RIP Arnold

Actually, Arnold was a rat – rats have hairless tails. It was the fact that his was brown not pink that confused me. A noble adversary…

It’s over. After two weeks, five mouse traps, one packet of rat poison, ten helpful suggestions and about a quarter of a jar of peanut butter, Arnold is dead.

And I feel awful about it.

As a vegetarian sailing a boat with a Buddhist name, we should have done better. But this is Colombia and, as I mentioned last time, the concept of a humane mousetrap simply does not translate into Latino Spanish.

Consequently, night after night, I would fall asleep listening to him behind the panelling, gnawing – and rose the next morning to find all the traps licked so clean they might have been through a dishwasher.

Admittedly, Arnold did nearly come to a sticky end (literally) after I took a taxi to HomeCenter – a superstore the size of one of South America’s smaller countries to buy a pair of sticky traps. The idea behind these is that the mouse puts his foot in the goo and can’t get it out. They hadn’t tried it on Arnold, though. He did put his foot in the goo – but then dragged the trap all over the fo’c’sle covering everything else in goo, before finally shaking it off in a Sainsbury’s bag-for-life (which now has a much shorter life). Anyway, he bolted.

Next, I mashed up a sort of Rouillard of rat poison and peanut butter, reasoning that he would be so busy licking it off and feeling smug that he would never realise he was eating the condemned mouse’s last meal.

I don’t know how he did it, but the entire dessert disappeared and Arnold did not. I can only think he spat out the blue bits and ate the brown. Anyway, as a savoury, he chewed the top off my clarinet reed. It was a Vandoren and I take it as a personal affront. Arnold was toying with me.

He made me feel like the put-upon Commandant in The Great Escape when Steve McQueen grins at him on the way to the cooler and says: “You’ll still be here when I get out?”

It’s my own fault. I underestimated him from the start. Because he joined in Aruba, I presumed he had jumped off one of the enormous cruise ships and would be easy prey. He had probably lived his life on smoked salmon and truffles.

Well, now the gloves were off. For one thing, I was being goaded by Niko Bolas, a regular on the blog who announced he was sending me two electronic devices. I looked them up. They made my hair stand on end. Any mouse putting a foot inside would get zapped with the full force of six AA batteries. But the Amazon delivery won’t get here until December 12^th.

It was time to man up. I spent a day in the Public Market – Santa Marta’s version of Camden with stalls selling everything including, tucked away behind the grilled sausages and the pineapples, mouse-sized mousetraps: Maybe Arnold wasn’t ready for the rat-sized one yet (although, the rate he was getting through peanut butter, it wouldn’t be long.).

I filed down the bars that spring the traps to make the mechanism more sensitive – a sort of hair-trigger, if you like. Now I felt like Edward Fox in The Day of The Jackal – a cold, calculating professional.

And, sure enough, on the second morning, there he was, hanging off the side of the navigator’s seat, his neck squished under the big trap’s mega-spring, his naughty little nose in a pool of blood. Of course, he’d polished off the other traps first.

You met Arnold on the “Aruba to Santa Marta” post. Arnold is the mouse – and he’s still here.

Obviously, I knew from the beginning that he couldn’t stay – a mouse on a boat is a recipe for disaster – what with their habit of chewing through electric cables and (heaven forbid) inlet hoses. It’s amazing to think that something so small could sink the boat – but he can – and unless I can find a way to get rid of him, he may well do just that.

My first thought was that I would get one of those humane mouse traps. I looked them up online: clear plastic, so he won’t feel claustrophobic while waiting for me to release him into the marina rubbish dump.

The dump is not such a good idea, since it is teaming with cats – but it is better than the skips in town which have been stripped of anything edible by the street people who live around them (sometimes, I believe, in them.)

It didn’t make any difference because the man in the hardware store had never heard of a “humane mouse trap” – even when Google Translate explained that it was a trap that did not kill the mouse.

What was the point, the man in the hardware store wanted to know, of a mousetrap that does not kill the mouse?

This gathered quite a crowd around my phone: A mousetrap that did not kill the mouse? Surely the microchips were mistaken…

It’s just as well that I learned early on to say “I’m English”. It explains a lot over here.

Since I could hardly wait for Amazon to deliver a humane mousetrap to Colombia, in the end, I bought the lethal version. Actually, it’s more of a rat trap – about twice the size of the ones we have at home and with a spring that really needs both hands. I baited it with a piece of mushroom (Arnold has demonstrated that he’s partial to mushrooms).

The next morning the mushroom was gone. The trap was still set and there was no sign of Arnold.

So, I looked up advice on YouTube and tried the next night with peanut butter – peanut butter cannot be removed delicately by tiny hands. It has to be licked off which is more likely to lead to a sticky end.

Arnold licked what he could safely remove and left the rest. It reminded me of leaving mince pies for the reindeer.

So, it was back to the hardware store, this time to buy rat poison. I really didn’t care for this at all – a quick end is one thing. Condemning Arnold to a lingering death – and then having him decompose in the farthest recesses of the bilges seemed most distasteful.

But needs must. I topped the peanut butter feast with a dessert of sodium monofluoroacetate, strychnine, zinc phosphide, aluminium phosphide, elemental phosphorus, arsenic, and barium carbonate. It came in the form of a sort of blue cake.

The next morning I got really quite excited on discovering that although, once again, the trap had not been sprung, almost all the peanut butter had gone and – best of all – the blue cake was missing from the top of little spike which is supposed to set the thing off at the slightest touch.

Or not. It turned out that the cake had been removed most carefully – and disposed of at a discrete distance from the feast.

I’m getting fed up with this. Tonight, I shall make a crumble out of the blue cake and mix it with the peanut butter. Surely, even a mouse as cunning as Arnold could not separate the two – which means he will probably leave the whole serving and help himself to some electric cable with a side order of plumbing.

Meanwhile, any advice would be gratefully received.

It’s an awkward thing, this failing to learn from experience.

But it does give me something to write about.

Or it would if the consequences did not risk offending readers of a delicate disposition.

I forgot that you mustn’t put kitchen roll down the loo on a boat.

So, now the head is blocked and we are still 200 miles from Santa Marta. Moreover, this part of the Caribbean is notoriously rough (something to do with the trade winds pushing the water round the top of South America). Anyway, the boat is rolling through 60° every two seconds and the prospect of contorting myself in the back of the plumbing to clear the joker valve doesn’t bear thinking about.

So, I have made other arrangements – and no, you’re quite safe, I’m not going to describe them here.

But this has meant that I thought: “Now, if this was a long trip, it would make good copy for a “Voyage” book (if you don’t know about the voyage books, I’ll put a link to the latest at the end.)

Then, I thought: “Why does it have to be a book? It could be a blog post.”

Because, yes, this trip from Aruba to Colombia is a bit of a voyage.

It doesn’t need to be. Johannes and Ana on the next boat in the anchorage off Surfside Beach had planned to do it in less than 48 hours. Why didn’t I sail in company? It would be good to have a buddy boat… especially for this passage.

Ah yes, the passage around Punta Gallinas is famous in sailing circles – or at least in the circles which pay attention. Had I not read what Jimmy Cornell said?

“You need to stay well offshore. The effect of the mountains deflecting the wind means you have to multiply the forecast by three times. That means a forecast of 15kts is going to create winds of 45ks – a full gale!”

Also, you need to stay well away from the coast of Venezuela to keep clear of the pirates. It used to be Colombian drug gangs who didn’t like witnesses that were the problem but now, with the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, the fisherman have turned to holding up boats and stripping them of valuables.

Johannes said that if we left on Saturday we would have a forecast of 5kts round the Cape (which would mean 15kts) and if we stuck to the 2000 metre line, that would keep us out of the way of the worst of the swell as well as the pirates.  Anyway, he was planning to turn off his AIS and just carry a forward-facing steaming light at night.

A lot of cruising boats “buddy up”. There’s the safety factor, obviously – and the social aspect of a schedule for radio checks.

But it’s not something I’ve ever done. Indeed, back aboard Samsara with a loose arrangement to leave in company after breakfast on Saturday, I began to feeling anxious.

Honestly, there was nothing to feel anxious about: This was a perfectly charming couple who had graciously invited me to sail with them round a particularly challenging part of the coast. I should accept, and be glad to do so.

So why was I getting in a state about it.

I had never experienced anything quite like it before. I found myself climbing out into the cockpit and then turning round and coming back, suddenly getting up and sitting down again, performing that trademark gesture which other people call “running your fingers through your hair” – something I gave up doing a long time ago.

I swore I was having palpitations. I was certainly sweating – but with the air temperature of 35°C and humidity at 68%, that’s no surprise. All the same, anybody might think I was having a panic attack.

I looked up panic attacks: “Most people experience panic attacks once or twice during their lifetimes”.

On the Friday, Johannes came round to make the final arrangements and to invite me ashore for a kebab. I’m afraid I was full of excuses. I didn’t think there would be enough wind on Saturday – the 2000 metre line was only 50 miles off the Cape. I always leave 100 miles just to be sure. I had a few last minute things to do…

It sounded lame – like the flurry of embarrassment and excuses when the owner of the large catamaran in Falmouth asked me to take his son to Jersey because he felt the lad needed some experience of small boats.

The fact is, as I told Johannes: “I just like being on my own. I’m used to it. I get all flustered if I have to think about other people. It’s odd, I know but…”

Johannes understood completely. He had been a singlehander before Ana and recalled a couple of embarrassing incidents himself when it came to other people.

And so, it wasn’t until the Sunday morning that I spent two hours readying the boat for sea – stowing the table, screwing down the cabin sole, securing the lockers against a capsize – and, at the same time, rigging the Super Zero because the windy app showed plenty of blue for “light winds”.

Waypoint One was 100 miles off the Cape – and also, coincidentally, 100 miles from Aruba. For the first time with Samsara, I sailed with the AIS switched off – one concession the the Venezuelan pirates. It did feel a bit peculiar at first, seeing the screen with just me on it, but then I thought back to the old days when we didn’t have identification beacons – when we set off and got lost for a bit until we found ourselves surprisingly close to our destination and the next thing anyone would hear from us would be that we’d arrived.

The feeling of isolation was the thing I liked best about it. If you’ve read Old Man Sailing, you’ll know my views on Health & Safety as it relates to Old People. If I’m overdue my family are under strict instructions not to raise the alarm – either I’ll turn up or I won’t.

But now I’ve got Starlink because I got fed up with SIM cards not working and the WhatsApp calls from waterfront bars being drowned out by full-volume reggae. However, clearly there’s more I need to know about it because when I tried to connect to find out whether the lightning I could see on the horizon was forecast to get in my way, the screen informed that my service was “restricted”.

This might be because I don’t really understand it yet and have confused “roaming” with “priority”. However, I suspect it might also have something to do with some of the rude things I’ve written about Elon Musk.

So, it turns out that this is a proper voyage after all – albeit one in miniature.

For a hundred miles until Waypoint One – and for another hundred to Waypoint Two – and so on as I skirted the Cape at a respectful distance, the boat rolled and swooped on her way and I eased back into the rhythm of the sea.

I am aware of having spent an entire afternoon just sitting in the cockpit watching the waves. I read two books in quick succession, stopped worrying about the news I was missing because, since the American election result, I have been avoiding all sources of news anyway.

Instead I have just some downloads from the Desert Island Discs archive. I think that if ever I’m invited (and I keep my list of eight records up to date just in case) I will take as my one luxury, the Desert Island Discs archive – or would that be considered just too sycophantic?

I have a passenger. I thought I saw a tail disappearing under the galley a couple of days ago. I even went as far as emptying out all the saucepans and taking up the floor but there was no evidence. Believe me, the last thing you want on a boat is an unwanted guest.

People talk a lot about cockroaches and the need to avoid bringing cardboard packaging onto the boat – you can see people unpacking all their supplies on the dock. But I’m sure this is a mouse.

To begin with I was worried it might be a rat – the rats in New York grow as big as cats. But now I’ve met him face to face and christened him Arnold. I call all my pets Arnold. It saves confusion.

Arnold appeared again tonight. It was three in the morning and I had just passed Waypoint Three and changed course for a point just ten miles from Santa Marta with an ETA of breakfast time tomorrow.

I was sitting on what is ostensibly the leeward berth (although, with the wind behind and the boat rolling, it doesn’t make much difference) when I caught a movement on the mast support where the clarinet is stowed. At first, I thought it was a moth because it seemed to flit to the bookcase. But then, there it was again. This time I got up and went to investigate and there – as large as life and right under my nose, clinging to the ligature was the bold-as-brass rodent staring straight back at me with an expression that seemed to say: “Oh yeah, so you’ve found me. Bully for you. What are you going to do about it?”

It was a good question – particularly since, before I had any chance of answering, the visitor was down the mast support faster than the eye could follow, hopped into the head and disappeared under the plumbing. I know how inaccessible that is because that’s where I’m going to have to go sometime soon to clear the joker valve.

Of course, I know what you’re going to say: Why didn’t I grab him while I had the chance?

Well, my first thought was that, despite Arnold being a pet and all that, mice can carry rabies can’t they? The one thing I know about rabies is that the only way to confirm a case of rabies is from the symptoms when it’s too late or by a post-mortem, (when it’s definitely too late). This means that if you go to a doctor with even a suspicion you might have been bitten by a rabid creature, they wheel you off straight away for a full course of very unpleasant injections with very long needles into the stomach.

So, I think it would be better if I don’t try and handle him until we’re better acquainted. Consequently, I have my very large and lightweight check shorts from Grenada to hand (they’ve been to hand the whole way, since I haven’t worn a stitch since leaving Aruba). The plan is to throw these over him and, before he knows what’s going on, bundle him into the big saucepan; which now sits ready on the stove – the lid close by so that the whole operation can be carried out in the blink of an eye.

Quite what I’m going to do with him then rather depends on when I catch him: If this was day three of a voyage to the other side of the world, obviously I would have to construct a suitable home for him (two plastic storage baskets came to mind, until I thought about how quickly he could chew his way out.)

The tales of mice chewing their way through boats are enough to put you off keeping one entirely. Apparently, they love electric cables (what about my brand new lithium batteries?) If they get their teeth into a seawater inlet hose, they can sink the boat.

For a moment there, I considered that Santa Marta is quite a big town. I’m sure they sell rat poison. But that idea soon went the way of a one-way trip to Davy Jones’s locker. Instead I’ve got this idea of releasing him into the wild – of taking him ashore in the big saucepan and releasing him into a pile of junk in the corner of the boatyard like Audrey Hepburn turning “Cat” out of the taxi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

In the meantime I keep thinking I see movement in the corner of my eye and reaching for the big shorts.

Here’s a law of nature: The bigger the project, the more something is likely to go wrong.

I had been a bit surprised that when I ran the engine to power the watermaker, it didn’t also boost the batteries – after all, the watermaker only draws 16amps – the alternator produces 70 or 80. Where was all that going? The starter battery voltage was up at 14V, the DC/DC charger should have been putting the excess into the lithium bank – I’m sure that’s what it did when we tested it in the marina.

Now – nothing.

Of course this isn’t really a problem – with only 70 miles to go, I should be in by tomorrow and although the wind has fallen light and the sky is slightly cloudy, the percentage charge has never dropped by more than 5% a day. I still have 48% and even if that did fall to zero, it would be no worse than your mobile phone going flat.

But a bit concerning all the same – especially since I can’t find the DC/DC charger. I remember seeing it – but that was before Rob installed it and, although he was most meticulous in keeping me up to speed with where he was putting everything, I’m afraid a lot of it went over my head. The only place I haven’t looked is in the locker under the liferaft and although I could get it out at sea, it’s a whole lot easier in the marina and, anyway, I’d need to have Rob on WhatsApp at the same time to tell me which warning light means what and I can’t do that with no Starlink.

It’ll just have to go on the list – underneath clearing the joker valve and – since yesterday – unwrapping the topping lift from where it’s got itself hooked around the radar reflector.

Meanwhile, I’m slipping along at two knots with the super zero and, with 60 miles to go, the plotter hasn’t even thought about an ETA, so I have plenty of time and have looking at the Grand Plan – which would have been more fruitful if I had a better knowledge of geography. I thought Guatemala was south of Honduras. Now it turns out to be north.

This is awkward because HMG (that’s His Majesty’s Government) has suddenly decided that citizens of Honduras must have a visa to enter the UK. Quite reasonably, the government of Honduras has reciprocated – and the only places I can get a Honduran visa are London or, apparently, the two neighbouring countries of Nicaragua (to the south) and Guatemala (north). I have been warned off Nicaragua as being distinctly dodgy and getting to Guatemala’s Rio Dulce and then taking a bus 200 miles to Guatemala City seems a bit of a trek – particularly since I would then have to sail back the way I’d come to get to where I was going in the first place: that jewel of the Honduran coast, the Bay Islands.

And if I’m not going there, then is Mexico a practical proposition?

Besides, who wants to go to Mexico now I’ve opened The Panama Cruising guide which was waiting for me in the giant Amazon parcel on arrival in Aruba. This 500-page full-colour doorstop is the Panama cruiser’s bible. The author, Eric Bauhaus has devoted his life to his subject (including no fewer than 50 transits of the Panama Canal) and it is quite clear that I could spend my whole three-month visa in the country and still not scratch the surface.

Come to that, I could spend three months in the San Blas Islands.

This enormous archipelago of the most delightful tropical anchorages and exquisite coral reefs is effectively a country in its own right – although the Guna people who live there don’t have much truck with such modern notions as borders or immigration forms – although visitors at each island are expected to introduce themselves to the local chief and behave with the utmost decorum.

For more than five hundred years, the Guna have preserved their culture and traditions in the face of progress. For instance, instead of TV and the Internet, the whole village gathers every evening to hear the wisdom of the elders – with selected members of the audience delegated to shriek if it gets too boring.

What did I say about all pets being called Arnold? Of course, there are exceptions – all swallows are called “Sammy”.

Sammy the swallow arrived for the last leg and has been flitting about the boat all day, first on the guardrails and graduating eventually to the companionway where I had to nudge him out of the way every time I wanted to get in or out. He ended up sitting on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot. Should I call him Captain Flint instead?

Here’s something I never wondered before: It used to be said that everybody had a dream about meeting the Queen – and, of course, it would be in the most bizarre circumstances. Do they now have dreams of meeting the King?

Anyway, tonight it was the Queen – which is why I am sitting here at midnight with a cup of tea brewing and the laptop fired up because, as anyone familiar with the voyage books will know, one of the unexpected benefits of long distance singlehanded voyaging is the most wonderful and vivid dreams.

I didn’t recognise the Queen at first – not since she was made of glass – and so when I bumped into her (quite literally, was pushed into her in the crowd outside the Savoy) there could be no doubt because she was wearing a small golden crown. It was most noticeable against the wine-red glass of her face and her vivid blue glass dress.

She was just straightening up as if someone had punched her in the stomach (unlikely if she was made of glass) and although she looked at me, her face was expressionless and, I am horrified to say that I didn’t react either.

However, I was immediately buttonholed by a typically pompous palace aide who informed me (in tones which suggested there must be some mistake) that I had been appointed as advisor to Her Majesty.

I must have said I would think about it or some such because, practically choking on his indignation, he blustered something about it being a mystery why I had been offered the post in the first place. I rather enjoyed replying: “Ah, well now, it doesn’t really matter what you think, does it? Because I haven’t been appointed by you, have I? It’s rather more a matter of what Her Majesty thinks of me.”

All the same, I made a mental to bone up on who was who in the Palace hierarchy.

Buckingham Palace turned out to be a maze – not figuratively, but literally a maze: All the doors and walls were painted the same deep magenta and you could walk into any room and find yourself in a completely different (and unexpected) situation.

Mind you, that still didn’t explain how I was woken in the middle of the night by someone poking me in the ribs – and there was Her Majesty kneeling on the bed (in the flesh this time, and a very pretty young woman she was in her voluminous white nightgown leaning over the snoring Duke of Edinburgh and hissing: “I hope you realise that’s the King you’re lying next to!”

This time I was truly flustered. Babbling apologies, I shot out of bed – and then had to apologise all over again because I had called her “Your Majesty” which you’re not supposed to do after the first meeting. After that, it’s “Ma’am”.

I found my way back to my own room, telling myself that this was something I must never divulge to a living soul. It would be the ultimate brownie point. One thing I knew the Queen valued above all else was discretion, and if this got out, she would know about it in a flash.

Equally, if she did not get to hear about it, she would know I could be trusted – and that would protect me from any number of pompous flunkies.

It was just such an aide who looked down his nose at me later that morning and said: “Ah yes, Mr Passmore – an interesting CV… and I believe you have a quote-unquote ‘blog’. I shall have to read it.”

I had no doubt that the Queen had already read it – the question was, whether she had also read my one novel Trident, written in the 1980s but set 20 years into what was then the future, and featuring a monarch who the reader would assume was to be the then Prince Charles (with his young Queen – obviously Princess Diana). I was certain she would have read it, along with everything else.

I know this because at about that time, I really did cover a Royal Tour to Hungary. On the evening set aside on these occasions for the Royals to meet the press (effectively the foreign press – they are only too familiar with the British Rat Pack), I found myself suddenly presented to Her Majesty. Casting around for something to say, I seized on the little-known fact (little-known to me, at least) that the streets of Budapest had doubled for 1930’s Paris in the Maigret television series. I knew this because it was in the briefing notes prepared by the Palace Press Office.

“Yes,” said the Queen. “I know.”

Twenty miles short of Santa Marta the wind fell away and then settled as the gentlest headwind and I spent the rest of the time alternately motoring, castigating myself for motoring, attempting to sail but making hardly any progress, and then switching the engine on again.

As a deliberate distraction, I poked away at all the little green plus signs on the Navionics chart. These are comments left by users. Sometimes it’s just a depth sounding or a “good holding” comment but one of them turned out to be a veritable treasure trove. There must have been twenty or thirty extended reviews of the Santa Marta Marina and virtually all of them were wildly enthusiastic (if you ignore the coal dust from the commercial port or the williwaws blasting 35kt winds through the berths between November and April).

However, all of these people were visiting to explore the interior or leave their boats while they flew home. There was only one report of boatyard work, which was said to be ridiculously overpriced. The reviewer suggested people should push on to Cartagena.

Of course, this set me off down a rabbit hole, checking the distance to Cartagena, working out how I could send a text warning the family of the change of plan.

But then, what if the boatyard in Cartagena turned out to be no good? Heaven knows when I would find one in Panama, and I could hardly sail back against the wind to Santa Marta again.

No, better to check in, get a quotation and, if necessary, do some more research on facilities in Cartagena. Also, in Colombia, you don’t just go through the tedious and expensive check-in procedure once, but each time you enter a new province – and Santa Marta Marina takes care of all of that free of charge.

I could visit Cartagena by bus – stay a couple of nights. It would be an expedition. Also, I had vague notions of doing a month of intensive half-days at the Babbel language school there. But now I’ve discovered Michel Thomas’s audiobook course, maybe I won’t need to.

Meanwhile, somebody wrote and complained that The Voyage #1 ended too abruptly when I arrived – that they would have liked to know about the first beer in a waterfront bar etc…

I got into Santa Marta Marina at lunchtime full of plans for a very cold beer because I’d turned up the fridge to save electricity, only to have the marineros who took my lines tell me that I wouldn’t be able to get off the boat until the immigration departments had processed my visa.

And that wasn’t until eight o’clock at night.

Meanwhile, do you want to know the best thing about a cold beer in Colombia? It comes in a proper 330ml bottle and costs $2.30.

Aruba, delightful as it is, has a tourist economy, so they put a particular tax on alcohol (I paid $60 for a bottle of whiskey!) Even the the local Balashi beer which the bars serve in silly little 200ml bottles costs $7! An ice cream is $8!

So don’t you believe everything you hear about small boat cruisers in tropical climes “living the dream…”

Book links:

The Voyage #1 (4.5 stars): https://amzn.eu/d/4quFrCb

The Voyage #2 (4.8 stars): https://amzn.eu/d/cwDBADA

IMG_4125(Spoiler alert: This gets a bit technical.)

If you go to Renaissance Island, you are welcomed by the tallest flamingo. Honestly, it can look you straight in the eye as it makes peculiar Kraak-Kraak noises while hanging around outside the kiosk selling flip-flops and T-shirts with “Aruba: One Happy Island”.

But then Renaissance Island is not for just anyone. The first time I went there, rowing over in the dinghy from Surfside Beach, a uniformed security guard caught me before I got anywhere near the flamingo and explained that this was a private island and, when I asked whether I could pay to visit, added that it would cost me $120.

But now I’ve got a Renaissance Resort wristband and can go whenever I like on one of the Flamingo Pink launches that run a shuttle service from the Renaissance Marina next to the Renaissance Hotel. 

I am moored in the Renaissance Marina (right next to the Renaissance Casino) because at last I have found someone to instal my new Lithium batteries – and it has taken eleven days, so I thought I deserved a day on the beach and lunch at the the Papagayo Bar and Grill… and yes, I did have a Piňa Colada (I’ve discovered you can’t get a Bushwhacker anywhere outside the Virgin Islands).

But you’ll be wanting to know about the Lithium batteries.  Lithium batteries are a hot topic in cruising circles. I did consider them two years ago during the Big Refit – but had already spent so much on sails and the watermaker and the “cooker for life” that I felt I had to call a halt somewhere. Besides, Lithium batteries catch fire don’t they?

This is where it’s going to get boring. That’s why I put the spoiler at the top (but there’s a mesmerising video at the end, if you can make it that far.)

The difference between the boat blowing up and being able to have all the lights on at once is the difference between Lithium-ion batteries, like you have in your mobile phone and Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries which just cooked my dinner and still have enough juice to run all the lights and both fans since it’s still 30° in the cabin with 74% humidity.

And all without blowing up, apparently.

I first tried getting Lithium batteries in Trinidad and then Sint Maarten but there were difficulties over deliveries and hurricanes. Eventually a firm in Curacao said: “Just turn up, we install them all the time. We’ll fit you in, no problem. 

Four hundred miles later, it turned out they put solar panels on roofs (who told you we did boats?) There was a firm in Bonaire – but Bonaire meant going backwards … into the teeth of the tradewind.

That’s how I ended up in Aruba with Rob Fijn. Rob is a Dutchman (it’s a Dutch island) and he has a one-man electronics business called Solar4Me.

Normally, he works on big catamarans and 45footers with generators and dive compressors and space for this sort of thing. Nobody with a 32footer says they want 600amp hours of capacity (not counting the lead/acid for engine starting and the windlass).

They certainly don’t get a dreamy look in their eyes at the prospect of an induction hob.

It never ocurred to me that I could have an induction hob but you can have anything you like with a big enough inverter (2000W and its own fan).

Just think of it: No more trailing around gas depots with a 14kg Calor cylinder on your shoulder and then finding no one can fill it (they didn’t have a British connector on Aruba either.)

Admittedly, I am going to need 400W of solar panels to make the electricity in the first place and the welder who was going to build the frame for them cried off because of “personal problems”, so now I have to cover the 300 miles to Santa Marta in Colombia before I run out. The marina there says: “Yes, we can do that for you; do it all the time; got lots of people.”

Where have I heard that before?

Anyway, I threw out the extendable ladder that hasn’t extended since North Wales to make room in the cockpit locker for the trawler-sized master switch. The starter battery is in the tools locker – the big spanner now in the secret compartment of the forepeak where I always thought I might put the cocaine if I wasn’t so sure I’d get rumbled (I seem to have one of those faces which automatically assumes a guilty expression when confronted by figures of authority.)

All of which might have something to do with poor Rob having to sweat away in the cabin for eleven days while I sat in the air-conditioned Starbucks going through the frappachino menu and doing online Spanish lessons. 

Rob admitted afterwards that he’d never installed a Lithium system on such a small boat (well, he did keep egging me on).

Meanwhile, you must excuse me, I have to go and check the “Time Since Last Full Charge” (121,711 seconds, apparently).

And here’s the video (who needs Netflix?): https://youtu.be/gdaVrJq3h4Q?si=tWpu7FXNcf9SBCiR

With Rob (shortly before he tried to explain how it all works)

600 amp hours of Lithium batteries

…and another 105ah of AGM for the engine starter and the windlass (with a DC-DC charger to top up the Lithium when it’s full. If it ever goes flat, I can charge it from the inverter…

You can do anything with a 2kw inverter…

Like cook enough rice for three days.

The master switch is big enough for a trawler. It ended up in the cockpit locker.

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…