I suppose I shall see a lot of beaches in the years to come, but here, today, in Aruba, I really think I have found the best of them – at least, the best so far…

It is called Surfside Beach which is really a misnomer since the barrier reef turns this part of the Caribbean into an enormous, placid lagoon. The water is that particular shade of turquoise that comes only from zero pollution and the brightest white sand.

As beaches go, it’s right up there with the Princess Diana Beach in Barbuda. But Surfside has something special. Surfside has trees. Really: Trees growing right by the water – some of them actually in the water – and giving real shade too, unlike the thatched constructions the resorts put up because they’re too posh for umbrellas. Also, with a tree, your legs don’t stick out and get burned.

And I was ready for a beach.

On the boat, it’s 35°C in the cabin and the deck makes you wish your tired feet were fireproof, as the Drifters used to sing. Besides, I had spent the morning cycling 12 kilometres tracking down metalwork shops which didn’t stock the kind of aluminium pipe I need for the self-steering (get it from Amsterdam).

So, I packed a sandwich and a couple of beers into the cool bag and rowed ashore to stake my claim. It wasn’t hard. The beach is half a mile long. There’s a tree every ten metres and there can’t have been more than a dozen people.

Now, I don’t want you to think that my life is one long holiday: Along with the beer and the sandwich, I had my folding fisherman’s chair and the laptop. I would sit in the shade and write the daily chapter.

The Daily Chapter is set in stone (along with one from the Teach Yourself Spanish audiobook). I have worked out that if I write a chapter a day, I will have the next book finished by the time I leave for Cartagena and a month of language classes.

But it was hot work rowing the 400 metres to the beach, so first I had to cool off.

It seems that I was in the water for 90 minutes. Just floating like you do in a bath when you don’t have to be anywhere in particular – only, at Surfside, I didn’t have to keep reaching down to the other end to top up with hot water. It was 30°C and it stayed 30°C. When I came out, I looked like a prune. But staring up through the leaves and working out whether the deep blue of the sky is actually what they call “sky blue” does take time.

Besides, everyone else seemed to be doing the same: couples, mothers with children, dogs – all just lying in the shallows and letting the day pass.

But you can’t eat a sandwich in the water – or at least, you have to get out to fetch it and, afterwards, you tend to be a bit sticky and rather red from the beetroot, so you have to get back in, and there goes the rest of the afternoon…

But I am proud to say that I did, eventually fire up the laptop and I was sitting under the tree tapping away writing this when Henrik came by. Henrik is a Swedish sailor and a most interesting one. You wouldn’t believe it to look at him but he was born in 1975 which makes him 49 years old. 1975 was the Fall of Saigon – and Henrik was a Vietnamese orphan.

People of a certain age will remember this: The South Vietnamese capital was full of orphaned children, the offspring of American GIs and Vietnamese bar girls (think Miss Saigon). The rest of the world was terrified the Vietcong would murder them all.

Actually, Henrik has no American blood, but nobody knew that at the time. Nobody knew who his parents were, or even if he had a name. He was the youngest orphan to be airlifted out – just a few days old.

They sent him to Sweden where a factory worker and a kindergarten teacher adopted him and brought him up in a small town called Mariestad between Stockholm and Gothenburg. For most of his life, he worked for the council as a maintenance man. But something in his Southeast Asian genes was calling him to the sea.

Now he is in Aruba in an old boat painted up like a 1980s New York subway train, sailing along with the rest of us except he hasn’t got the money to go through the Panama Canal so he’s condemned to do another circuit of the Caribbean. Anyway, there he was walking back along the beach from his shopping trip, and he happened to have four cans of something called Balashi (born and brewed in Aruba).

To return the favour and to help with the Panama Canal kitty, I’m going to give him my old dinghy. I was planning to throw it in the Marina skip, but he swears he can sell it in Colombia.

Henrik and “Cordiellia”

One way and another, the laptop went back in the bag and as the sun dipped closer to the horizon, I began to wonder whether today might be the day I photograph the legendary green flash (I’ve only seen it once and that was before everybody had a smartphone in their pocket).

Once again, it didn’t happen, but I did get this shot of my neighbour from the next tree watching the same sunset from an even better vantage point.

And the Daily Chapter? Well, tomorrow is another day…

Thank you to Judy and Steve, superstars of the sailing Fair Isle YouTube channel for making me look so good in their latest episode

Hanging out in hurricane season | Ep124youtu.be

Electric outboards are silent. Electric outboards require no maintenance. They are light, they don’t pollute, their “fuel” is free (providing the sun shines and the wind blows).

And yet I haven’t seen a single one in Spanish Water, this huge, land-locked harbour in Curacao.

There must be 200 boats at anchor here, waiting out the hurricane season. Their crews whizz back and forth to Uncle J’s the hamburger joint or the Fishermen’s dock where the courtesy bus picks up for the supermarket. Saturday morning is Zumba class on the beach, Sunday afternoon, Mexican Train Dominos…

You need an outboard in Spanish Water, and they all go flat out at all hours of day and night because RIBs with 9.9hp outboards work best going flat out – and who needs lights when all proper sailors can see in the dark?

And here is me in my little inflatable which deflates because I can’t find the leak – and I’m the only one who’s rowing.

Nobody can understand this. They keep offering to tow me in. It takes a lot of explaining.

Readers who have been with this blog from the beginning will know that when I had Largo in the 1980s, I had a two-stroke Suzuki 2hp which I used to pick up in one hand off the pushpit bracket, step over the rail holding it high in the air, climb into the dinghy still with it in one hand and slip it smoothly onto the transom.

So, when I bought Samsara in 2017, I found (eventually on eBay) another two-stroke 2hp Suzuki. Everything was the same. I had returned to my 30-something lifestyle.

In a 60-something body.

The big surprise was that I could barely lift a 2hp outboard in one hand. I certainly couldn’t wave it around while I climbed over the rail. I ended up having to lay it down on the deck and sort of shuffling it into the dinghy.

I did consider a derrick but you really need two people for those. In the end, I dumped it and bought what was called a “trolling motor” – a little electric job that weighed only 5kg (although you did need a 12kg lead-acid battery to make it go).

Nevertheless, I thought this was brilliant. I even made a little raft for it so I could lash it alongside and push the boat through those seemingly endless ocean calms. It didn’t work – I’m not sure I really expected it to. It tried to capsize as soon as I turned it on.

In the end, I sold it on eBay. I could row faster.

Besides, rowing is good for you. When the RIB drivers roar up alongside and offer to tow me the rest of the way, I puff out my chest and say: “It’s OK. If I don’t do this, I have to go to the gym!”

It’s true. My son the doctor tells me that, after the age of 75 (which the NHS categorizes as “late elderly”) you don’t make any more muscle. In fact, you have to work damn hard at holding onto what you’ve got left.

But I still hanker after an electric outboard.

I certainly hankered after one when I found myself rowing the two miles across the lagoon in Barbuda with a 15kt tradewind going the other way (it took an hour and 40 minutes).

It would be useful on those occasions when I have to carry passengers – like ferrying the family inside the volcano crater in the Azores – or Mohammed, the very large customs agent who navigated me through the Byzantine check-in procedure for the Gambia.

Now, with all the time in the world (and all the data on the Starlink Regional plan) I have started looking up electric outboards. I have even drawn up a spreadsheet with the pros and cons – which leads inevitably to long discussions over Uncle J’s little bottles of Heineken.

A Dutchman sought me out and tried to sell me his Mercury (I didn’t even know Mercury made an electric outboard). Apparently, it had been fine in the Med but the distances here are just too great. He couldn’t keep it charged – even with 1600 watts of solar…

So I’m back to square one.

Or not: The Slovenian company Remigo has offered me a discount on their version if I would like to give it some publicity. The point about the Remigo is that, although it weighs only 12kg, it has a range of 30 miles.

That’s right: 30 nautical miles at its lowest setting of 2kts.

And that got me thinking: OK, so I could whizz around at the five knots top speed for an hour but I would only be doing that in an emergency like having passengers on in the lagoon at Barbuda. The rest of the time I would be rowing anyway to make sure I still have some muscles to show off in selfies.

But the Remigo would really come into its own on an ocean crossing – in those calms that last all day: The sea dies down, the mainsail flops on the coachroof and, for 12 hours, the boat rolls her guts out in the swell that never sleeps.

If I had the right electric outboard, I could have a little bracket made for the transom and get the boat moving just fast enough to steady her – and I’d be making progress.

Marko at Remigo tells me they put one on a Halberg Rassey 42 and got it up to 3kts after a bit. Think of all those cruising boats that sail around with racks of diesel cans on the side decks to get them through the Doldrums…

I’ve got this vision of myself sitting in the shade with a cold beer wafting soundlessly into the next hemisphere.

I’ll let you know if it works out that way.

The companionway washboard in cockpit table mode

There were three of us sitting in Samsara’s cockpit as the sun went down over Spanish Water in Curacao . That was when the conversation turned to the size of the cockpit.

Well, it would do, given the size of said cockpit and the fact that there were three of us in it with the table up (actually the companionway washboard balanced on the tiller in its alternative role as a repository for coffee cups, beer bottles, breakfast, and – as I sit under the awning writing this – the laptop and a cup of tea).

It does mean there was even less room for the three of us because, in order to stop the rudder moving as yet another giant RIB roared past with 20hp on the back and the remote throttle all the way forward, the tiller had to be immobilised by means of a wooden strut and its opposing shock cord made off on the headsail cleat.

It works rather well. I always did want a cockpit table.

But it does mean there is only room for three.

The other two were Caroline and Fred, a Dutch couple in a 42footer who had adopted me when I arrived and drove me into Willemstad for Immigration, Customs and the Harbour Authority (to tell me where to anchor). The least I could do was invite them aboard for a beer.

“Did you ever think you would like a bigger boat?” Caroline asked, by way of making conversation (she was jammed on the far side of the table. It could have been worse, she could have been on the side with strut and the shock cord.

“No, never,” I told her. “There are a lot of advantages to a small boat. I can lift the anchor in one hand to bring it on deck (and most people would still consider it over-sized).

“I can turn round in marinas without giving everyone heart attacks.

“I can climb the mast without chickening out before I get to the top.”

“Everything is cheaper – including the boat herself…”

And all of this has become a talking point in the beach bars of the Caribbean – and the Tuamotus, for all I know, and the marina terraces all the way up the Hamble…and certainly Uncle J’s hamburger joint in Spanish Water where last night I sat drinking Heineken with a Englishman, a Dutchman and a German – and no, this is not the beginning of a joke.

Instead, we discussed big boats – very big boats. In particular, the tragedy of the Bayesian, the superyacht that capsized in a totally unexpected waterspout off the coast of Italy, drowning 12 people including her owner, tech mogul Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, who was just about to start at Oxford.

Yes, it is a tragedy. But no, it would never have happened to our boats – smaller boats, sensible boats.

The facts will emerge eventually of course – in a court somewhere where reputations will weigh in the balance and a price will be put on life of young Hannah, so full of promise, whose body was the last to be brought up from the bottom.

But that’s what you get, we decided, when you want to have the second tallest mast in the world (well, obviously you don’t. You want the tallest – but the case isn’t difficult to argue).

And a mast that tall with however many sails all hoisted and ready to go would weigh as much as any one of our boats – certainly mine. I’m only about eight tonnes all up.

Then, there’s the other side – the retractable keel (which was, apparently, retracted). The keel is for stability – to make the boat pop back up if she gets knocked down. I got knocked down last autumn running into Storm Babet on the way to the Canaries.

So, the boat was full of water. So, the 10mm bolt holding the gooseneck together snapped like a twig, four metres of teak toe-rail popped off with nothing but the sheer force of water. Sails torn, fridge inverted (in contravention of the instructions) big spanner in the sink, a single kernel of sweetcorn lodged on the top of a picture frame…

But the boat popped back up. She carried on sailing – all the way to Las Palmas.

Nobody died. Nobody got sued.

Small boat, you see…

Small boats are the answer.

I never knew that saving my own life would be so complicated. Believe me, it is much easier to drown.

If you have read Old Man Sailing – or even Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier – you will be familiar with my attitude to drowning. I have devoted several pages to the alternative, which is to grow so old and decrepit that I end up in some care home with a jolly girl in a plastic apron saying: “Never mind, let’s get you cleaned up…”

Believe me, I could not bear it. Far better, I reasoned, to fall over the side and watch my boat sailing away on her course into the sunset. How long would I be able to tread water? Until night falls? And then I would float on my back and look at the stars and contemplate my life and whether or not I had lived it as best I could – and all the other things people think about when they know it will be coming to an end soon.

That was why, when I fitted out Samsara in 2017, I did not install an EPIRB. I told Tamsin and the children that, if I should be long overdue arriving at my destination, they were not to instigate a search and rescue operation. Either I would turn up or I wouldn’t.

Now I am 75. I heard the other day that my old friend Kim Sengupta, foreign correspondent (war correspondent, mostly) of The Independent had died – in his sleep, in his own bed in London, from a heart attack at 68.

Clearly, I’m supposed to be dead by now – EPIRBs are for younger people.

I did begin to wonder whether I should have one in the middle of the Atlantic in 2020 when I was escaping from the first COVID Lockdown. World trade was non-existent. Pleasure boating was banned. I realised just how alone I was out there, and that if I should need to be rescued, there would be nobody passing by for me to call for help.

But there was nothing I could do about it, so I stopped worrying.

Yet now I have bought an EPIRB. I went into St George’s on the bus (one of those wonderful 18-seater Grenadian buses that come along every three minutes and take you wherever you want to go… and sometimes kick you off because the driver has spotted 18 people waiting on the other side of the road wanting to the other way…)

I had been thinking about an EPIRB ever since the crossing from the Cape Verdes. It was late in the season because I had been delayed by the knockdown repairs in the Canaries and then there were the phone calls from Mindelo about the house sale (which went through in the end, you’ll be glad to hear).

 So, there I was halfway through the 2,131-mile Atlantic crossing when it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a ship for three days – hadn’t even picked one up within 30 miles on the AIS, come to that. I certainly hadn’t talked to any other yachts (they were all anchored in Prickly Bay, their crews heading for Happy Hour in the One Love Bar).

I began to think logically about what would happen if I did hit The Container.

The Container is something that tends to preoccupy the singlehanded sailor if he lets his guard down. The Container is out there – and with the speed Samsara was chasing down her Westing even with the rudder held together with string (see The Voyage #2 book), hitting The Container would put an end to the narrative with a bang. Literally.

I had it all worked out: I would take to the liferaft. I had two hand-held VHF radios. I would wait until a ship came past and then I would call up (all tentative and apologetic) and ask “Could you give me a lift?

Except there were no ships – no yachts. In fact, not even any sealife or birdlife.

Just me.

I began to feel just a tiny bit anxious.

I was not anxious about falling over the side and seeing the boat sail away – that would be my own fault and all part of the plan.

But to run into The Container out of sheer bad luck when I was actually doing everything right – well, that just wouldn’t be fair. I could imagine the sort of language that would emanate from the little liferaft in the middle of nowhere.

I could imagine how much I would regret not having an EPIRB.

And now I’ve got Mr Musk’s Starlink, I bet I would use that to call for help – and then someone would have all the inconvenience of finding me from my last known position. I felt a certain obligation to make it as easy as possible for them.

Hence the EPIRB – and it’s my own fault for leaving it so long.

Buying it in Grenada means it is registered in the USA. This makes a difference because Samsara is a British vessel and I will have to get it reprogrammed to summon help from Falmouth rather than the US Coast Guard Maritime Search & Rescue Center in Virginia – where the inference is that my plight would be less of a priority than if I’d paid my taxes to Uncle Sam.

The nearest place to get it reprogrammed is Curaçao, 400 miles away.

Also, I discover that in order to screw it onto the bulkhead, I have to take it to pieces, and I cannot for the life of me work out how to put it back together again. On top of everything else, there is a hidden spring that throws the device out of its casing without warning and hits me smack in the face.

It would be just my luck to run into The Container and go to the bottom while still reading the instructions.

If you open up the engine casing and lie flat on the cylinder head and turn your head sideways so that your right ear gets folded back on itself by the underside of the companionway and your left ear is jammed against the oil filler cap, you can just reach Samsara’s fuel tank outlet.

I blame Alfred Walter Maley

Alfred Walter Maley it was who bought the bare hull fresh out of the mould in 1973, loaded it onto a lorry and took it up to Wolverhampton where he spent the next three years fitting it out.

Clearly, the first thing he did was put in the fuel tank. I bet he was really proud of it – the way he shoe-horned it in under the cockpit seat and then put in the calorifier so you can’t get at the tank by crawling round the back of the engine (which he put in next, so that you can’t get at the calorifier either.)

But Alfred Walter Maley was not totally without foresight. Clearly, he was capable of thinking ahead fifty years to the day I would find myself rolling through 40° in Prickly Bay on the South Coast of Grenada with my head in the engine – just able to reach the outlet and poke about with the long end of an Allen key.

The fuel tank was blocked again.

Readers who have been paying attention will know that this happened a month ago in Antigua. That time I spent £500 on a Nelson’s Dockyard engineer who I’m sure had promised he had a wonderful machine for sucking muck out of fuel tanks (in fact we just pumped out the fuel and then poured it back in again through a filter until it ran clear).

Well, obviously that didn’t get rid of all the muck because after a good deal of poking and jiggling with the Allen key, even more emerged – first in long disgusting strings and then in great glutinous globs.

Until finally it ran clear into the Tupperware I held underneath to catch the last few drops that were left after I had syphoned out all the fuel.

This, in itself, had been a bit of an operation because the original solution was to fill the tank to the brim in the hope that the sheer weight of fuel would clear any airlocks in the pipes.

My first thought was to buy extra fuel cans – it would still be cheaper than paying for another engineer.

Then I thought of borrowing them.

Then I thought of using water bottles. In the end, I had three of these stacked around the cockpit – as well as the 20-litre emergency water can. Surely they couldn’t be more than a dribble left in the tank…

But steadily, inexorably, the Tupperware was filling up to the brim. So, it was with some urgency that I hunted about for something to replace it. This was not as straightforward as it sounds (see “ears” above.)

While holding the very-nearly-full Tupperware with one hand, I flailed around with the other in the hope of connecting with something that might conceivably hold some diesel.

I found a coffee cup.

OK, so a coffee cup might not be the ideal receptacle for emptying a diesel tank but I was never a coffee purist – the slight tang of fuel oil might well complement Starbucks’ Pike Place roast.

Then all I had to do was change hands. Without removing ears.

The coffee cup filled remarkably quickly. So did the next one.

Quite clearly the tank was not as empty as I thought it was. I now had three coffee cups full of diesel, the Tupperware, of course, and also a pickle jar which I had emptied (complete with the last couple of pickles) into the bilge. Maybe the vinegar would cut the oil…

Meanwhile, I seemed to be out of receptacles and had my finger over the spigot rather in the manner of a little Dutch boy with a Saturday job in a garage. Thinking about it logically, you might assume I would be stuck there – that I might be stuck there forever, or at least until a wandering engineer with a hose and a bucket might happen by one his merry round.

But no. Feeling around with the spare hand, I chanced upon a piece of kitchen roll abandoned on the chart table. Scrunched up one-handed, this might be pushed into the spigot and block the flow long enough for me to get the wooden plug out of the bottom of the washing bucket (which used to be the rain-collection bucket in pre-watermaker days).

It worked. Retrieving my ears from their resting places, I dashed to the fo’c’sle, yanked out the wooden plug (with my teeth) dashed back and jammed it in place of the kitchen roll.

Now I had all the time in the world to empty the Tupperware, three coffee cups, pickle jar etc.

I am pleased to report that the engine now runs without a hiccup and the boat smells only mildly of diesel.

I wouldn’t come for coffee though.

I’m beginning to get the hang of Hurricane Season in Grenada. Nobody tells you about this, but it can all go downhill fairly quickly.

For one thing, nobody wants to go anywhere in case a hurricane comes along, so everybody has time on their hands.

This is why I spent so much time sitting in the cockpit with the man from the next boat drinking beer.

Well, not all the time, obviously. This afternoon I helped him put his mainsail back on – well, we tried to put it back on, made a total hash of it and then sat in the cockpit drinking beer.

This was not a particularly good look because it meant me tying my dinghy to his boat and leaving the crate of Carib lager I’d just collected on public display.

Yes, a crate – 24 bottles. When I presented 18 bottles at the Marina Mini Market checkout, the man behind the till asked why I wasn’t buying 24.

Well, the answer was that I had 18 empties for the recycling (except they don’t have recycling here).

But 18 bottles cost $81, he explained as if speaking to a five-year-old with their first pocket money, while a case of 24 is only $82 – and since these are East Caribbean dollars – a bottle of Carib “Premium lager from the heart of the Caribbean” works out at just 98p (and if you have a crate and bring it back full of empties, they’ll give you $10 as if this was England in the 1950s – which means your next bottle costs only 86p!)

Yes, thank you, I don’t mind if I do (and really, I couldn’t care less if we should have adjusted the grub screws on the mainsail batten tension before installing the luff plates.)

By the time I had rowed the leaky dinghy back to Samsara, there were all sorts of things, I really didn’t care about.

One of them was leaving the crate on the cockpit seat.

The boat rolled.

Gravity came into play.

… and, as I say, everything went downhill.

I think I’d better lie down.

I have always believed that every cloud has a silver lining – but only if you look for it. It has taken me two weeks to find the best thing about hitting the rock.

You may have read about the rock. I am pleased to say the damage is all fixed now and Samsara is back in the water. However, I did end up with a bill for $2,525 (£1,955) even if it does mean I now have a nice smooth bottom to the keel as well.

This has meant an adjustment to this month’s budget and definitely no tailor-made awning – here’s the one I made for $15. It does the job just as well.

And then I thought: How can I make up that money really quickly? Well, of course, there’s always a way. If you have read the “Desperation” chapter in my new book Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier (link at the end) or, more particularly the next chapter, “Luck”, you will know all about this.

So, I have given myself a month to make up that deficit. I have posted the following on Facebook:

“Who wants to make a quick £1,000? You will need a smartphone and a UK bank account in your name to receive the money on August 21st. Apply now with your name, occupation and UK phone number to john@oldmansailing.com. Enter £1,000 in the subject field. It worked for me. What have you got to lose?”

Of course, if any followers of the blog would like to apply, you would be most welcome. That way, we can both earn £1,000 in double quick time.

Meanwhile, if you would like to buy a book, it wouldn’t do any harm.

… and please leave it some stars. Stars are so important.

 https://amzn.eu/d/a7j8Re8

It’s raining in North Wales.

I know this because I just spoke to Dave Jones about my battery installation (I’m biting the bullet and getting Lithium). Dave was happy to talk. It meant he could stay in his van in the dry. Also, It was 14°C outside (feels like 12 says the BBC).

I mention all this because I’ve been moaning about it being 39°C in the cabin here in Trinidad – and coupled with 68% humidity, it’s been pretty unpleasant.

 Of course, this wouldn’t matter if I was anchored out in the bay with a breeze blowing down the hatch – or even on my way back to Grenada with 15kts on the beam. But, as you may be aware, I hit a rock last week and I’ve been on the hard while “Cow” (that’s his name) fixes the damage.

Also, they’ve parked me right next to the pilot boats’ shed where somebody leaves the lights on all night and as soon as it gets dark, every mosquito in Trinidad & Tobago comes to party on my doorstep.

I arrived on Tuesday. By Thursday I had learned that shutting both the companionway and the forehatch and fitting my one fly-screen to the skylight was not the answer. With sleep impossible, I took to getting up at 3.00 a.m. and making tea – until I discovered that that just made it hotter still. Since it would cost £102 to buy a special plug to fit the boatyard’s 220V socket, the batteries were precariously low and I’d turned off both fridges – so the beer was in the high twenties too.

But there’s always rum…

I do realise that drinking rum at 3.00 a.m. while watching old romcoms on Netflix is not really “living the dream”.

So, it was a significant moment on Saturday afternoon when Rob came by. I didn’t know Rob but I had met Anne in the laundry when I was depositing the last copy of Trident* and they have a Rival 38.

Rob climbed up the ladder for a cup of tea in the cockpit – the rest of the family were at the water park. He was astonished to discover I didn’t have air conditioning.

Air conditioning in a Rival 32…

“Not built-in air-conditioning. You can rent a mobile unit for $5 a day: A guy comes round and plumbs it into your hatch and bingo…”

Just my luck to discover this on a Saturday night.

I endured the Saturday night (John Thaw in “Bomber Harris” with Antigua Gold – a refined and mellow rum). Then on Sunday night, I moved into the West Palm Hotel. This was an extravagance I know, but it was only for one night and the air conditioner over the door was set to 17°C.

Now I’m back aboard and the cabin temperature is a pleasant 27°C (it’s 41°C in the shade outside). Another benefit of air conditioning is that the pressure of the cold air being pumped into the boat gets forced out of the cracks around the companion, so the bugs just get blown back where they came from.

If there’s any justice, it will have stopped raining in North Wales too…

*Trident in the laundry: This is the novel I wrote in 1983 and finally published on Amazon when its theme of Russia meddling in other countries’ elections, an “America First” President in the White House and a Corbyn-like figure installed in Downing Street suddenly seemed more credible.

I formatted it myself and very amateurish it looked. I’ve since had this done professionally and the book sells steadily to people who want to test Tamsin’s theory that I can’t write fiction because I’m not interested in other people (but you’re good when you’re writing about yourself).

Then, a few months ago, I found five copies of the original edition mouldering under one of the forward berths and decided on this idea of leaving them in marina laundries. I write a message on the fly-leaf asking people to leave the book in another laundry when they’d finished with it – and would they like to contact me and tell me where it’s got to? It’s like sending out messages in bottles.

By Sunday, Anne’s bookworm son, Sampson, had snaffled it and read it cover to cover – and, moreover, declared that he liked it.

Since I never waste an opportunity to plug a book, here it is: https://a.co/d/079DQuMq