The three Frenchmen came roaring up in their RIB and cut the motor alongside so that they lay rocking on their own wake – the harbour suddenly silent, 9.9hp on tickover.

“Do you want a lift?” said the helmsman.

“Do you want a lift?” said the bowman, not realising I had turned down the offer from the helmsman.

The third one just looked, eyebrows up under the brim of his baseball cap. After all, it is the best part of a quarter of a mile from the dinghy dock at Mindelos’s floating bar to the anchorage. Why would anyone be rowing?

But I was – and I carried on.

It’s not that I don’t possess an outboard motor. I have written in the past about my little electric job – and then wrote again saying how I had taken to using it for an extra push when rowing into the wind (like an electric bike going uphill).

But now I realise I haven’t used it since the Canaries two months ago – and I’m not sure I ever will again. The acid test came in the anchorage off the deserted island of Santa Luzia. Two hundred yards away was Ruffian of Amble with Iain and Fiona, who have been living aboard for the last four years and are currently heading in the general direction of Surinam. Would I like to come for dinner?

So, here was the decision to make: Should I ship the outboard, or could I trust myself to row back in the dark against the wind.

The wind, I should point out, is not the same in the Cape Verdes as it is in other places. It has a habit of shrieking down the mountains and through the valleys. Gusts of 35 knots are fairly routine. Could I row my tiny inflatable against a 35knot gust? Obviously not – but on the other hand, a gust, by definition, does not last long. Once the wind drops to something reasonable, I would have no trouble.

At this point, I should explain that it was important that I got this right. If failed to row to windward, broke an oar or whatever, the next stop would be Brazil.

The Royal Cruising Club’s guide to the Atlantic Islands points out that rescue services in the Cape Verdes should be assumed to be non-existent (rather in the way that lighthouses round here should be assumed unlit).

Iain and Fiona, of course, have a big RIB for a dinghy and a powerful outboard but they would have to launch it to come to my rescue – that was if I had some way of alerting them that I needed rescuing. Should I take the hand-held VHF with me? Don’t be ridiculous. I had a torch and I’m sure we all knew the morse code for SOS…

Of course, in the event I got there and back for risotto in the cockpit with no mishaps – indeed, I am pleased to say that in one truly ferocious gust, I checked my transits and am proud to say that I was not losing any ground at all (even if I was rowing like the Cambridge crew the year they sank).

But, as John Noakes used to say: DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!

If you take your little inflatable out of its box and try to row it into 35 knots, two things will happen:

First, you will find that the oars are too short to get any real leverage. To compensate for this, the manufactuer will have made them good and wide … which means that in a choppy sea, they will keep on hitting the waves on the back-stroke and stop you dead in your tracks.

So you will have to row harder – much harder than the designer imagined when drawing up the scantlings for the plastic rowlocks.

Which will break – and off you go to Brazil…

This, I was confident, would not happen to me. I have upgraded my little inflatable. My little inflatable is the Toyota Lancruiser of little inflatables.

Here’s what you do: Get some stainless rowlocks made up to the pattern of the plastic ones – this is not difficult or expensive.

Secondly, buy longer oars in the shape of proper boat race sculls, with low-profile blades incorporating a professional curve to give a kick to the end of every stroke.

Finally, keep the old oars, and on an inky black night with the wind shrieking over the mountains and nothing under your lee but 3,000 miles of Atlantic, sling a spare one in the bottom of the boat. It’s handy for manoeuvring at the jetty, and it might just save all that faffing about with “is it dot,dot,dot,dash,dash,dash or is it dash,dash,dash,dot,dot,dot…”

Next, for singlehanders: once you have a crew hanging half their bum over the transom, you will be going nowhere.

And for old singlehanders: After old age begins to bite, you will find that your muscles begin to atrophy. Your once-powerful biceps become little sticks; your broad shoulders shrink until you start buying girly T-shirts in the market.

But rowing is good exercise.

It seems ages since I did this: I’m sitting on the lee berth, laptop on my knees, feet braced against the windward – the hatch is just managing to keep the sun off the screen.

Dyna-mite by Mud is playing on Spotify and the beer in the little electric cooler I picked up second hand in Las Palmas is down to 10°C which is a lot cooler than it would be in the bilges, given that the water temperature is 26°C.

Normally, I  would open the beer at 1200 and it’s now 1130, but I might delay that if the writing goes well – anyway, breakfast was late because I didn’t feel like getting up. Why should I? There was nothing that I had to do.

Welcome to the seagoing lifestyle three days into the passage from The Gambia to Sal in the Cape Verde Islands.

Yes, there has been a change of plan. I was going to set off for the Caribbean directly from Africa but what good is cruising if you can’t change your mind?

Anyway, there was the little matter of provisioning in Banjul market: what I thought were potatoes weren’t potatoes at all – not even sweet potatoes. I don’t know what they were but they had the consistency of stone and a bitter taste that suggested they might have been medicinal.

Also, The Gambia being a predominantly Moslem country, beer was a problem and I won’t sail anywhere without beer. Eventually, I found an Indian shop with something called Cody’s. It said it was imported from Germany (possibly because the German’s refused to drink it).

No, much better to stock up in the Cape Verdes – the supermarket in Mindelo is 536 miles to the northwest but that is a mere detail when all you have to do is haul up the anchor and set the sails.

As the crews of Ceruean and Ruffian explained over Christmas lunch, if you check in at Sal, you can sail downwind through islands with sand dunes, pristine beaches and groves of date palms. This also avoids going to Praia.

Praia, on the island of Santiago has always had a dodgy reputation: Don’t just lock up your dinghy at night, lock yourself in the cabin as well. In Cerulean’s cockpit, I met Peter, the German skipper who had called there in the spring with a medical emergency. After depositing his crewmember in the local hospital, and returning to the boat, he woke up in the middle of the night to find himself facing five guys with machetes.

They tied him up, ransacked the boat, held a knife to his throat until he gave them his internet passwords…

Later, monitoring the emails they were sending using his address, he discovered they were trying to buy a car from his bank account  – a transaction that required a photo of the buyer’s passport.

Since Peter happened to be a retired Hamburg policeman, he recognised a clue when it smacked him over the head. Gleefully, he passed the photo on to the Praia police department – apparently, he is still waiting to hear what they’ve done about it.

So, don’t go there.

But Sal is alright. Sal is just fine – best of all, the course puts the trade wind free enough to carry the spinnaker.

This is kind of weird because, along with the enormous, diaphanous spinny, I have hoisted the trysail, the tiny, tough bright-orange storm sail. This is because, on the first day out from the Canaries en route to The Gambia, I contrived to break the gooseneck so, ever since, the boom has been lashed on deck while I look at options for getting it fixed in Grenada.

At the moment the best seems to be a Facebook friend sending me his old one – but finding out if he could get it off the boom wasn’t the top priority in the middle of a family Christmas. So that’s another reason for delaying the crossing.

Meanwhile, we’re still doing five knots in the right direction, the temperature in the cabin is up to 27°C and the beer is still down at 10°C

Even if it is the awful Cody’s stuff.

Old Man Sailing, the book, included accounts of some extraordinarily vivid dreams which I started having once I had been on my own for a while. Whether these were a direct consequence of the enforced solitude, I have no idea – but they went down rather well.

Since this blog is an exercise in pure indulgence (I have no editor to tell me what to write or when – or, come to that, whether it is complete nonsense when I’ve written it) I thought it might be fun to include some more dreams here.

Obviously, this might not be to everyone’s taste so I shall call them all “Then I woke up…” (so that you can ignore them if you choose and just stick to the supposedly serious stuff…)

I was late arriving at Carriçal on the Cape Verdean island of São Nicolau. Carriçal is so small and so isolated that the street lights go out at ten o’clock when the generator switches off. I stuck my head out of hatch and Samsara’s masthead light was the only sign of life. Had it not been for the sound of surf on the beach, I might have been in the middle of an open ocean.

Going to bed, the darkness in the cabin punctuated by tiny, glowing LED lights of various gadgets on charge, I debated the best time to leave for Porto do Tarrafal, 20 miles along the coast. After that, there was another 40 miles to the deserted island of Santa Luzia. I should be able to leave after breakfast…

Odd, that no sooner did I have the anchor up than I set course to the east, rather than the west. Also, I had the wind behind me which was even more strange because the wind in Cape Verdes during January has been blowing from the north east ever since the earth first started spinning – they call it the northeast trades.

Nevertheless, we were going like a train with the sails goose-winged (the boom was no longer broken and lashed to the deck, because in dreams, everything is perfect).

Or not, as will become apparent.

Anyway, we were ploughing along in glorious sunshine doing six and seven knots when I noticed HMS Victory and Portsmouth dockyard to starboard. This was a slight concern because everyone knows that Santa Luzia is further up the English Channel past Newhaven, so the last thing I should be doing is going into Portsmouth Harbour.

Then a high speed launch – customs or coastguard or something – came bouncing across my wake (yes, I was going so fast I set up a wake like a motor-cruiser). He shouted something over his Tannoy – some sort of apology about not being able to raise me on VHF. I ignored him.

I was more concerned with the fact that now I appeared to be in Venice and the canal was getting very narrow – the end of the boom scraping past the houses – startled faces in the windows…

I knew what I could do about this – an old tactic from my Laser days: centre the main – pull it in until the boom is on the centre line. It’s what you do when you find yourself close up behind the boat in front and unable to overtake because this is a race and you have other boats on either side. If you bring the boom onto the centreline, the wind can’t get into the sail and you slow down.

My trouble was that for some reason, the mainsheet was led through the blocks for the headsail furling line and that took it all around the deck – meaning that it was too short for me to reach it without leaving the helm.

So we just went faster and faster. I felt I should be congratulated on remaining calm. Some people might find themselves given over to panic, doing seven knots up the Rio di Palazzo, scattering gondolas like elderly pedestrians before an electric scooter. Yet I remained stoic and philosophical – but then, I knew that when I reached the end of the canal, I would find Chichester Yacht Basin. There would be plenty of room to turn round in Chichester Yacht Basin.

Anyone who knows Chichester Yacht Basin can pick themselves up off the floor, stop laughing and remember this is all a dream.

Anyway, it turned out that Chichester Yacht Basin now featured the Bridge of Sighs, incongruously connecting the palazzo to the nearest of the overpriced new houses they cluster like mushrooms around marinas.

Throwing the helm down at the last moment, I executed a snappy 90° turn and slammed into the 17^th Century limestone carvings sideways rather than head-on … for which I felt I should be congratulated.

Instead, I had to put up with a five-minute tirade from the woman in the house telling me that now she wouldn’t be able to get out to collect her children from school because the council had to send someone to inspect the damage every time there was a “bridge strike” (it seemed this happened regularly – which was not surprising: it was a damn silly place for a baroque masterpiece).

I got the sails off, made fast to a couple of gargoyles and accepted her invitation to tea so we could exchange insurance details.

But when I gave her my card, all it told her was the 0800 number to claim her winnings in the Utility Warehouse £20,000 give-away.

Then I woke up.