I had better do some explaining.

This blog has always been free – and I have been proud of that. I write it because that’s what I do. Even if nobody took the trouble to read it, I would write it. I have written stuff for more than 70 years. I feel more comfortable writing than talking. Since this blog began in 2017, there must be hundreds of thousands of words here.

You get my point?

But now I have started to write on another site where people can “buy me a coffee” if they feel like it – although there is no obligation.

For a subscription of £6 a month, they can become a “member” and receive exclusive content. As soon as I announced this, I was called a “money-grubbing influencer”.

I don’t see it that way. But maybe an explanation will do no harm.

It all started back in Conwy in 2017 with the original “big-refit”. I had begun to realise just what I was taking on in buying Samsara https://www.oldmansailing.com/2017/08/.

Soon after that, my children introduced me to Instagram, and I started posting pictures. One day, Lottie told me I had 11,000 followers. Where did they come from?

The years passed. The blog posts piled up. COVID came. I went sailing. I ended up on the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio2, talking to seven million listeners.

That led to the original Old Man Sailing book. This has now sold 13,000 copies (I looked it up on Google AI, but I think it’s more than that now). Interestingly, nobody called me a “money-grubbing influencer” because of that. In fact, if you go back to 1968 and my first job, I can’t remember being called a “money-grubbing farm labourer” – but that was only for £12.19s.6d a week.

Then suddenly, everything changed. On May 18^th this year on the voyage up from Sint Maarten in the Caribbean to New Ross in Ireland, I was becalmed somewhere south-east of Bermuda and, to amuse myself, I waved the camera around the horizon, filming the endless ocean swell, the slatting mainsail, the drooping ensign…

For some reason, it captured the global imagination. That 52-second video has now been played 3.2million times (on Instagram – more if you include YouTube, Facebook and the rest).

Nothing was ever the same again.

For one thing, I’m not publishing The Voyage #5 – the book I wrote about sailing from Sint Maarten to New Ross. There just wasn’t enough of it because, instead of sitting down with the laptop three times a day as I usually do to produce the raw copy for this series, I was busy fielding comments about ocean calms (and everything else, including “What kind of beer did I drink?” – and, of course, the interminable “Why didn’t I wear a harness?”)

Of course, the secret was that the video was so short, people watched it to the end (you have to have a catastrophically short attention span if you can’t manage 52 seconds). But the Instagram algorithm didn’t seem to appreciate that. It just said: “Good heavens, this guy has virtually 100% retention! He must be amazing!”

And pumped it out to everyone.

So, I did it again about the beer (and the blasted harness), until I was uploading a 1-2 minute video every day. I started signing off with “Until tomorrow. Goodbye.”

People loved that.

And, since most days on the ocean are fairly bright, I wore sunglasses. People asked me what kind of sunglasses I wore, in the same way they asked what kind of beer I drank.

This didn’t seem important until I arrived to anchor off Dunmore East at the entrance to the Barrow River and became rather nervous about the number of people who seemed to want to claim me as their own. As a solitary sailor, I was not used to this.

I must say, I have rather come to embrace it in the weeks of Irish hospitality that ensued. But it did mean that one of the first people who came to welcome me was Michael McLoughlin of the McLoughlin Boat Company.

Now I won’t hear a word said against Michael. Indeed, I will give a plug to his boat company https://www.mcloughlinboatcompany.com/ . There it is.

The thing about Michael is that he can see potential.

Like: “You could get a new water tank in that space behind the engine.” And: “Best to take the engine out anyway. We could blast off all that rust – spray paint it like new…”

And I didn’t help with: “Then you could take out the fuel tank and clean it. I’ve never been able to do that.”

We removed the redundant calorifier as well, and replaced the motor in the anchor windlass, fixed the leak in the watermaker, the one in the centre hatch, devised a way of securing the locker over the foot of the starboard berth, replaced the rusty hinges on the galley locker, the one under the port forward berth (and the starboard, if there’s time).

The trouble was that back home in Tramore, Michael’s wife Eleni, who does the boat company accounts, was keeping track of everything and I ended up in the situation of the British Admiralty in 1803 when an upstart new Admiral called Horatio Somebody was demanding a refit to his 35-year-old flagship which was going to cost more than The Victory had cost to build in the first place.

Maybe Their Lordships thought: “It doesn’t matter. In a couple of years he’ll win a naval battle somewhere like Trafalgar that will put an end to all the Napoleonic Wars. Then we can name a square after him and put up a column. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

I found myself thinking along the same lines: “If I have enough water capacity to sail round the world, recreating the voyage of Sir Francis Chichester 60 years ago (see https://oldmansailing.com/the-big-trip) then anything I spend on a refit can be considered an investment.”

Admittedly, that was before I discovered all the engine repairs were a waste of money because I had cracked the block overheating it and needed a new one.

So, is it “money-grubbing” to admit that AR Peachment and Colfer Engineering got together to provide a new one at a fraction of the normal price – all delivered and fitted free.

Without the help of people like this, I would now be considering putting off “The Big Trip” to another year (when it would no longer be Chichester’s significant 60^th anniversary?)

Of course, I hope I get round without running out of water, without stuff falling out of lockers and hitting me in the face so that I have to put into Cape Town to get my teeth fixed -without a thousand other things going wrong because I couldn’t afford to renew them or build in redundancy – like the spare StarLink or a second Laptop so I can keep writing this stuff no matter what. I’ve even got a plastic sextant tucked away somewhere in case Vladimir Putin shoots down Elon Musk.

And now that I’ve got used to the attention, I won’t be side-tracked by all the comments. I will sit down regularly, morning, afternoon and evening, to write Samsara Circles the World (with Chichester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World on the Kindle).

It will be a book in two volumes – Book One: Plymouth to Sydney and Book Two: Sydney to Plymouth.

I reckon people will buy it – especially if I include my trademark weird dreams.

But then I thought: “How much more exciting would it be for people to read it in daily episodes as it happens?” After all, I will be writing an episode every day (three, actually). In previous books, a lot of this was edited out once I arrived (too embarrassing… too weird…)

Wouldn’t it be great to read it not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow (do I get to fix the broken boom? Will the Jordan Series Drogue save me when the storm hits?)

And if people are prepared to pay for books, is it really so terrible to ask them to pay for instalments? (Dickens did.)

So, there it is. The oldmansailing blog will keep going. Everything that was free will still be free – and there will be new content from time to time (I really must write something about my solar panel arrangement and put the drogue question to bed – dare I explain my views on harnesses?)

But as an extra (and to help with the bills) there is also the paid site:  https://buymeacoffee.com/oldmansailing

There’s a new instalment out today (it’s free, just to tempt you over there). I should get back to daily posts for members once I set off for Falmouth on Thursday night.

And please get your questions in early for the live stream on Friday…