How about this: 3,747 miles in 29 days. That’s an average of 129 miles a day, or 5.4kts.
That’s what you get sailing from St Helena to Grenada.
It would have been faster if I’d gone inside the island of Fernando de Noronha off the corner of Brazil, but I had the twin headsails up, and found myself possessed by a peculiar ambition to sail all the way without touching the sheets.
It certainly made up for the three weeks of windward work on the last leg.
I was going to turn it into a separate book – The Voyage #5 but it would have been pretty boring – just endless days of sitting in the sun, one foot braced against the other side of the cockpit, reading Tapio Lehtinen’s account of sinking during the 2022 Golden Globe Race, while the Spotify “oldmansailing” playlist rolled through its 50hrs 43mins from Ben E. King to The Beatles.
In fact, everything would have been fine if it weren’t for Starlink. Elon Musk has a lot to answer for. This man has fundamentally changed the pace of ocean voyaging. Oh, there are people who still manage without it – the couple on the steel 40-footer anchored astern of me here admit they’re dinosaurs – not even a watermaker. But they completed their first circumnavigation 30 years ago, and you can get set in your ways after three decades.
I now have to accept that I am addicted to the news – it comes from a lifetime of setting the morning alarm at two minutes before the top of the hour to allow time for tuning the little Sony short-wave transistor to the least-bad World Service frequency. Now I download current affairs podcasts and get more and more depressed about the state of the world.
So, it was just as well, really, that I found myself sinking.
What happened was that Starlink allowed me to log onto the Windy app every day to establish that tomorrow was going to be another 100-mile-plus day. It was just a question of whether it was going to be a 120-mile-plus day and, therefore, a two-beer lunchtime celebration. Then suddenly, without any warning at all, the Trade Wind turned from solid green on the screen to a sort of wispy pale blue. In other words, a calm.
This couldn’t happen. It was against all the laws of nature (I blamed Donald Trump and his one-man contribution to global warming). Anyway, at least I knew it was coming. I spent an hour dismantling the two headsails, two poles, eight sheets, halyards, uphauls and downhauls – and got the boat reaching to the south with a couple of reefs.
This, of course, put the lee rail under, and the lee rail, I had established on the way down the South Atlantic, was the source of The Leak.
It was OK, really. At least now I knew where it was coming from and how to fix it (I was going to get a new toe rail in Guatemala, where teak is cheaper than plywood (it grows wild, apparently).
The only fly in the ketchup was that the automatic bilge pump switch packed up (as they do), and the next thing you know, the water was over the cabin sole. There were packets of teabags floating down there.
More importantly, the electric motor for the watermaker pump was now totally submerged. Fortunately, I now count myself as the world’s leading expert in the treatment of drowned electric pumps (see the “knockdown” post from a couple of years ago). The one thing you must not do is give them any electricity – at least, not until they have spent a morning soaking in a couple of changes of fresh water and then an afternoon sitting in the sun and the wind to dry.
Then you need to run them to replenish all the water you’ve just used to get them going in the first place. Only after that can you sit down and wonder whether you should leave the pump down there – where another flood will mean going through the whole process again. Or whether the crew can be trusted to keep hand-pumping regularly enough to maintain the water level below the bearings.
I decided the crew wasn’t to be trusted. I filled every receptacle I had with fresh water and then dismantled everything and stowed the motor in the wardrobe locker. When I needed some more water, I would just have to put it all back again (I was getting quite good at inserting the bolts for the pump head by feel).
It was fortunate that 24 hours of screaming reach dropped us nicely into the middle of the Brazil Current, which runs for 2,000 miles up the north coast to the Caribbean. Really, there is nothing like a couple of 150-mile days for taking your mind off your troubles.
So, what do you think I made of “Saturday February 7th: 163M”…”Monday February 9th: 176M”… “Thursday, February 12th: 186M”?
Think about it: 186 miles in 24 hours is an average speed over the ground of 7.75kts. That is some serious progress in a heavy cruising boat on a 28ft waterline.
I shot round the top end of Tobago, where Navionics calls it “The South Equatorial Current – up to about 4kts” and arrived in Prickly Bay in the middle of the night, rather in the manner of a runaway supermarket trolley. In other words, a tad unprepared. It took me an hour of drifting around among the anchored (and sometimes unlit) boats before I could get the anchor chain untangled enough to persuade it over the side.
Now all I’ve got to do is edit 10,055 miles and 112 days into The Voyage #4. At a cool 123,404 words at present, it’s shaping up to be something of a blockbuster.
Hi John,
Don’t get me wrong…but it’s with some jealousy I read your mail on a cold wet Feb. Sunday…oh for some hot sunshine off the coast of Brazil. I take it you’re still in the Rival 32? I mean 186m in a day is Olympic and without a tac …easy going. Strong current eh.
It’s great to hear of your continued voyages and look forward to reading the “Blockbuster “…reminds me of reading James A. Michner’s
The Drifters…as mem serves~650 pp
around 1972ish.
Bon voyage, good luck
John, you never fail to report enthralling sailing reading with handy tips / warnings – though by now with my ( somewhat over-equipped as with the loss of both parents then non-sailing accidents to self all I’ve managed is daysails around Chichester harbour for the last seven years ) Anderson 22, before that I did annual trips across the Channel to Brittany and the Channel isles, West Country etc hoping for further which won’t be this season for sure as still getting over a broken wrist & now hip – I’m 64, started skippering my own dihghies from 8, converted Dad from Golfing so we bought an Anderson 22 which we completed from a kit launching in 1978. She’s a very seaworthy boat – 3 have raced across the Atlantic singlehanded – but despite my dreams and loads of kit – of course I could still generate a huge shopping list but I somehow doubt I’ll manage to retrace a fraction of your voyages, please keep ’em coming for sometimes invalid armchair versions of your wonderfully down to the nitty-gritty nuts and bolts self !
Hi Andrew, thanks for that. I’m very nearly bought an Anderson 22 back in the 70s – it was a bit too pricey for me at the time, and I ended up with a Caprice. Sorry to hear about your health troubles (have you seen the good health page on the blog?)
Well done John, that was quite a ride – good to hear you’re still with us and that there’s more entertainment on the way!