This was being sensible: Tom Fisher was on his way over for the Yealm in Bonny. The first time I met Tom for a drink, we sat up over the rum bottle until three in the morning.

Add to that Connor Brosan and Alan Laine on their way from Salcombe in Feeling Groovy, and obviously it would be better if I did not try and row back to the boat at closing time without falling in. Just this once, I would fork out the £38 for a berth in the Haven marina.

I must say this hurt a bit because it was only the day before that the smart new harbourmaster’s launch came alongside and the harbourmaster’s polite assistant had informed me that no longer could I anchor for no charge in my favourite spot (it had been my favourite spot since about 1979.) Now the harbour commissioners wanted to charge me £10 a night for it.

While my mouth was working with nothing coming out, he added that, if I liked, I could pay for a year’s harbour dues instead: £10 a metre – £97 until April.

It seemed a lot, but I would be able to use the showers and launderette at the marina. I could land at the dinghy pontoon instead of climbing the ladder at Customs House Quay (and wading through the mud to get back in the water at low tide). Hey, I could fill the water cans with the marina hose and get my Amazon parcels sent to the Harbour Office…

I paid the £97 and rather looked forward to getting my money’s worth. Then I set about winching up the anchor. That was when things started to go wrong. It wouldn’t come. I couldn’t understand this. I had anchored here countless times before – that was why I hadn’t bothered to buoy the thing.

Although, now I came to think about it; this wasn’t my favourite spot after all – not the one marked by the anchor symbol on the Navionics app. Another boat had pinched that. I had been obliged to pick a spot a little further over towards the Falmouth side and a little closer to the mooring field – a spot where there was something on the bottom fouling my chain: I could raise about ten metres, and then the windlass started straining and making screeching noises. There was still 25metres down there, so it must be the chain that was fouled, not the anchor (so at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that an anchor buoy wouldn’t have helped, anyway.)

I did the obvious thing: I slackened off the chain and drove around it – first one way and then the other. It made no difference. Eventually, the windlass went on strike (well, the thermal cut-out stopped it burning itself out). I pulled by hand. Something shifted. The chain came in with a rush, and I had to pick myself up off the deck with a bump on the back of my head the size of a pigeon’s egg.

Then the chain jammed again.

There was nothing for it. I pulled out the phone and started Googling “Divers in Falmouth”. There were plenty of dive centres. They all said they weren’t insured for anchor recovery. I phoned Seawide Services, commercial divers “subsea welding, cutting and repair work”. They could offer a five-man dive team at £600 an hour.

Alternatively, they could send a workboat with a winch. The workboat arrived. It was enormous. The winch was enormous. The chain hummed under the strain. I stood clear. The workboat heeled alarmingly. This wasn’t going to work.

I turned to Facebook: Did anyone know of a diver in Falmouth? Of course, I had to explain why – which meant the advice came in thick and fast, everything from “drive around it” (tried that) to “get a mask” – I did think about it. I even have a wetsuit. But in five metres, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay down there long enough to do anything useful.

Seawide services called back. A couple of their lads had volunteered their own time for £200. I grabbed at it.

Sure enough, two young men turned up in another workboat. One of them climbed into a drysuit and disappeared over the side. Five minutes later, he came up to report that my chain was wrapped around the biggest anchor he had ever seen in his life. It must have been down there for 150 years.

What happened over the next quarter of an hour proved the claim on the Seawide website about “diligent project completion”. What this young man did down in the mud and weed at the bottom of Falmouth harbour was to take a 5mm Allen key, undo the retaining screw on the anchor swivel, drive out the bolt (which I always find difficult on the foredeck even with the big hammer) put the bits in his pocket without dropping them, remove the chain, untangle it from one turn round the Victorian anchor shank and another round the fluke – and then re-attach it.

“All OK, now,” said his mate. “You can winch it up.”

Well, actually, I couldn’t. The windlass was still on strike.

“Never mind,” I said cheerily. “I can pull it up by hand. I’ve done it before.” I have, too – all through the summer of 2019.

The two young men looked at my grey whiskers, considered how they would explain a dead old man to the authorities and pulled it up themselves – hand-over-hand in a trice.

I must say, it all made an excellent story in the bar of the chain locker that night. My greatest regret was that nowhere in all the drama did it occur to me to take any pictures – the workboard solemnly winching itself down to the bottom was most dramatic.

The following morning – after a good deal of urging from a beer-fuelled Tom, not to mention Con and Alan on Cornish cider, I presented myself at the harbourmaster’s office ready to claim a refund of my £97 harbour dues; the argument being that the said harbour was not fit for purpose (i.e. anchoring).

The harbourmaster came down to the front desk, ponderous with authority, his shoulders creaking under gold-braided epaulettes. He sympathised with my experience. He explained that the Harbour Commissioners could not guarantee that the seabed was totally free of obstructions. He suggested that I might be able to claim on my insurance (it’s third party).

The end of the story played out today – 48 hours later. Somewhat delicate after the previous evening’s welcome for Tom’s brother Sebastian and nephew Joe – who obviously deserved a session in The Stable and dinner at Balti Curries (brandy on the house), I returned to anchor in my favourite spot – now free – and was just having lunch in the cockpit when this turned up.

Over the next 20 minutes, while I raced to inflate the dingy so I could get round the other side of it and take better pictures, the peculiar craft raised the offending anchor as if it was nothing more than a 10lb CQR.

The diver was right. I had never seen an anchor as big as that either. The shank must have been three metres long. The flukes dwarfed the man directing operations from the deck.

I would love to know who paid for this operation on a Saturday. Was it the Harbour Commissioners? (ensuring without delay the harbour was free of obstructions after all?) Did Seawide services’ staff have their eye on a bit of scrap value in their spare time? Do I get a cut – after all, I discovered the damn thing.

.

I just reviewed a book for the Ocean Cruising Club – Happy Hooking: The Art of Anchoring by Alex and Daria Blackwell. It’s over 350 pages long – and this is the third edition!

Clearly, if you want to grab a yachtie’s attention, just bring up the subject of anchoring.

Take a look at the sailing groups on Facebook – they’re full of arguments about anchors. Sometimes it seems the new generation of ground tackle causes more trouble than Trump or Brexit. It’s safer to bring up religion.

Certainly, I had no idea I was stepping into such contentious territory when I wrote about choosing a new anchor back in 2017 (August 19, if you’re looking for it).

Also, in those days, I had never heard of an anchor watch app. It turns out there are several of them. This summer I downloaded something called Anchor Lite. It nearly gave me a heart attack: At two O’clock in the morning, a police siren went off in my ear.

That was the alarm to tell me I had dragged 20metres already. Hadn’t I better do something about it? After all, weren’t the rocks less than 100 metres away? Quick, start the engine – would the windlass work? It takes at least a minute to get the chain hook off… Damn, stubbed my toe. Where’s a clothespeg to hold the companion lock open – I need both hands to slide the hatch…

And all this while the anchor was dragging…

Except, of course, it wasn’t. All that had happened was that the boat had shifted sideways as the wind changed. The rocks were now even more than 100 metres away. If the Anchor Lite thing had any sense, it should have played soothing music instead.

As I shuffled back into my sleeping bag, nursing my stubbed toe and banged head – yes, I managed to collide with the hatch in the rush to save the ship – it occurred that we never had all this trouble in the old days.

In the old days, you set your anchor (you didn’t just “drop” it, by the way) and then you relaxed, knowing that you were safe.

Of course, in those days when the CQR was the favourite, you did drag – but very, very slowly as the great lump of iron ploughed its way along the bottom as it was supposed to. When the wind got up, all the diligent skipper had to do was keep a track of his transits to see how fast he was going backwards. But he didn’t get any nasty surprises.

With the new generation of anchors, there’s no need to drag at all.

Of course, I could be tempting fate by writing that line – on the other hand, I do have a 20kg Rocna and 10mm chain on a 9.7metre boat.

Yes, it is massively over-sized but I have never used more than 3:! scope* and, used properly, it has never dragged – not once. Take a look at the screenshot of the Navionics app: This was Braye Harbour in Alderney, the UK Channel Islands, where the swell comes in like a freight train in anything from a North Westerly to Easterlies. The track shows a couple of days when the wind swung from SW to NW and puffed up to 40knots, throwing spray 20metres in the air as the waves hit the breakwater and setting Samsara bucking her chain enough to upend the coffee all over the bunk cushion.

Alderney

But, although she pulled back and stretched the rubber snubber to more than twice its length, I don’t believe that anchor shifted more than half a metre (which it would have had to do as it dug itself deeper and deeper into the sand).

Compare that screenshot to the second one which I have just taken after two calm days in Poole Harbour, swinging to the tide in Blood Alley Lake between Brownsea Island and Furzey Island.

Blood Alley Lake, Poole

The point of this is to say that if you trust your anchor (and how well you set it) you should not need an app. All that an app will do is sow the seeds of doubt about what’s going on down there on the bottom. You will not sleep well – either because the police siren will shoot you bolt upright and crashing into the deckhead or because it hasn’t gone off at all and you have to check that it’s still set, that your phone hasn’t gone flat or, indeed, that you still have a GPS signal and the alarm for that didn’t go off.

OK, so I do sometimes wonder about the 10mm shackle between the chain and the anchor. It really ought to be one size up but it’s the biggest that will go through the bow-roller. Besides, it has a breaking strain of 10tonnes and the boat only weighs 5.3.

Anyway, there’s the snubber to take out the snatch loading and I’m getting a Dyneema strop to back it up.

If I didn’t have that to worry about, I’d only find something else.

At least it doesn’t wake me up in the middle of the night with a siren in my ear…

*Scope: When my father taught me about anchoring back in the 1950’s, we never used more than 3:1 (and I don’t recall adding the freeboard – but then, in a Folkboat there wasn’t much). So, it came as a surprise that the Rocna manual recommended a minimum 4:1 and 5:1 in anything of a blow.

Admittedly I do “round up” the calculations so a depth of 3.1metres becomes 3.5 … and 3.6 becomes 4.0. This makes more difference in shallow water which is where you need more scope – so it seems to make sense.

For those who have been following my track on Polarsteps, an explanation might be helpful.

Yes, I did disappear deep into the South Atlantic for no obvious reason – and then, without any explanation, turned sharp left.

And now, after a voyage of two months, two days, and 4,341 miles from the Canaries, I am in St Helena, that tiny lump of Britain 1,000 miles off the coast of Namibia.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The plan was to call in to Tristan da Cunha first, but I was a week late in leaving Gran Canaria because the OCC party had to be delayed for the host to attend a family wedding.

This would have been fine but for waking up in the middle of the night in the doldrums to find that while everybody’s idea of the doldrums is a lot of calms, what they’re really about is totally unpredictable weather from one minute to the next – like, for instance, 35kts appearing out of nowhere at three o’clock in the morning and unfurling the Super Zero.

The Super Zero is the huge, lightweight hi-tech sail which keeps me going in calms. It does not take kindly to being forcibly unfurled by a gale (I would have taken it down if I’d known a gale was coming…)

Long story short, a lot of scrambling around on the foredeck in the dark, sail in the water, big rip in the expensive hi-tech fabric – and no more Super Zero until I can get it fixed in Grenada.

That Doldrums weather…

So, what with one thing and another, the long voyage down the Atlantic was going to take even longer.

And this was a problem because Tristan da Cunha closes down on December 19^th every year for the island’s Christmas Holiday – really, everything shuts: The Customs & Immigration, the Post Office where you send your Tristan da Cunha postcards with Tristan da Cunha stamps, no pint in the Albatross Bar (the most remote pub in the world). No Crayfish sandwich in the Café da Cunha…

I did harbour fantastic ambitions of putting on a late spurt and arriving just in time for all the Christmas parties, but then a low-pressure system developed in just the wrong place, and suddenly I was looking at headwinds and calms for a thousand miles. I sent an email with my apologies. They were sorry to hear it and hoped I would visit if I’m ever round that way again.

What do they mean? Nobody’s “round that way” unless they’re going there. It’s in the middle of nowhere – the most isolated permanently-occupied island in the world.

My next port of call – since I didn’t have enough food to reach Grenada in the Caribbean -was always going to be St Helena. I could hardly re-supply in Tristan; I would have stripped every shelf in the island stores. St Helena, on the other hand, with its population of 4,500, is a popular stopover for boats on the way from Cape Town to the Caribbean.

And it made sense because the prevailing wind (if only I’d stuck to the plan and gone closer to the coast of South America) would have whizzed me down and round and then up parallel with the coast of Africa.

On the other hand, if I were to take the direct route, I would save two-thirds of the distance…

If ships’ captains had thought like that 300 years ago, there would have been no maritime trade at all. That’s why they called them The Trade Winds for God’s sake.

But I knew better, didn’t I? I reasoned that with only 995 miles to go, the wind wouldn’t blow dead against me all the time. Surely one day it would blow a bit from the north and another day, a bit from the east. I could wriggle my way north east – and just think how much shorter the distance I would have to sail…

Fortunately, I can’t work out precisely how wrong I was – the log has been broken for years. Consequently, I have no record of the three weeks of “wriggling”. The only entry in the logbook is of the distance made good each day. That adds up to 1,179 miles and 24 days.

Still, the weather was fine, the wind was gentle, and every evening the sun would go down in a blaze of purple and gold that had me sitting in the cockpit absolutely bursting with poetry. I read several books, managed an hour of Spanish every day and ran out of beer.

Calling at St Helena, I can tell you, is not like arriving anywhere else. There is no yacht harbour. You anchor off (and roll a good deal). To get ashore, you call the ferry, a 20ft motorboat manned by a rota of unbelievably skilful coxswains who manoeuvre up to the quay where the two metre swell crashes you against a row of lorry tyres lashed to the stone wall. This is the cue for passengers to leap ashore. To help them, there is a sort of gallows arrangement with ropes for grabbing. Since you’ve just sailed a thousand miles to get here, they reckon you can cope with this.

By the way, if you should want to know how to get back onto the ferry with six dozen bottles of beer, just let me know.

Meanwhile, that track on Polarsteps:

And some of those sunsets…

Enough sunsets – Ed.

The Aries never had a name.

I did try to call my windvane self-steering “Arnold” for a while, but somehow that didn’t stick. Instead, I called the rat that joined me in Santa Marta “Arnold”. It seemed entirely appropriate. Mind you, he never answered to it, and then I electrocuted him anyway – which made me wonder why I bothered to give him a name in the first place.

But names for self-steering gears are traditional. After all, anything that relieves you of the tedium of sitting at the helm staring at the compass for hours on end is bound to acquire a personality – if only out of gratitude.

The Raymarine Evolution tillerpilot, which brought us home from the Grand Banks to the Isle of Man (and finally packed up four hours out of Falmouth), was a good friend and shipmate whom I called “Eric”. I imagined him standing at the rail with his arms folded, staring out to sea, a sour expression on his face because I was late in reefing.

But the Aries remained “the Aries”.

And then it broke.

Actually, I broke it, we have now established, backing out of the slipway at Varadero in Aruba. It’s just that it kept on working until the servo-paddle hit something (ice?) 300 miles southeast of Newfoundland.

I intended to get it fixed. I sent it to Lean Nelis, who manufactures and repairs Aries vane gears in Amsterdam. But DHL didn’t tell me I needed to describe it as a “temporal import”, so the Dutch customs demanded duty and when it wasn’t paid, they sent it back.

To the Isle of Man.

I was in Ireland.

Don’t ask. It was a nightmare – partly because Lean went off sailing for six weeks (why shouldn’t he?)

Long story short, I cut my losses and bought a Hydrovane.

What a revelation! So much easier to use. So much less clutter in the cockpit – and you can have a Watt&Sea hydrogenator because there’s no servo-paddle to clobber it (or get knocked off by any passing debris).

I was looking at this latest addition, all brand new and impossibly tall, and the name came to me like a flash of inspiration: “Hawkins”.

Hawkins the Hydrovane.

This is Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. Only now he’s grown up – 17 or 18 at least. He’s done his RYA competent crew, a big strong lad with curly brown hair blowing in the wind, standing up there in a T-shirt in all weathers, volunteering to stand my watch if I want to get my head down (or finish When Harry Met Sally on the iPad).

A bit of me feels bad for having abandoned the Aries fraternity – I had one on Largo in the 1980s. It’s a bit like changing religion – or worse, moving to a new anchor.

Getting rid of the remaining bits of the Aries hasn’t been so easy. I did give three vanes, a bag of spares, and some other bits to a Dutchman in Guernsey, but his version wasn’t the Lift-Up. Somebody in Queensland is having the con-rod assembly for £50, which he described as “very generous”. I just want to get shot of it all, yet it seems like sacrilege to throw it in the marina skip.

So, if you’re looking for a base plate and the transom fastenings, or the tiller clamp – even half a metre of stainless steel chain, let me know…

Hawkins, the Hydrovane

The Aries: (just “The Aries”)

383 miles. Six Days, No engine. No self-steering. Two calls from the Coastguard: “Do you require assistance?”

No.

I came to Galway because it wasn’t Killybegs. I had been in Killybegs for a month for what we might call the “Major Works”, and there really isn’t much to the place apart from the boatyard.

Galway, on the other hand, is a favourite – full of music and gastro pubs. The fish and chip shop serves oysters…

Also, it was as far as I got in an attempt to sail to Cobh in County Cork to meet with the family for a weekend’s walking. The autopilot had packed up again – this time terminally. I ordered a new tiller drive and went to Cobh on the bus.

The other reason for being in Galway was that the engine was overheating (again). This has been the bane of my life for the last five years – you may remember the trouble in the Isle of Man. Now I couldn’t run it for even one minute. They had to tow me in.

But, yes, we had a lovely time rambling over the southeast coast, getting just a little bit lost and finding wonderful restaurants in unexpected places. Now it was time to move on. Pat Ryan Engineering had tried for six days to send someone to look at my engine, but clearly it just wasn’t going to happen, no matter how much Pat promised he would “absolutely, most definitely” try to get someone to me tomorrow. I went to the Harbour office to pay the bill. The lock gate would be open until 1541.

I’d love to know what I was doing at 1541. Certainly, I was very busy because, still with no engine, I proposed to put the little Remigo electric outboard on its new bracket on the back and go whizzing out with that. I checked the time. High water was 1400, and the one thing I know about Galway is that the lock opens for two hours each side of High Water – in other words, until 1600.

Except on this particular day, it was going to be 1541, wasn’t it? They’d told me so.

Sure enough, the little Remigo pulled me backwards out of the berth, spun me round (once I worked out that I couldn’t rely on the flow of water over the boat’s rudder and instead had to lean over the back and steer the motor itself.)

Eventually, we got out and into the main channel, where you can see out into the bay. Except, this time the view was blocked by the lock gates – the closed lock gates.

I tried again at 0200. I’d got the hang of the Remigo by this time, and we went humming down the channel to the (open) lock at 1.9kts (and only at half power).

Then it stopped. Since I had no idea why, I did the only thing I could think of and unfurled the headsail. It didn’t help. There wasn’t a breath of wind, but it did give me the time to realise I’d been fiddling absent-mindedly with the outboard’s remote control and turned it off.

Once we got out, the new drive unit for the autopilot packed up.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair. As the display pointed out, the real problem was “low power”. I’ve been chasing this for months and spent a fortune on electronics engineers, but that didn’t stop me having to rely on the rather Heath-Robinson sheet-to-tiller arrangement that’s been steering the boat since The Scillies.

As it happens, I’m rather pleased with it: I’ve discovered that it also works downwind (as it’s supposed to, according to the book). It’s just that you’re better off without the headsail, downwind. This might explain why, as I write this, we’re doing only 1.8kts and it will take 26 hours to get to the waypoint off the Dingle peninsular. I sent an email to the Ocean Cruising Club saying I wasn’t going to make dinner on Saturday night.

Day One

Off the Dingle Peninsular.

It really is remarkable how far you can go if you don’t stop and have all the time in the world.  It appears I have now sailed 65 miles. Admittedly, that is in thirty-three hours, but I am now down at the bottom with only 13 miles to go to the waypoint off Tearaght Island.

It has to be said that the apparent wind is 0.0kts. I say “apparent” because the plotter shows us doing 0.71kts in the right direction. So, we will get there.

It’s a shame because I could have left on Monday night when the wind was still blowing. But if I had done that, I would have missed what I understood to be Pat Ryan’s “absolutely cast-iron promise” of an engineer coming out on Tuesday.

Now I’ve had a chance to think about this a bit more logically and realise that I’ve left messages with half a dozen marine diesel specialists in both Falmouth and Torquay, and only one has got back to me (and they’re in Dartmouth). Instead, I rang Rab, the friendly – but equally unreliable – Scotsman in the Isle of Man and had a frank discussion.

Years ago, I had been told that trying to get the heat exchanger off the engine would probably damage both beyond repair. Also, I looked up the previous owners’ maintenance log and found that the Nanni’s first service was back in May 2005. So, it is a full 20 years old. Also, don’t forget the boat has been in commission year-round for the past nine. Maybe this is just anno domini. Anyway, I’ve now ordered a new Vetus 27HP to be installed along with the Hydrovane self-steering and Watt&Sea hydrogenator.

This has all made a big dent in the savings. Another thing: I can’t stay on the boat while the work is done. This means  I shall have to find a cheap B&B – but it seems there’s no such thing on Guernsey. It’s a hotel at £160 a night or a tent (I did investigate campsites, but didn’t find one. Just as well, I hate camping, and by the time I bought enough stuff to make myself comfortable, I could probably stay in a hotel.)

And, I could get on and finish the second edit of The Voyage #3 (these things should be done quickly – ideally in one, intensive session. But it’s never happened…)

Meanwhile, the speed has dropped again. For long periods, the plotter records “0.0kts”. These are just the conditions I hoped would test the Remigo, but it’s cloudy and I don’t want to use electricity for charging – not if it means I won’t be able to make tea.

*

Well, here’s a fine kettle of fish. It’s half past one in the morning and I’m totally becalmed 2.7 miles from an exposed rock called Great Foze Rock (I remembered that because I’ve just entered it as a waypoint on the plotter – not that I ever intend to go there) or Inishtearaght Island, which 1.8 miles away and big enough to have a lighthouse. This is good, because when I woke up to the half-hour alarm, I was 1.5 miles from Great Foze Rock.

Four hours later, I was still floating about in more or less the same place with no hope of any real wind for at least another 18 hours. The predicament puts me in mind of a competitor in the Jester Challenge who was in a similar situation with engine trouble near the Scillies. Of course, they have much stronger tides there. He ended up calling out the Lifeboat.

I won’t need to do that. I still have almost a full charge in the Remigo – and, of course, in extremis, I could run the engine until it explodes. It’s going to be thrown away anyway.

In the meantime, I have tacked and tacked again. This may not sound like much, but remember, I have the storm jib sheet-to-tiller self-steering set up, which means that the headsail has to be furled to get round it, then the jib itself has to be switched from one bow cleat to the other. Next, in the cockpit, I have to pull the sheet out of two blocks (one single and one double) and re-reeve it on the other side – and finally, I mustn’t forget to set up the shock cord to the tiller as a counterweight.

I say “finally”, but it is not final at all: the next ten minutes are filled with tweaking to find the exact opposing tensions on the sheet and the shock cord to steer a course.

Admittedly, I have now added a second double block on the starboard side and another single on the tiller so that I don’t have to pull one sheet out and feed in the other every time (you can never have enough blocks).

In the end, the wind was so light that I ended up hand steering – and the tide still swept us ever closer to the rocks.

When the distance to the lighthouse was down to 1.2 miles, I started the engine. It ran for just over a minute before the temperature got to 62°C, and I turned it off. At least now I know its limits. By 4.30, I had given up any pretence of trying to make headway and ran off to the northwest – at least I was getting away from the lighthouse. As I write this, the clearance is 2.9 miles thanks to the tide (I just looked at the windspeed indicator and it said “0.0kts”.)

When would the tide would turn? I looked for the answer in my current copy of Reeds (current in my case meaning 2021). It told me “three-and-a-half hours ago”. Where did that come from? Anyway, I was just making my third honey sandwich – the apricot jam ran out with the first – when I heard the wind charger starting up, and now we’re 3.3 miles away from the lighthouse, doing 3.1 knots – not entirely in the right direction, but at least away from the damned lighthouse. We’re even heeling. I might be able to go back to bed.

Day Two

Off Valentia

A much better day. At one point, 17 knots of wind, and we’ve been storming along in the right direction. The “string-and-a-prayer” self-steering needs at least ten knots. I got so fed up with it that I tried the autopilot again, just in case all it needed was a rest. As usual, it worked for a minute or two and then announced “low power” and went to sleep.

I didn’t immediately disconnect it because the boat seemed to be managing all right. Then I realised it had stopped with the helm adjusted perfectly so that we just kept sailing along bang on course, so I carried on like that for four hours, eventually substituting shock cord lashings because I thought there might be a strain on the drive unit. Why I never tried this before, I have no idea. It’s much simpler. I left the storm jib lying all over the foredeck. It might fall in the water, but it couldn’t get away. In fact, it blew itself up against the spinnaker boom on the lee side and lay there like a Labrador with its back to a radiator.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about this. Writing to Boatworks in Guernsey about the new engine, I added a request for an electronics engineer to my email, but what they’re going to do, I have no idea – after all, it works when you test the voltages. It’s only when you use it for a while that it packs up.

When in doubt, I ring Dave Jones, the one-man MarineTech company in Wales who installed the thing – and much else, besides. He seems to think I’m a bit of a hero, so he’s always up for a phone call. I asked him if he had installed a fuse anywhere that might be a weak connection. He didn’t think so, but chatting about it, we decided the switch panel is probably as old as the boat, and so, very likely a weak point. Certainly, it would be worth replacing those two circuit breakers. Better still, a new panel altogether –  better than that even, a total re-wire of the boat. I asked how much he would quote if he was doing it: £3,000…

By pure chance, I enlarged the Navionics screen of the route to The Bull off Dursey Island and was surprised to see The Skelligs in the way. I hadn’t noticed them at all, which would never do because (1) they are hard and rocky and (2) they occupy a soft spot in my heart because last time I was here, I took two pictures a minute apart at sunset and they made perfect covers for The Good Stuff Book One and The Good Stuff Book Two.

I was going to give them a similarly wide berth this time, but it would have meant tacking, and that is a bit of a palaver with the storm jib to move and whatnot, so instead, I went between them – it’s not much more than half a mile, and a perfect opportunity to play with my new Steiner binoculars (a present to myself before Rab told me I needed a new engine).

Great Skellig – or Skellig Michael – is home to an early Christian monastery, and a rather odd one at that. While monks tend to go for a hard life, those who headed for the Skelligs liked their solitude on steroids. Their tiny stone hovels are there to see today. In fact, they’re so extraordinary that they starred in the Star Wars films, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. You can take a Star Wars tour, landing next to the little white hut in the picture and climbing up those precipitous stone steps.

Anyway, it’s cocktail hour. We’re doing five knots in the right direction over a smooth sea, and Tamsin brought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire when she flew in to Cork. Of course, being a liquid, she couldn’t take the rest of it back with her, so I’ve got half a bottle of gin aboard.

Gin is unusual aboard Samsara, because I can’t make ice, and you mustn’t drink gin without ice (all right, if you were in the Navy in the 1950s, you would have ordered pink gin from the mess steward).  Anyway, I’ve got a pack of those little cans of tonic and the fridge makes them passably cold – the slice of lime too. I think I might just have one with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I bought James, the Booker prize-winner which is about an escaped slave who buddies up with Huckleberry Finn, so then thought it made sense to do some preparatory reading. Maybe this will be one Booker prize-winner I actually enjoy.

Day 3

Well, we’re getting there. I woke up to find we had lost the Starlink signal as we set off on the long haul across the Celtic Sea to the Scillies. Actually, it’s only about 150 miles, but a long haul because I can expect calms or light headwinds from tomorrow onwards. Meanwhile, we’re doing a steady three knots over a calm sea, heading to the west of the course so as to be on the right side of the wind shift when it comes (don’t you just love the Windy app?)

Today is Saturday, and the Ocean Cruising Club dinner starts with a welcome drink on the terrace overlooking Falmouth Harbour at seven o’clock. Which I will miss. It’s a damn shame. But on closer inspection, it wasn’t just the engineer not turning up, or whether the lock gate opened two hours each side of high water or one hour nineteen minutes. There was also a small miscalculation in measuring the distance between Galway and Falmouth. Apparently it’s 383 miles, not 300…

So, all of this meant that I had allowed myself only two-and-a-half days to cover all that distance down the west coast of Ireland, across the Celtic Sea, from the Scillies to Land’s End and finally round The Lizard and up to Falmouth. Even at my record of 140 miles over 24 hours in the Gulf Stream, I couldn’t have done it. Anne, the OCC Port Officer, is going to see if she can get me a refund – at least on my half bottle of the wine allowance. It galls me that I’ll miss the port.

One of the last messages to come in before the signal died was Tamsin asking if I had ever been to Zell am See. She’s planning next year’s skiing holiday, and everyone says they’d like to go earlier than Easter, which we’ve been tied to by school holidays, even after all the children left school because Tamsin was working at East Suffolk College. Now she has a new job, she can take her holiday whenever she likes.

But I won’t be back from my South Atlantic Circuit by mid-March – not if Hugo comes to join me in the Canaries, and he can’t do that until sometime in November.

And now the sun’s come out. We should be making some decent electricity. I didn’t mention that on the first two evenings of this trip, I felt obliged to have a cold dinner while trying to preserve the batteries above 50%. I don’t really need to since converting to Lithium, but I don’t want to risk running them flat and losing the lights and the AIS.

By the time I get to Guernsey, I will have completed 1,100 miles without self-steering. By that I mean without a wind vane self-steering gear or an autopilot. I like to think that makes me something of an expert.

Of course, I will tip my hat to Andrew Evans who taught me how to do it, and give a plug to his book Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics for Singlehanded Sailing (Third Edition). The truth is that once you know the basics, you’re only at base camp. The rest is on-the-job learning – and what you learn is very likely only applicable to the boat you learn it on.

I can sit on the lee berth and write this undisturbed because, I have finally got Samsara sailing herself.

The trouble is that there are so many factors that go to make up the perfect balance. For instance, now she doesn’t like it with the jib tacked down to the starboard bow cleat – but apparently it’s all right tied to the tensioning nut on the anchor windlass. Although this is closer to the centre line, it is also a bit further forward.

Here are some other adjustments that make all the difference.

1. The height of the tack above the deck.
2. Whether the sheet is led inside or outside the spinnaker pole.
3. Tensioning of the headsail.
4. Tensioning of the mainsail.
5. Position of the car on the mainsheet track
6. One or two shock cords pulling the tiller to leeward.
7. Tension of the shock cords.
8. Tension of the sheet on the tiller (honestly, two clicks of the winch can mean a difference of 10°.)
9. There is also the option of setting the storm jib on a spinnaker pole ahead of the forestay. This involves a whole different set of adjustments all of its own – and, I would disagree with Mr Evans and say that on Samsara at least, it’s best to dispense with the headsail when running – it wouldn’t do much good anyway, being blanketed by the main.
10. And finally, everything depends on whether or not I’ve just made a cup of tea and settled down with Tom Sawyer – because that is sure to upset the apple cart.

Apparently, somebody called Tony Skidmore got it to work and sailed 17,000 miles in a 24-footer. It’s not a record I plan to challenge.

My father could be a bit of a show-off at times. I remember one occasion: We were all sitting around the table and Father undertook to shake the tomato sauce – you will remember that in those days it came in a conical glass bottle and, when less than half full, had to be shaken down to the neck before the sauce would come out. Father shook with a flourish. Above his head. With vigour.

This would have been fine. We would all have been impressed – if the top had been screwed on securely. It wasn’t – and the result was tomato sauce all over the ceiling, all over the walls, the carpet…

All over Father, come to that.

And us.

I have just managed something like the same effect, although on a smaller scale, with the hoi sin sauce all over the chart table, the Kindle, me…

Day 4

The Celtic Sea

I have hard-boiled the last two eggs. This was an admission of failure. I set out with five, which I thought would be ample – in fact, I only boiled three of them for the fridge, reasoning that I might arrive in Falmouth at night and need them fried with Tomatoes, Marmite and toast for breakfast. In fact, I shall count myself fortunate if I don’t have at least one egg-less breakfast before I get there.

If you’re interested, I eat them with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce in one hand, adding more with every bite. The secret is to aim it at the yolk where it soaks in. If you hit the white, it just runs off all over your fingers. Did you know that in Central America, they try to copy it and call it Salsa Inglesa? It’s not the same.

I definitely need a Watt&Sea. We’ve been sailing into 15kts apparent wind with the wind charger whirring away all night, but when I got up, the batteries were still only at 42%. Now that I’ve boiled the last eggs and made a cup of tea, they’re down to 38%. I’ve angled the two solar panels on the guardrails – the “wings” – to face the sun, but it still may be cold dinner tonight. Certainly, it will be a beer instead of a cup of tea for lunch.

And now I’m wishing I had switched Starlink to “Global” mode. It’s crazy. It would have made sense if I decided I didn’t need it and switched it to “Pause”. Instead, I’m still paying for unlimited data within ten miles of land, when after all this time, I’m still 50 miles from land.

No sooner had I written that, than the phone went “ping” and, for a magic moment, I thought I had a connection, but it was only the calendar reminding me it’s time for the OCC raft-up – and I’m 80 miles away (or 200 with the wind as it is.)

Also, it would be really handy to know whether I should tack. The last forecast I had showed calms all over The Scillies by now, but I’m still doing very nicely into 12kts apparent.

Very nicely, but in the wrong direction.

Out of nowhere, a big French yacht. I wouldn’t have known he was there but for a call on the VHF. Before I answered, I checked the plotter, and there he was, just crossing my stern, I didn’t even register the name. Why hadn’t I heard an alarm? I didn’t even have any music playing. Still, there was nothing for it but to answer: “Station calling Samsara. Say again.”

In good but heavily-accented English, he said he had crossed my stern two minutes ago and noticed there was something wrong with my staysail.

I took great delight in telling him: “My windvane is in Amsterdam and my autopilot is broken, so I am steering with my storm jib sheet lashed to the tiller. It works very well, but it looks a little odd…”

I could tell he was impressed. It was just as well I was on starboard tack and had the right of way. Otherwise, he might think I hadn’t been looking…

There is hope: It’s eight o’clock on Sunday evening, and I was planning on getting to the waypoint to tack round to the west of the Scillies before starting dinner. Now I’m not so sure. The wind has veered a little. Maybe I should beat down the inshore passage. It’s only 12 miles and easy if you get the tide with you… which I might manage. If not, it just takes longer, but I could steer for that long (didn’t I manage five hours or something in that gale of the Northwest coast of Ireland?)

The great advantage of this tactic is that it gets me into mobile phone range by about six o’clock tomorrow morning – which means a forecast (OK, so it’s a bit late for a forecast. By then, I’ll be committed to the inshore passage).

Also, it means I can start dinner now.

Day 5

20 miles north of St Ives

If we keep going, we’ll end up in Bristol. Surely I must be able to tack for the inshore passage round Land’s End by now, but I kept waiting for daylight and of course, it’s the end of August, and dawn is coming up later and later. So, when I did finally put about, we could lay the course easily without me having to steer. Indeed, the 60° off the wind which is what the sheet-and-a-prayer system seems to prefer, actually puts us ashore in St Ives Bay. That might be the tide which turns with us in two hours and might just sweep us all the way down to Gwennap Head.

Well, that didn’t end well. In fact, over the next 36 hours, so much was happening that I didn’t get to write a word about it as it was happening. When I finally arrived at the top of the inshore channel, everything seemed to be going swimmingly – but of course, that was only because I had the tide with me. Once it was going the other way at a couple of knots, it was a different story. The Navionics track reminded me of that awful beat back to Mindelo in The Voyage #2. But then I was under threat of arrest and incarceration in a Cape Verdean prison.

This time, I had the option of stopping – and that seemed like a brilliant idea. I could anchor somewhere and wait for the next favourable tide (about 2100, it seemed). I could have dinner… a bit of a kip without worrying about the boat tacking herself. Whitesand Bay looked ideal. But suddenly the good progress came to an end and I fetched up in some place called The Crown, a grim indentation of sheer cliffs with strange ancient buildings on the top – towers and lookout posts, long since deserted… or so I thought…

I heaved the anchor over. I had planned in 20 metres. In fact, when I checked, it was 23. So, I had 90 metres of chain down there. It’s amazing that the sound of an anchor chain grinding its way across rock can be transmitted to the surface loudly enough to drown out Dr Hook while the skipper is frying onions.

It was a morose meal. For one thing, I wasn’t frying onions, I was just overheating the other saucepan because I had got my hobs mixed up (I do this all the time since converting to electricity and getting a twin hob induction cooker.)

Then I tried to get some sleep while aware that the anchor was dragging very slowly over the rock.

The trouble with rock is that not only does it not, some of the time, allow the anchor to get a hold, but there is always the chance that the anchor might get a very good hold like, for instance, being stuck under a rock where no amount of pulling will get it free. What was I to do then? Cut free the bitter end and buy a new anchor and chain (and the very expensive, top-top-of-the-range swivel)? Buoy it with a fender and offer a reward to some enterprising fisherman with a hydraulic winch?

Meanwhile, there was nothing I could do and, at about half past eight, I gave up on the idea of sleep and prepared to set off again. I turned off the anchor light and switched to the masthead tricolour to show I was “under way”. Even if I wasn’t yet.

Clearly, I wasn’t. About ten metres of chain came back aboard (agonisingly slowly) and then stopped.

Of course: I had no engine, nothing to put any amps into the lead/acid engine start/windlass battery while I was drawing 1000watts grinding in the chain. To give me credit (I need all the credit I can get), I had thought of this and had the little 7-amp charger plugged in, drawing from the Lithium bank. Still, you can’t expect a 7amp charger to keep up with 1000W… all right, I never did understand Ohm’s law…

So, there I was with 80-metres of chain out – not forgetting the20kg anchor on the end of it – around 130kg all told…

OK, so I tried pulling it by hand.

It nearly pulled me in, and I lost a couple of metres during the learning curve.

What you do in this situation is use the powerful cockpit sheet winches. I tied a long 10mm line to the chain hook, led it through the staysail fairlead and onto the winch.

And started grinding.

By the time I was out of breath, the hook was back at the fairlead – half the length of the boat… about five metres…

Here is the routine for pulling up an anchor using a sheet winch.

• Once the hook is back at the fairlead, go up to the foredeck and get a rolling hitch onto the chain and take the strain on one of the foredeck cleats.
• Then you can go back to the cockpit and cast off the winch.
• Next, go back to the foredeck and feed half the chain on deck down into the chain locker (it doesn’t want to cooperate in this, and a good bit of jiggling ensues.)
• Pull the chain hook forward to attach it again as far forward as possible.
• Take up the slack on the sheet winch
• Cast off the rolling hitch.
• You have now regained your breath and are able to start grinding again.

Congratulations, you have just pulled up five metres of chain. Only 75 to go…

I got into a rhythm after a while – added little tweaks, like leaving enough chain on deck to get dragged back to the fairlead. I thought I was doing quite well. Then someone shone a very bright light at me.

It came from the top of the cliffs, presumably from one of those ancient structures that seemed to be not so deserted after all. Obviously, somebody couldn’t understand why a vessel showing running lights wasn’t moving. I nipped down and switched them off. Turned on the anchor light instead (after all, I was still very clearly anchored). The light went out. I returned to my routine.

Then I noticed the phone ringing. I well remember the first time I heard a phone ring on a boat, and how peculiar it seemed. When I started sailing, people went off on boats to get away from the telephone – doctors in particular. It still seems an intrusion. I ignored it.

I ignored it when it rang again. Eventually, I looked at the screen. This was Tamsin calling. She was used to me not picking up if I was busy. I would see she had called. I would ring back – but this level of persistence spoke of some urgency. Immediately, I thought of the children and the kind of disasters parents imagine at times like this. I stabbed the green button: “Look, I’m a bit busy. Can I call you back?”

“This is urgent,” said Tamsin. She had received a call from the Coastguard. Did she know where I was? Did I need assistance? Would I call 999 and report my emergency…

I called 999, but they were only interested in Fire, Police or Ambulance. They didn’t appear to have heard of the Coastguard. I tried VHF and got through immediately. I assured Falmouth Coastguard that I did not need assistance: “I’ve got no engine, and so I have no power to the windlass, and I’m having to get the anchor up by hand. Also, being singlehanded and with no self-steering, it’s proving a fairly difficult passage, but I should be underway again soon.’

And yes, I would be sure to inform them when I was… and, when I arrived in Falmouth. Thank you. Goodnight.

It still took me two-and-three-quarter hours of traipsing back and forth to the foredeck, grinding on the winch, feeding the chain down through the hole before the 15metre marker crawled over the bow roller.

Interestingly, the depth recorder was showing 23metres at the time. How do you explain that?

One way and another, I must be nearly there. Maybe the battery had recovered a bit. They do that if you leave them. I was just about to try the windlass again, when I remembered the trip switch. If the motor finds it just too much like hard work and things are in danger of overheating, the trip switch with call a halt to proceedings. Sure enough, that was the problem. I turned it back on and the last 15 metres came aboard in a rush – and with the anchor on the end, I was pleased to see. Not stuck under a rock.

Now why didn’t I think of that two and three quarter hours earlier. Put it down to Not Thinking. But then, if you’ve read my autobiography Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier, you’ll know all about that.

Of course, the tide was turning again. You can’t have everything.

Day 6

It took forever to get round Land’s End and across Mount’s Bay, and then came The Mother of All tangles. By this time, I had lost patience with the “String-and-a-Prayer” system and had reverted to two shock cord lashings on the tiller, pulling opposite ways (which often led to pointing in opposite ways), but I had left the storm jib up, flapping ineffectually.

For sheets, I was using the long, long 8mm lines that normally sheet the Super Zero. They are, in fact 17 metres long, almost twice the length of the boat, so I reasoned they were hardly likely to pull all their length out of the four blocks on each side.

Which is why I did not put stopper knots on the ends.

Which is why, when they did pull out and went flying away in a squall just past the Lizard, they tied themselves into the biggest knot I have ever seen. Really, I wish I had taken a picture of it. If you imagine two 17 metres lines convulsed into a haphazard bundle that would fit conveniently inside the galley gash bucket…

No, that doesn’t do it: Try thinking of what happens when the cat gets into Auntie Nelly’s knitting basket. Now translate that into Liros 8mm polyester braid…

Well, it was a big tangle. Of course, what I should have done was drop the storm jib on top of it, bundle the whole lot down the forehatch and worry about it when I got in. I could have taken a picture of it, too.

But no, that would be too sensible (see the book recommendation above). Instead, I settled down on the foredeck to untangle it straight away. It’s easy enough. All you need are two ends (or in this case, four), a modicum of patience – and all the time in the world. It took me 40 minutes, which I thought wasn’t bad.

Unfortunately, during this 40 minutes, the tide turned again – and began dragging me back to the west… right into the race off the Lizard.

I was vaguely aware of the white water, and how it was getting closer. But it didn’t look that bad and I hadn’t got wet yet…

It was when I was emerging from the cabin, fully suited-up in my brand new Irish Guy Cotten oilskins that I heard the Coastguard calling me once more.

For Heaven’s sake, what now?

A member of the public, a fellow yachtsman, was sitting in a café on the cliffs and had been watching me for some time. He was concerned, so he had called the Coastguard – and, of course, the Coastguard are duty-bound to investigate all reports, no matter that they be made over cream tea…

I assured the man, once again, that I did not need assistance – adding that I would appreciate if he would pass on my thanks to the concerned fellow-yachtsman.

And so, finally, eventually, I anchored under sail in Falmouth Harbour off Trefussis Point where there’s no danger of hitting anyone else since the Harbour Master started charging for anchoring absolutely anywhere in his jurisdiction, so you might as well go into the Haven anchorage and leave your dinghy on the dock instead of climbing up ladders – and then coming back to find the tide’s gone out and you’ve got a walk through the mud.

So, I got everything stowed away, had a cup of tea and popped the Remigo electric outboard onto the stern. It had got us out of Galway – but that was in a flat calm. How would it fare with a 10kt headwind?

Just fine, as it turned out. We whirred the half-mile over to the other side at a steady two knots on half power, turned round (on a sixpence again, thanks to the ability to lean over the back and steer it). Just remember that while the Remigo will keep you going once you have some momentum, it doesn’t have much in the way of stopping power. Still, no harm done and dinner at Balti Currie (it’s a tradition).

Galway nightlife

..and by day

The RemigoOne electric outboard – moving a 5,500 kg Rival 32 at 1.9kts (on half-power!)

The sheet-to-tiller (string-and-a-prayer)self-steering

…and in downwind mode.

…meanwhile, in the cockpit.

Or steering by shock cord…

Great Skellig

..star of Star Wars.

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

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

Depart Crosshaven 1100hrs Sunday July 6^th 2025

It’s Ireland. It’s different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Mooney’s will let me stay aboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the inevitable mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 2 Tuesday 8^th July. Off Bantry Bay

The wind has fallen light.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day 3 Wednesday July 9^th.  Off Tralee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leaves all of Friday for getting the work organised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Four.

Donegal Bay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thereby hangs a sorry, sorry tale.

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

*

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

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

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

Without stopping.

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

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

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

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

We settled to ordering Tartiflette and Fonduta Valdostana,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we did get a blow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, no instructions for the dive system.

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind, tomorrow is another day in Paradise…

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my books: https://oldmansailing.com/books

There I was in the Swimming Pool. It’s not really a swimming pool – just the anchorage to the south of Banedup Island in the San Blas of Panama.

The Swimming Pool is so completely surrounded by coral reefs and islands covered in coconut palms that there is hardly a ripple. Also, there’s a nice little bar too, with swings instead of seats and absolutely the best Piña Coladas. You can take them to drink at a table under a thatched sunshade knee-deep in the water.

But I couldn’t stay there – not on the 100^th anniversary of the Guna revolution.

The Guna are the indigenous people of this region. They’ve been here for 500 years – and they continue to live just as they always have. You might find a village on an island so crowded that there’s hardly room to walk between the wattle houses – or maybe just one family in one hut on an island you can walk round in 15 minutes.

They live by fishing and collecting coconuts and selling intricately-sewn “Molas” to the cruising community who sail through here on their way to the Panama Canal.

They are delightful, smiling people who paddle their dugout canoes as they have for centuries – fishermen who come alongside in remote anchorages offering the Caribbean Spiny Lobster (like the European one but with no claws). At the more populated islands, whole families will come out selling molas and Guna courtesy flags. The flag takes some getting used to – it’s a Swastika, but they had it first when it was still respectable.

And they do love a party. Everybody agreed: The 100^th anniversary of the revolution was going to be the party of the century. After hundreds of years of  oppression – first by the Spanish Inquisition, then by the Panamanian government, they finally won their independence in 1925.

So, where to go for for the anniversary, that was the question.

The San Blas Cruisers WhatsApp group was divided between Carti Island and Tigre Island. I plumped for Carti because there was talk of fermented sugar cane. I spent a day sailing down there with the wind behind me, only to find no other boats and the island so crowded I couldn’t imagine there was space for even the tiniest re-enactment – let alone the sort of Bacchanalia you might expect from sugar cane hooch. I stayed a day, walked around the place until I realised I had wished “Buenas Dias” three times to the same old man sitting outside his door. I moved on.

I had to sail upwind and then downwind (to avoid a bunch of other islands apparently not in the party mood) but Tigre was the place to be – there must have been 20 boats anchored there – particularly families with young children (how many school trips feature re-enactments of beheadings and dismemberments?)

The celebrations went on for five days, with dancing and fireworks, kite-flying, more re-enactments (the Panamanian soldiers had wooden guns – the Guna, wooden machetes and wooden axes).

But the big event was the Congresso. This was an extended version of the regular gathering in the village hall when the business of the village is discussed and the elders sit on hammocks and chant the songs and histories of the people – which in turn get translated from the ancient tongue by the not-quite-so-old elders. As you might imagine, this can go on a bit, so certain villagers are delegated to shriek periodically to keep everyone awake (Did I say this was an enlightened civilization?)

Something else that is really good about Tigre is how clean and tidy they keep the island. While some others are ankle-deep in plastic, here every house has its wastebin – a wastebin cleverly constructed out of plastic bottles. They even use plastic bottles as shades for the solar-powered streetlamps.

I would have stayed longer but without warning (and ten days late) UPS found my new dinghy and delivered it to the duty-free zone in Colón. Suddenly getting back to the marina at Linton Bay seemed more important than a hundred years of Guna independence.

It’s taking two days because the wind died on the first afternoon and I found myself an island with a protective reef to anchor behind for the night. It was only the next day as the wind began to fill in from the north and I thought about pushing on that I realised the island was not deserted after all. There were two huts – one at each end. I like to think there were two families, each minding their own business, living their simple, charmed lives of lobsters and coconuts, sewing molas and singing.

I wonder whether just on this one special day, they got together for a party?

A typical island in the San Blas (there are said to be 365 of them)

Recycled recycling

Molas

The Congresso

Re-enactment

The Swimming Pool