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

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

Depart Crosshaven 1100hrs Sunday July 6^th 2025

It’s Ireland. It’s different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Mooney’s will let me stay aboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the inevitable mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 2 Tuesday 8^th July. Off Bantry Bay

The wind has fallen light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 3 Wednesday July 9^th.  Off Tralee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leaves all of Friday for getting the work organised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Four.

Donegal Bay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thereby hangs a sorry, sorry tale.

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The description from the book

It works too…

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

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

Have a look.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In which case, why wasn’t I sailing?

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

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

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

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

The engine stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Without stopping.

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

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

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

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

We settled to ordering Tartiflette and Fonduta Valdostana,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we did get a blow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can follow my track ‘2025’ at

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

 I went out to lunch yesterday. Actually, the whole purpose of coming to this deserted anchorage was to go out to lunch.

It was blowing like stink, the skies were cloudy, and from time to time a handful of rain blew in through the hatch. I reckon I deserved lunch.

There is supposed to be a restaurant on the island behind me, Tiadup – indeed there are half a dozen little cabins on stilts with steps down into the water, so I suppose you could call it a resort, but when I hauled myself up to the level of their dock and rolled onto the planking, it turned out they weren’t expecting anyone.

Two women sat at one of the tables and ignored me – and they really do wear their amazingly bright traditional clothes all the time. But when I suggested lunch, the whole place woke up. The chef bustled out offering chicken or fish – which is what everybody offers. He had a packet of dried beans, but you can’t cook dried beans from scratch.

I said I would go and look at the restaurant on the other island, Kagandup.

Actually, I had a suspicion this was going to be the better option. All day there had been four lanchasanchored off the beach and, through the binoculars, I could see the passengers cavorting in the shallows or snoozing in the hammocks strung between the palm trees.

It did mean venturing out of the protection of the anchorage – but isn’t that rather the point when you’ve got a brand new 3D tender and a Remigo electric outboard to go with it. I got comprehensively soaked.

Once again, two women sitting at a table – but this time they seemed to be going through the books and stopped for the usual “buenas tardes”. The menu (recited at breakneck speed) seemed remarkably extensive. I chose the only dish I recognised, prawns in garlic with fries and salad. No piña colada, though – not until the bartender came back.

I settled for a Balboa beer … and then another. It was still early for dinner, and I wanted to stake my claim.

Kagandup is quite an operation. It’s only about 100 metres across but the restaurant is as sophisticated as many you’ll find on the mainland. There’s even a bathroom with flushing loos (an oil drum full of seawater on the roof, an underground waste pipe leading back into the sea). The lanchas carry about 15 people, so there can be as many as 60 guests a day. The kitchen must be run off its feet – although the guests waiting their turn can play volleyball or lounge about in the hammocks.

By the time I finished the excellent prawns (and the most enormous helping of fries) the bartender returned with the rest of the crew and the supplies for the next day, all of which had to be carried up from the boats – sacks of potatoes, endless plastic cans of fresh water… all that beer…

At least I got my piña colada – even better than the one at Banedup – in its own pineapple skin.

Note to self: Must master launching the dinghy into surf with the Remigo on the back. Got swamped. That’s one good thing – a petrol outboard wouldn’t have started. This one works underwater!

Thank you for joining me. And, while I’m on, I’ve got some book news. The Voyage #2 Falmouth to Grenada – which includes the story of the near-catastrophic knockdown north of the Canaries and the 1,500 miles with a broken rudder on the Atlantic crossing, is now available in Audible, narrated by the inimitable Charles Robert Fox. Also, as an experiment, I have added my autobiography Faster, Louder, Risker, Sexier to Kindle Unlimited, so if you have a subscription, you’ll find it included. It took seven years to write. I’m intensely proud of it – and some of the early readers say it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

Goodbye for now.

The 3D tender and the Remigo electric outboard – don’t they look good together!

Lancha

If you’re going to start varnishing, you have to get off the boat.

Well actually, once you finish varnishing, you have to get off the boat.

The table looked wonderful: That deep, intense shine you get from being too impatient to do it properly with twelve thin coats and instead you ladle it on as if spooning golden syrup onto a crumpet.

OK, so the finish is rubbish – but the worst thing is that it’s going to take the whole day to dry and a table with nothing on it is just asking for trouble – quite apart from the step between the saloon and the galley. How was I supposed to avoid stepping on that? It’s a step for heaven’s sake…

There was only one thing for it: A visit to Taidup.

Taidup is the island on the other side of the anchorage they call the Swimming Pool in the Eastern Holandes archipelago of the San Blas. There’s a hut and, at night, a single light – so, presumably somebody lives there. But, on the other hand, I’ve never seen anyone go over in a dinghy. Clearly, this would be the time to take presents.

In his Panama Cruising Guide, Eric Bauhaus talks about the dignified poverty of the indigenous Guna people who have lived here since they were forced off the mainland by the Spanish in the 1500s. Then they had to fight a war of independence against the Panamanians which only ended in 1925. They are fiercely proud of living as they have for the past 500 years.

Their huts are made from bamboo and palm fronts, they paddle dugout canoes and there is a tradition that sailors who visit bring gifts. Food is most welcome. Crayons and paper for the children. One of the best things you can give them is reading glasses for the older women to sew their Molas – the traditional intricately-wrought fabrics. I had them all.

Taidup was indeed, very small. I could have walked round the whole island in 15 minutes and it turned out there were half a dozen little encampments – all deserted except for one at the far end. There was a woman in the usual brightly-pattered clothes and then, when I looked closely a white man sitting on a plastic chair. A bit of a disappointment, that – to find a visiting yachtie here already.

But it turned out that, no. He was Guna – but albino.

This is not at all unusual. If you think about it, with only half a dozen families on the island, social life is going to be limited. Inbreeding is endemic. Indeed, it is part of the culture: During a lunar eclipse, the only people allowed out of the huts are the albinos – and it is their job to chase away the dragon which is eating the moon.

Tentatively, full of Spanish Good Mornings, I invited myself into the encampment. They were, of course, unfailingly polite – although it was clear that this was the equivalent of walking straight into someone’s living room without even ringing the doorbell.

“May I give you a present?” I asked (without even having to consult Google Translate, which I thought was pretty good) and I brought out the rice. You would think I had given them a bar of gold. It seemed their staple diet were plantain and coconut. There didn’t seem to be any young children for the crayons, although some teenagers appeared from nowhere. But then I brought out my trump card: the reading glasses. I had four pairs of differing prescriptions and so there was a lot of trying on – it was quite clear that the young man with the pale skin and the blue eyes was seeing the world as he had never seen it before.

His mother took me over to see her molas, strung out like washing. So, of course, I had to buy some. In fact, I thought that in view of my undoubted generosity, I might qualify for a bit of a discount, but apparently not. On the other hand, $40 would mean a lot more to them than it did to me.

It seemed that all the huts were on the beach – the interior was jungle. On the other hand, how could I tell without exploring it?

It was when I found the first coconut on the ground that I remembered how unwise it is to walk around under coconut palms. They are impossibly tall, and a ripe coconut is as heavy as a brick. More people are killed every year by falling coconuts than you can count.

I remembered thinking about this in Tobago and wondering whether I should have come ashore with my florescent cycling helmet and decided that when it came to naff tourist faux-pas, that was probably off the scale. But I did have my molas. I folded them carefully and stuffed them into my hat.

But I was right, the jungle was impenetrable. I would have needed a machete to get anywhere. But I did come out with a coconut.

There is absolutely nothing as refreshing as fresh green coconut water. In Aruba they have roadside stalls turning them into smoothies. But for that I really would need a machete.

Back on the boat, I opened up the tools locker. The saws were no good – the fibrous nature of the husk just clogged the teeth – same with a spade drill bit. In the end I got in with a 10mm metal drill. At least I could drain out the water – and it was fresh, although not with that champagne-like tang you get from a nut that has been cut from the tree.

I mixed it one part rum to three parts coconut water and put it to chill in the beer fridge (removing a beer to make room, which then required drinking while I thought up a suitable name for one part rum to three parts coconut water, shaken in an old fruit juice bottle and served ice-cold in a glass from the vegetable fridge.)

 The name I came up with was a “Swimming Pool Slammer”.

Meanwhile, the table still wasn’t dry, so the afternoon would have to involve another expedition. I still hadn’t been to the Hot Tub.

This is the next anchorage, behind an island called Kalugirdup. It would be a good destination for a further trial of the Remigo electric outboard. This was fully charged from the solar panel and I am pleased to say I have learned how to get it out of the cockpit locker through the hatch behind the nav station.

Actually, this is a good thing. If it’s too long to get out the normal way, I don’t have to put a padlock on it.

I’m beginning to discover all sorts of good things about the Remigo. For instance, it looks so different and so stylish that people on other boats remark on it – which gives me an excuse to stop and answer their questions, which in turn leads to the occasional invitation and I can always unload another leaflet about the Old Man Sailing book.

Then the skipper of a big South African boat told me where to find the best snorkelling, which was how I came to tie the dinghy to a fallen bamboo trunk, get myself all kitted up with mask and flippers and start swimming in the direction of Cuba.

Well, apparently there would be a reef before I got there – with wonderful coral according to the South African.

I never did find it, despite swimming for half an hour not always in the right direction. In the end I had to turn around because I kept going aground – and never did see any coral.

Before leaving, I went and asked some Canadians anchored nearby who said they took a detour round to the west and then tied themselves to the dinghy and drifted back with it – although even they hadn’t seen any coral. Anyway, that wouldn’t suit me. My dinghy is so light that if I try to climb into it from the water, it just turns over. I admit this is awkward from a safety point of view, but as I found out in St Maarten, it does work if you’re drunk – which is probably what counts.

Thinking about this, when I got back (a total of six miles at an average speed of 3.8kts and the Remigo battery still at 80%) I unloaded all the surplus gear and headed for the beach for some experiments: It turns out that, with 12kg of outboard on the back, if you thread the painter round the rowlocks and pull on the slack, you can haul yourself aboard over the bow without turning the thing arse over tip.

One way and another, it was rather a good day – and of course, it wasn’t over yet: There was still Cocktail Hour to come – with Swimming Pool Slammers on the sundeck.

Although it turns out that coconut water and rum is not the success you might imagine – although I did find that mixing the surplus with scotch whisky was an improvement.

But that may have had something to do with the senses being dulled somewhat from the original recipe…

If you haven’t already, you might like to look at the “books” tab above. There are nine titles up there – and, would you believe it: I’m going to be 76 years old in two weeks… and there’s still absolutely nothing wrong with me. In fact I’m one person who doesn’t need reading glasses! See the “Good Health” tab.

So far the record is seven years – I met a German who said had spent seven years in the San Blas and not left the islands even for a day. There are said to be 365 of them and the climate is perfect all the year round (you do get a few rain squalls in the summer but they soon pass).

Mind you, that’s not for me. I wouldn’t want to stay in the same place… although I’ve just realised I’ve been at Bug Island for a week now. Originally, I had plans to move the anchor to a better spot now that there are only nine boats in an anchorage which will comfortably accommodate 50. But somehow I find I can’t be bothered.

It’s not really called Bug Island. The Guna people of the region call it Banedup and there aren’t really any bugs. The anchorage is “The Swimming Pool” because, being surrounded on all sides by reefs and islands covered in palm trees, it is as calm as a swimming pool.

Part of the island’s attraction is Ibin’s Beach Bar and Restaurant, a collection of ramshackle huts – some on stilts in the shallows (some of the tables are in the shallows too, but not on stilts.) People come from all over the world to get married on the beach at sunset, party until dawn and then crash out in the camping hut. It’s such an institution, it even has it’s own entry on Google Maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Banedup/@9.5831643,-78.6738236,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x8e54f98970b98ed1:0xdfdee27232697c5!2sBanedup!8m2!3d9.5831643!4d-78.6712487!16s%2Fg%2F11mvmzdhmd!3m5

!1s0x8e54f98970b98ed1:0xdfdee27232697c5!8m2!3d9.5831643!4d-78.6712487!16s%2Fg%2F11mvmzdhmd?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDMxMi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

But after the revellers depart in the high-speed lanchas back to Porvenir (which is just big enough for a miniature airport) the sailors take over again. The other night 18 of us gathered for barbecued lobster.

So, like the wedding guests, I wasn’t up very early the next morning – but that’s e beauty of life in the islands: I had plenty of things to do, just nothing that I abasolutely had to do. There are still three weeks before I fly back for the family skiing holiday (that’s if Donald Trump doesn’t invade Panama first.)

For instance, I needed to find out what was wrong with the battery for the electric dive system. This is a floating pump connected to a 10m hose and a diving regulator – a lot less bulky than SCUBA gear on a small boat. Yesterday, I spent the best part of an hour cleaning the weed and barnacles off the bottom before the battery expired. Now I just needed another ten minutes to finish up, but after four hours on charge, the LED status showed four red lights. Surely, that should be  four green lights. I started looking for the instructions.

Looking for things on a boat really is one of the most useful activities. To begin with, I looked in the chart table. I keep the instructions in two plastic folders – one for mechanical devices, one for electrical. But now so much stuff is electrical – and the instructions are so much more extensive that they’ve taken over the mechanical folder as well.

Besides, there were instructions in there for stuff I threw out years ago. Also, it seems that Arnold the Rat had paid a visit because a lot of it was in small pieces – and what was eggshell doing in the chart table?

Anyway, no instructions for the dive system.

I did find some rubber wedges that really ought to be in Toolbox #5 under the foot of the starboard berth – and that in turn led to some elasticated Velco I’d forgotten about which might do for immobilising the Aries when the Remigo outboard is on its bracket. I really should look for things more often. It’s important to know where stuff is – who knows when I’ll need to find the headsail luff feeder in a hurry?

Also I found the sieve – a bit late, admittedly – I bought another in Puerto Lindo. But I never did find the instructions for the dive system. It was only after a whole afternoon of unexpected discoveries that it  dawned on me they might have instructions online.

That’s how I learned that four red lights means “fully charged”. They don’t do green lights (where’s the logic in that?) So I went over the side again to finish up the bottom (although I have a sneaky suspicion the weed was re-attaching itself as soon as I looked the other way). Never mind, I sawed a bit off one side of the boarding ladder to make it level and then decided to reward myself with a beer at Ibin’s – I could order fresh bread for breakfast tomorrow at the same time.

The beer turned into a beer and a Piña Colada – although, as cocktails go it wasn’t much to write home about on the family WhatsApp group. This meant I had to stop at the beach bar opposite the anchorage for a proper one.

And now I’ve woken up at three o’clock in the morning finding that I never actually went to bed and the washing up’s still in the sink.

Never mind, tomorrow is another day in Paradise…

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My daughter worries that I’m lonely, sailing all by myself with not even a dog or a cat for company.

Not a bit of it. Let me tell you about the last few days.

I came back to Linton Bay to collect the new outboard. It arrived in Colón via a forwarding company in Miami and from there to the Marina. No sooner had I picked a spot in the Eastern anchorage than an email landed from Mike and Nicki of the Australian yacht Zen Again: They had spotted me coming in, identified the Ocean Cruising Club burgee, and would I like to join them for sundowners? In fact, there were seven of us in their cockpit by the time the sun dipped below the horizon in a yet another blaze of gold and purple.

Mike is an electronics engineer cruising the world as he builds IT systems for people in offices from Sydney to San Francisco. Zen Again positively hums with electricity – and he was appalled to discover that I had OpenCPN charts for the whole world but had never looked at them because I didn’t know how.

It’s true.  Andy on Cohiba uploaded them for me in St Lucia, but there’s more to it than just having this stuff in your microchips. You have to know how to access it, what to do with it when you’ve found it…

Mike offered a tutorial, and for an hour the following afternoon, I cudgelled my brain with the difference between Raster charts and Vector files and did I need a GPS dongle? I was pathetically grateful even though I don’t think I was any further forward. Anyway, we repaired to the Black Pearl – and there, from the next table, were joined by a tattoo-covered American called John with a Westerly Oceanlord. He had a baseball cap proclaiming “Surf Naked” and the two of us decided we had been living each other’s lives for the past 40 years. He was a professional skier from Aspen. I started sailing when I was five. I was able to assure him that he had indeed done absolutely the right thing in buying a boat first and then working out how to sail her.

Then we added some more chairs and a Turkish family with two little boys joined in. Nibbles appeared and so did another round of Panama’s version of IPA which they call Frog for no particular reason. That turned into dinner and then Roxana turned up in her red dress.

Roxana is a Hungarian violinist who gave up playing with major orchestras to sail her 30footer where the wind takes her. She pays her way by busking absolutely world-class music in any bar that will have her.  The Black Pearl will have her any time she feels like turning up.

And I’m wrapping up this post sitting in Julie’s Juice Bar waiting for my “vegetarian bowl” before leaving for Portobello because they have an ATM machine and there isn’t one in the San Blas. After that, if I can get to Banedup by Sunday afternoon, there’s usually an impromptu party on the beach. If not, the beach bar does absolutely the best piña colada and I shall be quite happy sit with it on my own, at a table knee-deep in the water under a palm-frond roof with solar-powered fairy lights as the sun goes down on another day in paradise.

And here’s a video of Roxana at the Black Pearl: IMG_4677