The yacht was an Oyster 885 – essentially 90ft long – so it was a bit of a step up from the pontoon.

Actually, at the end of the automatic, electrically-operated passerelle with LED lighting and folding handrail was one of those little collapsible step ladders you keep in the broom cupboard so you can reach the top shelf in the kitchen.

It looked somewhat out of place on the big boat pontoon at the ARC, but the crew were having trouble connecting the passerelle app to the ship’s wi-fi, and besides, a tiny design flaw meant the miniature hatch in the transom got in the way.

I know all of this because my cousin Sophie is the cook aboard Babiana and invited me aboard to see how the other half lives.

The other half have it hard, I can tell you: They also had to contend with a glitch in the app for the sparking water system:  It came pouring out of its designated tap without any bubbles. Never mind, they can always drink champagne. They’re carrying 250 bottles of wine from the owner’s award-winning Vondeling vineyard near Cape Town (It’s a hobby bought with money from the hedge fund he founded with money made from buying enough cocoa futures to give everyone in the country 83 Mars Bars each).

The Financial Times calls him “Chocfinger”, but in fact, he’s a surprisingly modest guy called Anthony Ward who was even then on his way with his wife Sophie (1) and determined to win the ARC’s racing division. It would have been better if the crew hadn’t returned the night before from pizza ashore to find the freezer on the blink.

Sophie (the one in the galley) had spent two days preparing and freezing ten meals for the 12-strong ship’s company. She’s catering for a 14-day crossing, so had another day over the stove to look forward to.

The skipper – that’s her partner James – as calm as a man can afford to be when he has retractable bow and stern thrusters, asked whether they might leave the freezer until the morning.

You don’t need to know the details of Sophie’s response.

But sure enough, by the time the owners arrived, Babiana had bubbles, the freezer was back at -18°C (they disconnected one of the fridges – they’ve got five of them) and we were ready to go out and try the whompa.

You need a whompa if you’re going to win the ARC. It’s the biggest sail you can get on a 120ft mast – which means it is 639sq/m (or, if you like big numbers 6,878sq ft).

We put up the whompa and sailed faster than the wind. Then, we put up the A3 and sailed faster than the wind. There is something curiously pedestrian about putting up big sails when the only effort involved is in keeping your toe on the button for the electric winch.

The helmsman has buttons too – different buttons for port and starboard steering positions.  Of course, it all takes a lot of electricity, which is why they have a starboard generator and a port generator – although why nobody can make a washing machine that works at a 30° angle of heel is a mystery.

By the time you read this, they will be over the horizon, deciding whether to go north and sail deliberately into a gale or south and risk being becalmed.

Anyway, just in case, they topped up the fuel tanks. It took the best part of an hour. An Oyster 885 carries three tonnes of fuel.

Oh, it’s not for motoring through the calms (they’ve got the whompa, don’t forget). But what if the generator stopped – port or starboard – with five fridges and the washing machine to run?

Not to mention having to cross the Atlantic without bubbles….

The Whompa

Port steering controls

Starboard steering controls

The engine room – with port and starboard generators.

The owners – Sophie and Anthony Ward

Skipper James

Cousins: The old man and Sophie the cook

You know those rogue waves everyone talks about? The real monsters, big as houses with breaking crests way higher than the mast. And steep – so steep there’s no escape. The boat is going to be knocked flat.

I found one.

Two hundred miles north of the Canaries on October 22, inbound from Falmouth for Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Six o’clock in the morning BST – still dark, and I was asleep, having gone to bed at midnight, setting alarms for 90 minutes.

It was blowing 28 – 33kts out of the SSW, and Samsara was double-reefed and making 5-6kts hard on the wind in not quite in the right direction. That was the reason for the 90-minute alarms. I wanted to be sure that if the wind changed, I didn’t go charging off in a new and entirely inappropriate direction. At 0130, nothing had changed. At 0300 nothing had changed – although the barometer had started to rise after its fall from the previous afternoon. I reckoned I could set the alarms for three hours. So it didn’t look as though we were going to get a full gale like the one of Lisbon. But what I did not know was that back in the UK, they were calling it Storm Babette.

At 0330, I was fast asleep (and dreaming of the legendary Portuguese Trades) when then this happened.

That’s my track on the Navionics app – at 0330, just after I went back to bed. The boat was being steered by the Aries windvane which, faithful as ever, followed the wind round what in was a very, very sudden wind shift of 30°. This was good news. Now we were heading in the right direction.

Actually, it was partly good news. The bad part is that if you look up “rogue waves” or “extreme waves” or “exceptionally steep waves,” you will find that when two wave systems intersect at an angle of 30°, that is when the monster wave can be generated. Don’t ask me why. It’s all to do with hydrodynamics and highly technical. Ordinary sailors wouldn’t understand.

But this is what it did to the inside of Samsara’s cabin.

The first I knew was that I woke up but couldn’t get up because there was a lot of stuff on top of me. Also, there wasn’t any floor. Just a lot of water.

Thinking about it now, I’m surprised how calmly I accepted the situation. My first concern was that I wasn’t wearing any trousers. After three o’clock I didn’t think I’d be getting up in a hurry and it’s much more comfortable without…

Then I noticed the rechargeable light that hangs from the forehatch was on – except I couldn’t see it – just a flood of white light coming through the forehatch. Which was wide open. So, the first thing to do was close the forehatch. I always bolt it, but because it takes a bit of wiggling, I never bother to lock the bolt in position by turning it sideways into the little slot. Yet, somehow, that had come undone.

Then I turned back to the cabin and switched on a light. Seeing everything piled up in the middle like that, there could be only one explanation. We had suffered a knockdown.

I don’t think we’d been completely rolled because I had no sensation of being on the deckhead, but what had happened to the rig? That was the big question. I picked my way aft, noticing with some surprise that the big adjustable spanner was in the sink.

Outside, I found the sprayhood had been flattened, and we were hove to and riding quietly in a very big sea with 33kts on the wind speed indicator. The mainsheet had parted from the boom, which was now lying against the shrouds. Well, she could stay like that. There was no point in trying to fix the mainsheet if I had no idea where the tools had got to.

Normally, the tools live under the head of the starboard berth. There are four turn buttons to hold the lid down in the event of a capsize. Guess what? I hadn’t fastened them. I wasn’t expecting a capsize. The locker was pretty much empty. At least I knew where the big adjustable spanner was. Everything else, not so much.

The first thing to do was find my phone so I could photograph the chaos. I’m always wishing I had stopped to photograph dramatic moments. I‘m pleased to see that I was thinking clearly enough to photograph this one.

Then I started the big clear up. First, my pride and joy, the Alpicool fridge. I put it back, plugged it in. It didn’t work – but that was probably a simple connection problem. Then I put the bunk boards back so I could heap everything on top of them and get the floorboards down so at least I could walk about. The floorboards have pre-drilled screw holes so they can be secured against the possibility of capsize. But that’s where the spare beer lives, and they weren’t secured because I wasn’t expecting…

I never knew I had so many batteries. AA, AAA – there were batteries everywhere – including lodged in the handhold that runs along the sides of the cabin under the windows. There was sweetcorn in there too – and nuts, bolts and small screws.

Normally, these live in a large plastic box – a rather successful impulse buy from B&Q with little compartments for different-sized fastenings and small items which may come in useful one day. This thing had not burst open completely (I would still be sorting screws instead of writing this), but one catch had come undone just enough to fill the handhold on the other side of the boat.

Most peculiar was the storm jib, which lives right up in the forepeak – how did that end at the aft end of the saloon?

And the hatch over the log impeller. That was another odd thing. This hatch is under the shower grating. Now it was on top – the grating back in place. Piece by piece, item by item, I put everything back where it belonged (or at least where it will be out of the way until I get round to a proper sort out). Meanwhile, I had to deal with the outside. For one thing, I didn’t like the idea of the mainsail flapping itself to pieces.

First, how to get the boom back? Maybe I could haul it in with the preventer, which is permanently rigged to the end and made off within reach of the mast – but apparently, that too had been attached to mainsheet fitting, so was hanging loose.

In the end, I got the boat sailing under jib, lashed the helm down so that the backdraught kept the main off the shrouds, and I could get it down. But that still left the end of the boom swinging about out of reach. In the end, I tamed it by letting off the topping lift and stood ready with the stainless dog clip on the end of the bracing line. When the boom swung inwards, I snapped the clip onto the topping lift. Now I could get the boom in and braced and see what had given way. I remember being inordinately pleased with the way that went.

It turned out that 45 years of a stainless steel shackle wearing on the aluminium casting at the end of the boom was just too much.  When I bought the boat five years ago, I replaced this with a soft shackle, but the damage had been done. It turned out that I didn’t need any tools. There were two other attachment points on either side for twin tackles, and the Dyneema shackle was just long enough to reach through both of them. Don’t you just love soft shackles?

Within 15 minutes, we had the main back up and the boat on course. At least the cockpit lockers hadn’t burst open.

Well, not without trying. The weight of warps, fenders and gash bags in the starboard locker had pulled the facing off the lid, so there would have been nothing to stop it all falling out. It seems only the number of gash bags blocking the way saved everything from being lost.

I did lose the piece of teak facing, though – as well as the nicely carved cover for the fuel cap. It would have been so easy to make up a safety line for it – and teak costs a fortune now the trade has been banned.

That was when I noticed what had happened to the toe rail. This, too, is teak. Or was. Now, about three metres of it was missing on the port side. For several days, I was at a loss to explain how this could have been ripped off – surely not the force of the water?

Ah yes, right in the middle was a fairlead and if a sheet got caught in that and then, with the weight of water in the sail…

Then there was the broken stanchion: The spinnaker poles are fastened to the stanchions. I don’t suppose that helped.

I was going to say how impressed I was to see the sails (the new Vectran sails from Crusader) had escaped unscathed – until it transpired that the weight of water falling onto the sail and ripping off the mainsheet had also caught the luff on the wrong side of the reefing horns. The sail tore – you can’t really blame it; the 10mm stainless bolt supporting the horns snapped too.

The sprayhood turned out to have one small broken fastening on the end of one of the struts, and the zips are apparently designed to burst open before the fabric gives way – thank you again, Crusader.

I stayed a long time in the cockpit, just watching the sea, not caring when a wave broke over my head – I couldn’t get any wetter, and the water was warm. But it was now nine o’clock, and I hadn’t put the breakfast oats in to soak before I went to bed (I think I had some idea that the motion would be easier in the early hours). Well, we know all about that, don’t we?

More seriously, the cooker had been swamped (again) and wouldn’t work. It took two days to get a very low flame out of one of the burners. Infuriatingly, the little electric kettle had packed up a couple of days before, and I was waiting for calmer weather to get out the multimeter and find out why.

In the end, breakfast was cold rice pudding out of the tin with the Nutella jar tucked into the corner of the berth beside me. That and two digestive biscuits with a small glass of rum (it had to be a small glass; the big one got smashed).

Other damage, since we’re on the subject: Two shelving units became detached from their fastenings – not because they contained anything particularly heavy – it must have been just the impact.

The cockpit grating broke.

The fridge is definitely kaput (the instructions say it must not be inverted.)

The low-pressure pump for the watermaker is making a strange noise and not producing the required pressure. It has to be below the level of the high-pressure setup, hence its home in the bilges, but it does sit on a little platform designed to keep it above any water down there (but not if the water is up to the cabin sole.)

Of course, the 50m of 10mm chain (weighing 50kg) hit the deckhead, demolished the wiring for the windlass and then crashed back down as comprehensively tangled as Auntie Nellie’s knitting wool after the kitten got into her basket.

So, what happened?

I believe the exceptionally steep wave hit from the starboard bow, and the boat, sailing fast, started to go straight into it. If you have seen the film The Perfect Storm, you can guess what happened next. The bow was forced up and up until the hull was almost vertical – that would explain the storm jib being catapulted five metres from its place in the forepeak halfway back down the saloon. Also, the peculiar behaviour of the shower grating – and something else that supports this theory is the shelving system above the port berth. This features a piece of wood which slots into two grooves to act as an optional divider. This can only be removed (normally with difficulty) by lifting it out vertically. It turned up in the bilges.

So, rather than being pitchpoled, I believe Samsara was very nearly tipped over backwards, but as the hull approached the vertical, she fell sideways across the face of the wave. The mast may well have been below the horizontal, but given the steepness of the wave, that would not necessarily have put it in the water, causing her to roll (there was no damage to the anemometer or Windex).

The wave would then have fallen on top of the boat, demolishing the sprayhood, breaking the boom casting and tearing the sail, ripping off the toe rail, breaking the stanchion etc…etc…

I’m quite glad I wasn’t out there.

Eventually, of course, the weight of the keel brought her up – which, as I know from experience, is not something that happens with a catamaran.

Oddly enough, I count myself lucky.

Because the boat tipped backwards before being knocked down sideways, the big adjustable spanner flew diagonally aft to land in the sink. If this had been a simple sideways knockdown, it would have been propelled directly across the cabin from its stowage beneath the head of the starboard berth, straight for the head of the port berth – to hit me squarely in the face.

And that, my friends, is what they call positive thinking.

Now, if you will excuse me, I still haven’t found the galley scissors…

The reefing horns: The 10mm stainless steel bolt snapped like a twig

Aluminium casting broken

…and fixed with a soft shackle

Toe rail ripped off.

The back of the North Atlantic passage chart has this to say about leaving the UK for the Canaries: “September is a good month”.

Last time I did this trip, I Ieft on September 10^th, got there in 13 days and spent most of the time rolling south at six knots under twin headsails with the Portuguese Trades blowing as steadily as they did for the Cutty Sark.

October, says the chart, is “acceptable, but get a good weather report.”

I left on October 4^th. I had a good weather report – at least the Windy app offered me moderate north westerlies for 48 hours to get me halfway across Biscay. If I left it for a couple more days, however, there was no end to the prospect of south westerlies, some of them in orange…

Actually, I did consider waiting a couple of days because – would you believe it after the Great Refit – at the last minute I broke a stanchion coming up to the fuel berth in Falmouth.

Anchoring off Trefusis Point, I considered a delay to get a new one. There was one at half price on eBay. I could have it by Thursday.

But by Thursday, the south westerlies would have arrived – and I had 24 days to get to Gran Canaria, check in for my stupid Brexit visa and get to Pasito Blanco in time for the Ocean Cruising Club party.

I ordered a new pair (I think I need a spare) to be sent to Agustin the OCC Port Officer for the Canaries. “Was that all right,” I emailed him. “Of course,” he replied by return. Agustin is great.

So, I left on what I imagined would be a straight-forward 1,400-mile passage. “Two or three weeks,” I told Tamsin.

It was going to be three. It just seemed longer.

For a start there were the calms off Finisterre. Days of calms. Calms and headwinds. In desperation I even motored for 20 hours in the hope of finding some wind. I had screenshots of a week of Windy forecasts, and they suggested that if I were to get further into Biscay, there might be enough wind at least to keep me moving.

Motoring is not something I like to do on long passages – what difference is it going to make over a thousand miles? But I was pleasantly surprised to see how far I could get with the little Nanni 21hp ticking over at 1750 revs.

All the same, when I got to where Windy said there was wind, there wasn’t.

In the end it was the new super zero that got me out of there. This is the enormous lightweight sail set on its own Dyneema luff rope from a short bowsprit and sheeted back to the spinnaker blocks. It is essentially an upwind sail, and the idea is that the merest puff gets the boat moving and generates enough apparent wind to keep her moving. It works.

At least it worked until I put a hole in the leach trying to furl it when it was caught on the crosstree which – I then discovered – had lost its smooth protective boot.

I almost wept with disappointment, shame and frustration. The worst part would be having to tell Paul Lees at Crusader sails what I had done to his beautiful creation.

So, it was fully nine days into the passage before I saw any real progress down the Iberian coast. Of course, I could have cut the corner – abandoned my waypoint 100 miles off Cape Finisterre but, if there is one thing that frightens me as much as lightning at sea, it is the prospect of meeting the marauding Orcas.

I know that people say Orca attacks are statistically very rare and they only want to play but Samsara doesn’t carry hull insurance and I manage to break quite enough stuff without any help from “playful” marine mammals.

Incidentally, here’s a politically incorrect observation: If they’re so bored, can’t they go and learn to do tricks in a nice Disneyland marine park?

(Now, of course, I’m going to be in real trouble. They’re intelligent enough to read this.)

Anyway, I moved the waypoint (it was an exclamation mark) from 100 miles off Finisterre to 50. Apparently, the advice for yachts sailing down the coast is to stay 20 miles offshore, so I should be well out of the way.

Certainly, I was out of the way. I still found myself 100 miles offshore – tacking against persistent southerlies.

These got stronger the further south we bashed. In an area famed since the 17^th century for northerly winds, I spent day after day switching between one reef and two, all the hatches shut, the inside of the boat becoming clammier and clammier as cast-off oilies, wet boots and flying food grew into a sort of putrid compost heap on the floor.

Then, one afternoon off Lisbon, the glass dropped like a stone and the wind speed shot up to between 30 and 36 knots. I considered the sensible thing – heaving to. But that would mean going backwards at two knots and I just couldn’t bear it. Also, the boat seemed to be loving the conditions, crashing along at between five and six knots in clouds of spray. Of course, we were only making one knot towards the Canaries as the Navionics track zig-zagged painfully across the screen – and this went on, would you believe for 36 hours…

Then, after just a 24 respite (there was even some north in the wind) would you believe the same thing happened again – the sudden drop in pressure (but only 28-33 knots this time.)

And that was when I got knocked down – in a Force 7. You don’t expect that (nobody expects a knockdown). I’m not going to describe it here because I’ve written a full explanation in another post.

By the time I got to Las Palmas, quite frankly I’d had enough. Also, I have to organise the repairs – which are beginning to resemble another refit.

I think I’ll take the bus to the party.

After the knockdown

I wasn’t going to have a watermaker.

The whole point of the first trip to the Caribbean had been to work out what I needed – did I need an outboard (no), a sun awning (not so far), a watermaker?

Ah, well, there a subject for discussion. Everyone told me that a 32ft boat with 220 amp hours of battery capacity is just too small for a watermaker (where are you going to put it? How are you going to power it?)

But, on the other hand, I had discovered two things about water in the Caribbean: One is that you have to pay for it (and it’s not cheap). Secondly, when you have bought it – via a manky hose on the dockside or from a putrid tank on a sort of barge with an outboard on the back (which also takes your rubbish and the laundry) the water goes bad in three days. Really; It tastes of bad eggs. You have to boil it.

Thinking about this while sitting in the anchorage at White Bay, Jost Van Dyke, after one too many bushwhackers in the Soggy Dollar Bar, I mused over the way the partying crew on the adjacent chartered catamaran did not appear to notice that suddenly water had started to spurt out of their port hull. The generator had kicked in – triggered either by low battery voltage or, possibly, the level in the water tanks. All those freshwater showers after a swim, the dishwasher, the washing machine…

On a charter catamaran, people don’t expect to economise with water – and why should they? They have four staterooms, three decks, two dining areas, patio doors to go sunbathing spot on the foredeck. They think they’re in a waterfront apartment.

Actually, this doesn’t matter because a modern watermaker can supply 120 litres an hour on demand, automatically…

Of course, I don’t have to feed a dishwasher or a washing machine and I don’t have a diesel generator. But, there are smaller versions and, you must admit, there is something very compelling about the idea of making your own water from nothing more than the power of the sun and the wind. As for the raw material – salt water. Well, there is no shortage of that.

As Iain and Fiona aboard Ruffian of Amble put it: “There is life before a watermaker and life after. If you can find any way of squeezing one in, you’ll never regret it…”

I spent the winter of the Great Refit trying to work out how to do this. I consulted Dave Jones of AdvancedTech Marine.

“Where will you put it?” he said. “They’re not small.” And “Have you done an electrical inventory?”

This is where you write down every electrical device on the boat, how much power it consumes and then multiply that by the number of hours a day it is in use. This gives you an amp/hour figure.

Then you the same with your charging capacity – wind charger, solar panels, engine alternator…

Finally, you accept that with old-fashioned lead/acid batteries, you can only use half their capacity or you will run them flat and ruin them.

I didn’t need to do the arithmetic. Boats with watermakers had five or six hundred amp/hours of battery capacity – sometimes more – sometimes Lithium. They had three or four hundred watts of solar on enormous arrays perched on the stern. They had diesel generators (how else were they going to run their washing machines?)

I had chosen a small boat. I set great store by keeping things small and simple (or so I said). But, all the same, it would have been nice…

 Then I started trying to measure up for the new water tanks. I was going to throw away the old leaking flexible jobs and get a pair of proper polyethylene replacements made by Tektanks. It was all arranged. All I had to do was send them the drawing or, if I preferred, I could mock up the new ones in cardboard and send those like flat-packed furniture.

I went to the marina skip and loaded up with an armful of cardboard boxes.

Over two days and half a mile of Sellotape, I discovered I was never going to be able to do this. I stood there with chopped-up cardboard up to my knees and surveyed the two huge voids under the bunks where the tanks were to go.

“Do you know what?” I said to myself. “There’s room in one of those for a watermaker.”

After all, if I had a watermaker, what did I need with two tanks?

I messaged Iain and Fiona again, now in the San Blas Islands. They recommended a Splash 25 – 25litres an hour at 13amps. Utterly reliable. In seven years, it had produced thousands of litres with never a moment’s trouble. Talk to Jim Cudd at Sailfish Marine, they said.

So I did – and I talked to Terry Richardson at Richardson Yacht Services on the Isle of Wight who could fit it and, come to that, measure for the new tank (so that if the measurements were all wrong, it would be his fault).

Jim sent me an invoice. I paid it. The kit would be sent directly to Terry. This was in May.

The fitting was scheduled for July (after all, I wouldn’t need it until I got to the Canaries – that’s where you have to start paying for water… although, that’s not entirely true. If you stop at the Scillies on the way, you have to pay for it there…)

Then there was the first delay. Terry was still very busy in July. Would August be OK?

August would be fine. I arrived in August.

“Where’s the watermaker?” said Terry.

“I thought you had it.”

“I thought you had it.”

I called Jim: “Where’s the watermaker?” I asked his voicemail.

I remember the eventual conversation very clearly. I was walking back from Newport’s public conveniences to the Isle of Wight central library. The library doesn’t have a loo but there is a very nice little park to walk through. Jim explained that he had ordered the watermaker. He had taken delivery. He was getting ready to send it out. But then he had an order from a customer who was in a hurry for one and, since he knew I wasn’t in a hurry, he had let the other customer have my unit.

“So, what you did,” I put it into its most basic form, “is you sold my watermaker – that I had paid for – to somebody else.”

Jim said that he would have to put his hands up to it. He admitted he had done “a bad thing”.

Now I don’t want you taking against Jim just because he did “a bad thing”. Jim is going to turn out to be the hero of the watermaker saga, hold on…

Of course, the obvious course, having sold my watermaker to somebody else would have been to order another one for me (I wasn’t in a hurry). I would never know. But that’s not what happened. Come August, Samsara had been lifted out at Richardson’s yard on the Medina – necessary because the inlet was going to have its own skin fitting as far below the waterline as possible. That was how we discovered that one of the bolts for the cutlass housing had unwound itself, was sticking out by a good 40mm and about to fall out completely. If the cutlass housing falls off the boat sinks, so you can see why it was lucky we decided on the new skin fitting. Meanwhile bigger bolts would fix the cutlass housing – and re-aligning the engine to stop the vibration so it wouldn’t happen again … and, while on the subject of running repairs, I’d manage to pull the spinnaker pole fitting off the front of the mast … and the adjustable sheaves for the reefing wouldn’t adjust to the new mainsail… there was plenty to be going on with while a new watermaker was sent from Spain.

And it was sent from Spain. It was sent from Spain to DHL’s warehouse at East Midlands Airport.

And there it stayed.

Over the next week, sitting high and dry in Samsara’s cabin – or on a park bench outside the library so that Josh, the guitar-playing shipwright could tear the cabin apart to instal his skin fitting and get on with the preliminary plumbing, I got to know the very friendly staff on the DHL helpline rather well. They can afford to be friendly – after all they have all the time in the world because it can only be a tiny percentage of outraged DHL “consignees” who have the patience to navigate the Byzantine voicemail maze you have to get through to reach them.

Oh, the jolly conversations I had with the helpline – all about how interesting it was that there’s a Newport in the Isle of Wight as well as one in Glamorgan: “Imagine if we sent it to Wales by mistake!” (they were going to). Then it transpired that DHL didn’t recognise the account the consignment had been billed to – so that’s why it hadn’t been paid – and why my watermaker was now on something called a “Credit Stop”.

Jim called them: “I have my credit card in my hand. I can give you the numbers now…”

But no, that would not do. DHL would need authorisation from the shipper.

We put Samsara back in the water. I was not in a hurry after all. I could go to Falmouth for the OCC West Country Meet, then on to Jersey to see my son Olly and his family. Then I was going to the Boat Show. Surely it must be sorted out by the Boat Show.

Well, yes and no. I got my watermaker – but only because Jim set up his stand at the Show with a hand-written note on one of the displays announcing: “Splash 25 – stuck in customs!”

He had given me his unit (delivered on time by UPS). This thoroughly decent gesture must have cost him further sales. Also, he didn’t charge for an expensive carbon block filter because of all the trouble I’d been put to – and paid my mooring fees at Southampton Town Quay and didn’t charge me for a whole box of spares…

On top of all this, he couldn’t concentrate of manning his Boat Show stand because of all the time he spent on the phone, his back to the public, haranguing the helpful people on the DHL helpline trying to get hold of my watermaker to put on his display.

“You’re right,” he said. “They’re very helpful – only nothing changes.”

 I believe the wretched thing arrived just as the show was about to close.

So, all’s well that ends well, yes?

Actually, not so much. The thing with watermakers is that you must give them clean sea water – certainly not the contents of Island Harbour Marina, where Richardson’s is based and where the water is left to stew for 20 hours a day while the tide goes down and the lock stays closed. So, I didn’t switch it on for the first time until I was out of the Solent and on the way back to Falmouth for the “off”.

It worked brilliantly! Hardly any noise and plenty of lovely fresh water.

Until I came to flush it. This is when you run some of the water you’ve just made through the system to get rid of any bugs that might grow in the damp and the dark. When I did this, there was the most dreadful screeching noise and the tank promptly emptied again. Jim thought there must be air in the system.

In Falmouth, I went right through it, tracing the hoses through bulkheads, working out where A connected to B, following the diagram in the instruction manual.

It was the three-way valve that was the culprit. Josh, the guitar-playing shipwright had installed it so that, although it delivered sea water to the pump OK, instead of the fresh water flush going to the pump, it went straight back into the sea – and so the pump was indeed getting “air in the system”.

I moved the valve, reconnecting the hoses the right way round. That worked for a day or two. Then, when I turned it on, I noticed there wasn’t the familiar clicking of the high pressure pump. Indeed, both the gauges remained steadfastly at zero. I looked at the three-way valve. It was set to “production”. I lifted another floorboard. There was water in there – a lot of water. In fact, it was splashing – and if you looked closely, you could see it pouring out of a hose which had become detached from the pump inlet. To put it in its most basic terms, the boat was sinking again.

I closed the seacock, reattached the hose and tightened up the jubilee clips (which took all the tightening you would expect of clips which had been slipped on but never tightened in the first place.)

Given the very large bill I received from Richardson’s, I am considering writing to them and suggesting a refund to compensate me for the hours (days) I spent trying to work out what was wrong. I will let you know what they say.

Meanwhile, I can tell you that life after a watermaker really is wonderful. I am writing this 17 days into the passage to the Canaries (yes, the weather has been awful). I have washed up in fresh water. I have swabbed the galley in fresh water. I have washed myself (yes, really!) It took a few days to get over the guilt but eventually I was using freshwater as readily as you might turn on a tap in a house.

Then, all I needed to do was press the button once the batteries were up to 12.6V with the wind and sun and wait for the new freshwater to come pouring out of the galley tap showing the tank was full again.

I find it difficult to write the next sentence but here it is: “This normally takes between five and ten minutes.”

I think I might go and wash the salt off the windows…

• Interestingly, no sooner had I ordered my Splash 25 than Iain and Fiona’s packed up for the first time – took them ages to fix, involving a “special tool”. Must make a note to get a “special tool”.
• Stop press: Now it’s making a new and sinister noise. At least, this time, I know what the problem is: Nowhere in the instructions does it say it’s OK for the drown the electric pump – the post entitled “knockdown”.

You don’t appreciate just how big Poole Harbour really is until you row from Pottery Pier to the little beach in the fishing boat marina.

That’s 1.3 nautical miles (Poole Harbour being the second biggest natural harbour in the world – second only to Sydney, apparently).

I row at two knots – but then, I have all the time in the world…

Rowing back and thinking about last weekend’s trip to Jersey to visit my son Olly and his family, it seemed astonishing that it is 40 years since I used to ferry Olly and his younger brother George across the harbour in a dramatically overloaded inflatable.

In those days, it was from the mooring off Brownsea Island to the Lilliput Yacht Station (now a block of flats).

Admittedly, I wasn’t rowing; we had a Suzuki 2hp, and the inflatable was a Tinker Tramp with double buoyancy chambers.

But we were definitely overloaded – particularly on the outward passage. The boys had their bags on their laps in the hope of keeping them dry. I needed a free hand to steady the pile of victuals as we navigated the Middle Ship Channel with its freighters and ferries. If we met the pilot boat, everything was going to get soaked anyway.

“Did you ever think that was just a teeny bit irresponsible?” I asked over the Braye beach café’s crab linguine.

“Not at all,” said Olly. “I assumed you knew what you were doing.”

“Ah, such faith!”

“Until you got me up in the middle of the night to look for rocks…”

I had rather forgotten about this. But now it’s out there, I suppose the story must be told…

It must have been a few years later because Olly was about 14 and George 12. I had delivered Largo to Plymouth in anticipation of a West Country cruise without having to spend 18 hours bashing them across Lyme Bay into a Force 6. But as we travelled down on the train, the sun shone, and a northwesterly 4 promised a perfect passage to the other side.

“If we set off as soon as we arrive, we can be in Morgat tomorrow in time for a late dinner in Café du Port,” I enthused.

Olly and George were up for it.

Isn’t it amazing how trusting children can be?

Suffice it to say, dinner the following night did not find us diving into cauldrons of moules. Instead, I suspect it might have been something rather hurried, like a handful of biscuits as I searched for Les Plâtresses in the gathering dusk.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when both boys were tucked up in their sleeping bags, and the night was as black as only a moonless night can be when you have neglected to look up the time of moonrise, that the Grande Viotière (Fl. R. 4s.) seemed to get itself mixed up with the Tournant et Lochris  (Fl. (2) R. 6s.)

Somehow, this did not seem the moment to go below to get the Seafix out of its bracket and start looking up frequencies for radio beacons (NW France).

Olly took up the story, aware that my grandson Benedict’s opinion of me was shrinking with each unfortunate turn of events.

“You woke me up and said you needed me in the cockpit to keep a lookout for rocks,” Olly went on, rather in the manner of midshipman Hornblower pointing out to the First Lieutenant that the French were now behind them as well as in front … and on both sides…

Well, I had suspected something might be wrong because a fishing boat had spent an awfully long time shining a searchlight at me – presumably wondering what a single navigation light was doing where no light had a right to be.

And the searchlight must have ruined whatever night vision age and nature had left me, because, no sooner did Olly poke his head out of the companionway than he said: “There are rocks over there…”

“Where?”

“Just over there. You can see the waves breaking on them.”

It didn’t seem the moment to argue. I spun Largo on a sixpence and headed straight for the fishing boat – presumably, he knew where he was…

It was breakfast we had in Morgat instead of dinner– and a lovely week in the Îsles de Glènan. The unfortunateness was all forgotten on the trip back – setting out as we did in broad daylight with courses and transits all drawn out carefully on the chart.

Anyway, it shouldn’t happen again. Now, I’ve got Navionics on two phones and a tablet – and the Garmin plotter… and two VHFs with GPS…

Just as well, too. I’ve looked up radio beacons (NW France), and they don’t seem to be there any more…

Olly, then.

…and now.

…and Benedict.