norse people, more used to thick sweaters and two heaters for half the year, just couldn’t cope with this at all. So they headed North again. 

I asked where they were going after Galway but they simply had no idea – nor did they know where they were going to spend the winter. 

“We’ll see,” said Bjornar. “For now, we like it here.”

He had a point.

I don’t like towing a dinghy. It slows you down, it gets itself into trouble. In the worst-case scenario, you can end up losing it. That’s why I carry the smallest, lightest (only 10kg) I could find – you can deflate and stow it in five minutes so who needs to tow it?
But what I witnessed 20 miles North West of the Scilly Isles yesterday beggars belief.
First, there was an alarm from the AIS: A 12m pleasure vessel approaching at 12 knots – so it had to be a motor yacht. Anyway, sailing yachts don’t call themselves “Pleasure Vessels”. But there was something odd about the name of this one: TT Elysian.
“T/T” usually stands for “Tender to”. But nobody puts an AIS transponder on their dinghy – and anyway, what kind of dinghy do you find out in the Western Approaches – doing 12 knots in those big Atlantic rollers?
Then I looked more closely and saw that there were, in fact, two little green triangles – one overlapping the other. The second one was called Elysian – another “Pleasure Vessel”. But this one was 66m, also going to Lorient.
Sure enough, as they passed astern, there at the end of a very, very long line was a small, speedboat. Well, when I say “small”, the AIS pointed out that it was longer than Samsara but it did look very small compared to the mother ship.
Was it too big to get aboard? Could the 16 crew not be bothered? Did the owner know? Can you get away with treating a $500,000 Riva that way?
I’ve since looked online and found that Elysian is available for charter at $448,000 a week – and, let’s face it, isn’t that typical of the way people treat charter boats?
If you happen to find yourself rafted up alongside somewhere in the sun one evening and you get chatting to the owner over a beer, you might let them know…

Years and years ago, I wrote a piece for Yachting World called Real Men don’t use spinnaker squeezers. It centred around the Mother of All Broaches in Largo off the Grand Banks towards the end of the 1988 OSTAR – which, that year, was sponsored by Carlsberg (although the beer was all gone before we left Plymouth).
There were two particular features of this broach which remain stuck fast in the memory: One was that it all happened in the middle of the most inky-black night but the spinnaker sheet popped the lifebuoy out of its bracket, dragging the strobe light with it…which, of course, started flashing, lighting up the entire scene in a series of frozen images – the myriad droplets of Atlantic fixed in time and space.
And while all this was going on, the cockpit speakers continued to play – relentlessly – Maurice Chevalier singing Thank Heaven for Little Girls.
All of this comes to mind because I dared to suggest on a Facebook sailing group that traditional symmetrical spinnakers were a lot more versatile than cruising chutes and asymmetric spinnakers.
Back in 1988, the asymmetric version had only just been invented and was strictly the preserve of the racing sailor. The rest of us had the old-fashioned kind and poled it out. Occasionally it ended up in the water. That was the way it was – we thought nothing of it.
Yet now, people seem to be horrified at the idea of flying a traditional spinnaker. Samsara came with a cruising chute. I swapped it for what I would call a “proper” one – with a man who had never taken it out of his attic and had been warned by the previous owner that it was “a monster”.
No, it isn’t. It’s a pussycat – a pussycat with a lot of oomph, admittedly. The other day, it had me doing seven knots hour after hour on the way from Valentia to Galway across the centre of a tropical low while everyone else from Bloody Foreland to Roches Point was sheltering from gales.
But then, proper symmetrical spinnakers are absolutely great sails.
The enduring image of Jean Luc Van den Heede winning the Golden Globe race is of Matmut running into Les Sables d’Olonne behind her big blue kite – with the sponsor’s name to the fore (how did Matmut’s PR department organise that?)
VDH is even older than me. Maybe flying a proper spinnaker is an age thing. In which case it is something which OldManSailing should seek to preserve for posterity, like baggywrinkle and futtock shrouds.
So here’s where I maintain that a symmetrical spinnaker scores over the asymmetric upstart: It’s more versatile. You can fly it with the wind anywhere from dead astern (or a bit more) to ten degrees forward of the beam. That’s 100 degrees of apparent wind angle. Try doing that with a cruising chute and the main will blanket it once the wind gets past the quarter. Asymmetrics on bowsprits don’t fare much better. In fact, they really only come into their own when the boat is fast enough to shift the apparent wind so far forward that they never really “run” at all.
So much for the technical side. How about the fear factor? For that’s the real issue. When it comes to sailing nightmares, The Spinnaker Wrap is right up there along with hitting the container, the out-of-season hurricane, lightning strikes and piracy.
And it’s a legitimate fear: Once your pretty sail is wrapped a couple of times round the forestay when you just happen to be passing a wind farm, the south coast of Jersey, or one of those trawlers that keep relentlessly (and rightfully) to their course, you are, without any doubt, in the deep stuff.
I just looked and there is no advice whatsoever on the internet about how to deal with a spinnaker wrap. Plenty about how to avoid it before it happens – but absolutely nothing about what to do when it does. I suppose this is because there really is nothing you can do – short of sending someone aloft with a sharp knife. It’s either that or wait ’til the wind drops.
To prove this point, I remember one of the AZAB competitors sailing back into Falmouth with three metres of spinnaker still flying from his masthead: He had managed the outward trip singlehanded and without incident. For the return leg, his wife shipped aboard – but flatly refused to let him go up the mast to retrieve the sail. I don’t believe they have sailed together since. In fact, I’m not even sure they’re still married…
Anyway, to business: Here is the Old Man’s recipe for flying a traditional spinnaker singlehanded and safely.
First, before you do anything else, hoist your spinnaker net. You can make this yourself. It’s just two 3mm lines hoisted on a spare halyard. One line clips to the stemhead fitting just aft of the furling gear, the other to the foot of the mast. Between these two run three shorter lengths of line at intervals to form a “net”. Once this is up, it is impossible for anything to wrap itself round the forestay. My net has clips on one end of the horizontal lines and I attach them as I hoist it – makes it less prone to tangles.
Rig your sheets and guys if they aren’t a permanent fixture. The sheets go to blocks on the quarters, the guys to blocks at the boat’s widest point (If your boat is shaped like a dart and the widest point is the stern, then you will have a bowsprit and an asymmetric and none of this applies). On each side, the guy and sheet terminate in a single snapshackle.
Once you’ve got all that sorted, you can furl your headsail.
Take the spinnaker halyard round the forestay to the lee side and clip to the guardrail.
Rig the pole on the windward side with the spinnaker guy through the down-facing jaw and pulled in front of the forestay and clipped to the leeward side of the pulpit. You will need two uphauls for the pole, one on each side otherwise you won’t be able to gybe it with the net up. The downhaul can be taken through a block in the centre of the foredeck and led back to the cockpit.
Bring up the spinnaker and attach the guy and sheet. Ensure the line for the squeezer is not tangled and kept inside everything else. This line should run through some sort of ring which can be attached to a point in the middle of the foredeck (you don’t want to worry about losing it).
Go back to the cockpit and pull in the guy so that the clew of the sail is dragged round to the weather side. Leave enough slack in the sheet so that the sail will not fill immediately (you don’t want to be pitched off the foredeck when it suddenly inflates with a bang). Make up the pole downhaul in the cockpit.
Once all is ready, attach the halyard and hoist the sail in its squeezer.
Hoist the squeezer and make fast the line round a foredeck cleat to stop the funnel slipping down if the wind drops.
Go back to the cockpit and haul in the sheet. Adjust the guy and pole downhaul.
And off you go!
Writing it all down like this makes everything sound rather complicated – which, I suppose it is, when compared to hoisting a cruising chute but really it’s just a matter of remembering everything and doing it in the right order – and, of course, practising until you can run through the whole process in ten minutes.
One other thing to mention – particularly for singlehanders – is that I have never managed to make a mechanical windvane steer a spinnaker: As soon as there is a puff of wind, the boat accelerates and the apparent wind angle moves forward throwing everything out of kilter. An electronic autopilot works fine – but I would love to know how the Golden Globe Guys did it.
Meanwhile, a couple of things to mention about taking your spinnaker down again:
Firstly, douse it as soon as the autopilot loses control. OK, so you could do a better job yourself – but then, how are you going to cope on the foredeck when you have to hand the ship back to the microchips and they let her broach all over the place?
Wear a thick pair of gloves when hauling the squeezer down over the sail: Even with the sheet flying, there’s a lot of tension on that thin line.
Oh, and by the way, I’m not proud: I pull the squeezer down when the time comes to gybe. It only takes a moment and makes the whole operation so much more manageable.
And now, just to show you how stable a symmetrical spinnaker can be – and how fast it makes to boat go, here is that trip across the centre of what the Irish Meteorological Service called a “vigorous tropical low”.
Enjoy.

It’s a delicate decision; when to call in the experts. A couple of weeks ago, I had this weird problem with the cooling water for the engine. Sometimes it would flow, sometimes it wouldn’t. There seemed to be no logic to it.

I’d inspected the filter, tested the seacock – easy now that I have a seawater pump in the galley branching off the inlet. I opened up the impeller housing – without dropping any of the bolts into the bilge.

I even asked for advice on Facebook – and terrified myself with the range of wild and technical advice. In the end, I pulled into Dover where I met a lovely engineer called Mick. He was one of those calm and competent tradesmen who takes the cack-handed boat-owner under his wing with a show of mock exasperation at the vagaries of machinery. He didn’t even bring his toolbox onto the boat – just climbed aboard and said: “Let’s have a look…”

The next thing he said was: “Hello, what’s this branch coming off the inlet pipe?”

“Ah,” says I, proudly. “That’s my galley seawater…”

We worked out – or at least, he was kind enough to include me in the process – that, under certain circumstances (motor-sailing on starboard tack) the engine would rather draw air from the galley pump than water from the sea. All you have to do is put your thumb over the tap for a minute to make it see sense.

I felt such a fool! Mainly I felt furious with myself for incurring another bill on the maintenance budget when all I needed to do was think logically. What is it marine engineers charge? £50 an hour? £60.

But Mick shook his head. He hadn’t even opened his toolbox, had he? 

And now here I am in Falmouth with the headsail furling gear working as smoothly as if it was the demonstration model on the Hood stand at the Boat Show. 

That‘s not how it was yesterday. Yesterday, I couldn’t get the last two turns off it – and I had to put the line on a winch to roll it up again. Twice I had dropped the sail and fiddled with the drum – everything was fine without the sail. 

It had to be something to do with the new furling line. On the other hand, the gear had worked to begin with – only after Portland did things start to go wrong – yet here I was about to set out into the Atlantic…

The rigger was called Jake. He would come and have a look when he’d finished with the davits on a brand new Rustler 57. I went and found the boat. It was easy to see why this one took priority. For one thing, all the sail handling was electric (or, possibly, hydraulic). There was a satellite dish, a drop-down bathing platform, the varnish on the rail looked as if it belonged in Harrods furniture department.

I looked back up the pontoon to where Samsara lay with her hand-painted decks and the rust stain dripping out from some ancient fastening buried under the woodwork. 

How could I take Jake away from his gleaming davits? The RIB, by the way, came with individual fitted canvas covers to keep the sun off the various bits without increasing the windage with an all-over cover. Nice idea…

And yet, Jake took a break from this million-pound project to come and looked at my furling gear. He didn’t bring a toolbox either – just a big Leatherman and borrowed my 10mm socket spanner and an Allen key.

Here’s what he found – and if you ever need to change the furling line on a SeaFurl5, you need to know this: Inside the drum housing there is a plastic disc which separates into two halves. When you put it back together, it needs to click into a groove on the extrusion.

Nothing to it really – but, of course, enough to stop the whole thing working and lead to all kinds of potential disasters. 

“I could have worked that out,” I said to the back of his head as we crouched on the foredeck and he tightened the last screws.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Already, I’d put it back together once without noticing the groove. The truth is, it’s the tradesman’s expertise that you pay for, not his time. So how much did I owe Jake for his ten minutes?

He shook his head and smiled as he headed back to what he called the “tweaking” at the other end of the pontoon. 

I peeked at the online brochure for the new boat. It’s got a heated towel rail in the heads.

I bet they won’t get that fixed for nothing. 

I was fast asleep when the boat turned turtle. Being a catamaran, she stayed that way. They pulled me off with a helicopter. I had been asleep at the time.

There, that’s out of the way. If I’m going to write about sleep management for singlehanded sailors, I had better admit to the embarrassing moment up front. But the fact is that it happened 20 years ago – in another lifetime, or so it seems.

Now I am sailing along the South Coast of England on my own and without stopping. How on earth am I going to stay alert 24 hours a day for four or five days in the middle of the busiest shipping lanes in the world?

Well, for one thing, I’m getting used to it: Five days from Lowestoft to Falmouth in April, then back from Baltimore in Ireland to Woodbridge on the East Coast at the beginning of July. Now I’m back off to Galway… The English Channel is beginning to become as familiar as my local High Street: The headlands – The Lizard, Start, Portland, St Catherine’s – old friends like Costa’s and Boots.

I admit I am contravening the International  Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea. These are very precise and begin by insisting “Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper look-out…”

At all times… Every minute of every hour of every day…

Back in the 1960’s when singlehanded began to claim public attention, my old Alma Mater, Yachting World and its then editor, the ferociously correct Maurice Griffiths, mounted a vigorous campaign against the practice, insisting that it was by its very nature, unseamanlike. After all, how could one man (and it was inevitably a man in those days) possibly keep a good lookout at all times?

Well, of course, he didn’t. Singlehanders slept in small snatches – calculated at the time it would take a ship to appear over the horizon and run them down.

And while on the subject of being run down, these early solo sailors seemed to take the view that the ColRegs were written to stop big ships sinking each other. If a big ship were to hit a small yacht, it might not even notice – and if the solo sailor went down – well, that was his lookout (if you will pardon the pun).

Or as Blondie Hasler put it, he would “drown like a gentleman”.

And that is the way I viewed it when I started singlehanded voyaging in the 1970’s with a passage from Poole to Santander, hardly sleeping at all and in a constant state of alarm lest a ship should cover the distance from my horizon in less than 20 minutes – which I’m sure it could have done.

On the strength of that, I bought a gadget called a Watchman which was supposed to detect radar beams and sound an alarm – although I don’t think it ever did.

Instead, as all singlehanded sailors eventually do, I just got used to sleeping in short snatches – and discovered that there is a knack to it.

The first thing to understand is that when alone on a boat, you must never allow yourself to get tired. When you’re tired you make mistakes. So, if you’re going to be out for any length of time, it is most important to start the sleep routine straight away. As soon as you are clear of the harbour, the boat is settled on her course, get your head down.

OK, so it may only be ten O’clock in the morning and you don’t feel remotely tired. Get your head down!

The plan is to sleep for 20 minutes so you will need an alarm – in fact, two because there is sure to come a time when you make a mess of setting one of them or turn it off instead of on…

I use the timer on my phone – and an old phone as a backup. Each has a different ring tone (as loud and annoying as I could find). The two phones sit in the fiddle above my head.

For this first session, it is possible that you will not sleep at all (after all you’re not remotely tired). Never mind, this is just to get you into the routine: You lie awake thinking about supertankers until the first alarm goes off (they are staggered by a minute).

You get up, you look around, you check the course – and then you go straight back to bed. That is important. The more stimulation you allow yourself, the harder it will to be able to go to sleep next time. Just keep on doing this and eventually, the alarm will go off and you will realise it has woken you up. You have been asleep before midday!

With a bit of practice, this will become easier and easier. Then it’s just a question of building up the total sleep time: Three 20-minute sessions in the morning gives you an hour. Six after lunch and you have three hours in the bag. At night it’s easier because it seems natural – which means you will have no trouble reaching your normal total.

Of course, the 20-minute allowance can be adjusted to suit the circumstances: In the midst of a fishing fleet or when closing the land, it can be reduced all the way down to five minutes.

Some people may ask “What good is five minutes?”

Honestly, it can make all the difference. Have you never been tempted, while doing 70 miles an hour on a motorway, just to “rest your eyes” for a few seconds? I hope you resisted the temptation. Just imagine how much you would have welcomed being able to lie down for five minutes…

At times like this, it goes without saying that you must be absolutely sure that both your phones are charged, that you really have started the timers, that the “do not disturb” function is disabled and that you have closed the app before putting down the phone so as to avoid pausing it accidentally by touching the screen (yes, I have done all of these – why do you think I have a backup phone?)

With luck, such precautions will prevent you from sailing embarrassingly up the beach or into the side of a trawler. Remember; everything – absolutely everything – gives way to a trawler.

But there is still the possibility that you may sleep through both alarms. I have found there are two reasons for this. The first is that you have allowed yourself to get so tired that the needs of your body override the needs of the ship. That’s why you must bank your sleep even when you don’t feel tired – especially when you don’t feel tired.

However, there is a less obvious reason for sleeping through the alarms: You can get used to anything – and, of course, you can get used to waking up to the same alarm tone after yet another five minutes’ sleep and, once more, doing the checks and then going back to bed all in the space of some 40 or 50 seconds. In fact, it’s great that you have hardly woken up at all and, so, can go straight back to sleep as if nothing had happened.

Do this enough and the brain will decide it’s a waste of time waking up at all – and that’s when you hit something solid.

So I wouldn’t recommend doing the five-minute routine for longer than half an hour – or the 20-minute routine for longer than two hours.

Obviously, this means that at some point, you’re going to pack in a whole hour at a stretch – and this is where Mr Griffiths will start rotating in his grave. Any solo sailor who goes to sleep for an hour is asking for trouble.

Or are they?

Back to the ColRegs: “Every vessel shall at all times maintain a proper look-out…by sight and hearing and all available means…”

You might imagine how delighted I was to discover, after my 20-year-solo sailing hiatus that somebody had invented AIS. I am writing this while crossing the Separation Zone north of Alderney and simply cannot imagine how we all managed without it. This morning I tacked because I was about to be overtaken by a tanker a mile away on my port side – no problem there but the plotter showed up a fishing boat ahead which I would never have spotted without searching through binoculars (and who does that every 20 minutes unless they’re in Das Boot?)

So now, when I get my head down, I check the AIS (the Absolutely Indispensable Security-Blanket), ensure the VHF is tuned to Channel 16 – and you’ll understand why if you come back and read www.oldmansailing.com/cautionary-tale.

However, if you do read it, you will understand that AIS is only as good as the willingness of everyone else to use it too. In UK waters this is fine – even small day-fishing boats and RIBs full of divers have AIS transmitters and only once have I found a commercial fishing boat without one. Maybe it has something to do with the British willingness to conform – after all, we don’t seem to mind that we have more CCTV cameras watching us than any other nation on earth…

Sailing in Irish waters I discovered an alternative attitude – and when I mentioned it on a Facebook group, it was clear that Americans would no more give up their right to anonymity than their right to bear arms.

That’s OK – just as long as we know. Now, once past the middle of the Irish sea, the radar goes into “watch” mode and, once again, I sleep soundly. I suppose that, venturing into new territorial waters, I will have to assume the natives are in hiding.

 I suppose I can see their point of view: I used to think that one of the nicest things about sailing was that you “disappeared” – rather like the old days when I was a foreign correspondent and delighted in the office having no very clear idea where I was staying – or, on occasions, which country I was in… 

Maybe I’m settling down in my old age.

Or maybe I just want my old age to last a bit longer…

It seems only yesterday that I wrote with such pride about pulling up the anchor by hand – and me 70 years old if I’m a day (imagine how impressive it will be when I’m 80!).

You might have guessed I would live to regret this.

But from Falmouth to the Hebrides – the Isle of Man and North Wales, I hauled in the 20kg Rocna with its 10mm chain as if it was no more than a bath plug. Even in the dark depths of Loch Spelve, I got it up in the end.

Then I dropped it in Baltimore (the Irish one). Baltimore was this year’s destination for the Jester Challenge and the other singlehanders in small boats turned out to be such a convivial crowd and Bushe’s Bar served such a good pint of Guinness that I stayed for a week. Part of that week involved the gale which battered the Azores and Back fleet on their return to Plymouth.

One way and another, when the time came to weigh anchor and head back to the UK, it was well dug in. In fact, it was so well dug in that after an hour of grunting and revving, and nothing to show for it, the only possible explanation had to be that something had fouled it. I knew all about fouled anchors – this time last year in the Outer Hebrides, I’d had to call out a diver to get the thing out from under a ground chain. And this felt just the same – the identical, absolutely rock-solid resistance.

I’ll tell you the moral of this story now: Don’t make assumptions. Check your facts before shelling out for another diver – particularly since they cost twice as much in Baltimore as they do in Barra.

This time, the assumption was that just because the anchor wouldn’t budge, it must be fouled again. I now realise that I was predisposed to think this way because now I have the answer. After last year’s debacle, I bought myself an AnchorRescue.

This is a brilliant bit of kit. Made in America by Scanmar, one half of it lives permanently on the chain and the other half goes down on the tripping line to connect to it. The clever thing is that you do this after the event because, as Sod’s Law dictates: The time your anchor gets fouled is the time you didn’t think to rig a tripping line.

With a bit of jiggling, I got the two halves connected, at which point – according to the instructions: “Using a hand-over-hand technique, raise the retriever without relying on the windlass’ capstan until the anchor is free of the bottom.”

Of course, I didn’t read that bit – who bothers to read instructions when they’re trying out something as exciting as this?

I did get around to reading them later – after it turned out that the anchor didn’t want to come out backwards either – even though I put the line on a cockpit winch and cranked until it hummed. That was when I decided to look up the breaking strain – 760lbs. What’s that? About 350kg? I plucked the line as if it were a violin string. Hmm… C#. Maybe not.

So in the end, Gerry the diver went down and tied another line to the roll bar. Then I winched on that while he mud-wrestled on the bottom.

Afterwards, he reckoned that even if I had possessed a working windlass, it wouldn’t have done any good – nothing short of a commercial tug for Baltimore mud, apparently.

So here’s the practical part. This is what I should have done (in case you happen to visit Baltimore at the same time as a vigorous low):

1. Go and ask the harbourmaster if there is anything down there that could foul an anchor – maybe he’ll say the local mud does that…

2. Get in the water and look at it – being a born-and-bred East Coast sailor, it never occurred to me that all I had to do was dive down a couple of metres and I would have been able to see what was going on.

3. (And this is the big one): Don’t be in such a hurry! Wait for low water, haul the chain as tight as it will go – and then wait for high water. With a range of two metres, there is no mud in the world that can compete with the buoyancy of Samsara’s great fat bow.

I really wish I had thought of that one: I once read a description of a Thames Barge being held down by the suction of an Essex mud bank as the tide rose higher and higher up its topsides. Eventually, as the water began to lap at the scuppers and it seemed the ship must founder, there was “a tremendous explosion of mud and water and air” and the old lady shot to the surface – and then, apparently, kept going…

Also, if I hadn’t given Gerry 100Euros, I could have had dinner at The Mews Restaurant, Baltimore’s celebrated foodie heaven (although, maybe 100Euros wouldn’t go that far – not when they start you off with “mackerel tartare dotted with charred gooseberry slices, wood sorrel and dayglo orange nasturtium petals”).

Alternatively, I could just get the windlass fixed…

If you’re going to get stuck somewhere, Dublin is a pretty good place to do it.

The plan had been to stay for a day or two while the Isle of Man TT was rained off. I could do the Guinness tour, listen to some Irish music in the pubs. Drink some more Guinness… Who cared if it rained?

But then, just as I furled the jib as the wind picked up in Dublin Bay, the sheet flipped the whole of the top of the winch onto the deck.

How did that happen?

The top of the winch is supposed to be held down by a plastic disc which screws into the feeder arm and holds the whole thing together.

There you are, isn’t that impressive? I know that the silver bit is called the “feeder arm”. That’s because I had to scour the internet to find out what I needed to ask for when ringing round the local chandleries for a replacement – because you see, when both the feeder arm and top cap leapt off the winch and bounced onto the side deck, the top cap bounced higher and straight over the side.

It was one of those moments when you freeze to see what’s going to happen – and later on, wish you were the sort of person who doesn’t freeze in emergencies but leaps into action (in this case, snatching the bits out of the air like the second slip at Lords).

Instead, of course, I stood mesmerized as the feeder arm – being the heavier of the two – landed in the scuppers while the tiny, lightweight top cap arced delicately over the guardrails and into the boiling maelstrom which is Dublin Bay in a southerly force seven.

Now, I suppose it would have been possible to sail back to the Isle of Man for the last of the TT without a starboard cockpit winch – and, of course, it would certainly be possible if I had a posh boat with secondary winches. But as things stood, I really couldn’t think of anything more inconvenient: Would switching the top cap from the port winch every time I went about be more trouble than rigging a handy billy on the sheet?

Simpler to wait ‘til Monday morning and ring round the chandleries for another – except, for some reason I never established, Monday was a bank holiday in the Republic of Ireland – although, not in the UK.

What if I got to Tuesday and nobody had one – and wouldn’t even sell me the one off the winch in the window (which, of course, would make their £800 item of stock totally unsaleable until they got a new top cap).

In the end I ordered one from the UK. They’d get it in the post right away. It should arrive on Wednesday.

Hmm. If I left on Wednesday evening, I could be back in the Isle of Man by Thursday night – still in time for the last day of the TT on Friday. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be an alternative.

Odd how things turn out: Once the package was in the post, I stopped worrying. In fact, those four days in Dublin were just great. I did the Guinness tour – actually, I did it twice because I was just about to collect my pint when a very insistent and annoying announcement over the public address kept demanding a Mr Sands’ presence in reception – which turned out to be the code for a fire alarm.

Still, I got my pint in the end (you get to look forward to it after going round the tour – twice). Do you know how to pour a Guinness? There’s a right way and a wrong way. It’s all to do with the proportion of carbon dioxide and nitrogen you put in the glass along with the beer. Anyway, I messed up mine by trying to put in too much Guinness and it went slopping all down the side.

I joined a party of Americans and Canadians for a musical pub crawl around the Temple Bar – the lone Englishman. I was quite the celebrity. “Welcome to Europe!” said the guide.

In those four days, I rode my little folding bicycle all over the city – the Yeats exhibition – backwards and forwards across Halfpenny Bridge…

St Steven’s Green was an eye-opener with all its signs telling the story of the Easter Rising: Here was the spot where the Irish Citizen Army dug their trenches (and pinched cushions from cars parked in the adjoining streets to make themselves comfortable) – and there, on the facade of the Royal College of Surgeons were the scars from the British Army’s Lewis gun firing out of a bedroom window on the fourth floor of the Shelbourne Hotel. Of course, both sides agreed a truce when it was time for the Park Keeper to feed the ducks.

I didn’t know any of this. But then I went to school in England. I wouldn’t – which, of course, explains half a century of misery on both sides.

Meanwhile, everywhere you go in Dublin, there are pubs and there is music. In fact, the music spills out onto the street. It seems that on every corner, there is someone with a guitar – and next to the statue of Molly Malone, a proper set-up with microphones and speakers and a duo leading the tourists in endless repetitions of “She wheeled her wheelbarrow…”

Molly, by the way, was quite a gal if her statue is anything to go by – her bosom positively gleams (lovingly polished by the groping hands of ten million tourists a year).

When Wednesday came and went with no sign of a small package for me behind the bar of the Poolbeg Yacht and Boat Club, I was really quite philosophical. I think I ordered another Guinness to make up for it. By then it was too late for the TT. When it did arrive on Thursday, I set off back across the Irish Sea to Wales.

There was to be free mooring for a week at Pwllheli in preparation for the Jester Challenge – more about that next time. It’s an event for small single-handed boats sailing to… Ireland.