The Swan Inn at Noss Mayo on the River Yealm – the perfect place to dry out for a scrub.

Like most of the world’s great discoveries, the perfect solution to the antifouling problem turned up when I was looking for something else. I could tell you what it is right now – in a few words, as it happens.

But that would be a waste of a good story – and it is a good story…

When I bought Samsara, I had a lot of money left over and thoroughly enjoyed spending it – there was the fancy feathering propellor, the new solar panel, upgraded electrics – all the things that usually spend years on the wish list.

And there was Coppercoat antifouling. If you look it up in the search box, you will see I have written about this elsewhere. It has not been a great success (which is the fault of my hull,  not the stuff itself). Anyway, I’m stuck with it now. I’m certainly not going to pay all over again to have it taken off. Instead, a couple of times a year, I lean the boat up against a wall somewhere and spend three hours underneath with a bucket of water and a packet of scouring pads cleaning off the weed  while green slime drips in my eye.

It’s not something I look forward to. Never mind, at least I can choose a nice place to do it. The River Yealm is a nice place, and if you’ve got a little boat, you can dry out in front of the Swan Inn which does a very nice pint when you’ve finished.

Except that I couldn’t get started. Do you think I could find the scouring pads? I knew exactly where I kept them (stuffed down behind the seacock under the galley sink). But this time, they weren’t there.

That was how I found myself pedalling all the way up to the bridge and then down the other side of the creek to the Co-Op at Newton Ferrers. You would think a Co-Op would have a pack of scouring pads. Not in Newton Ferrers.

Instead, they suggested the garage at Yealmpton. Seeing how far that was, I phoned ahead. They didn’t have any either.

Having gone to all this trouble, I asked in the craft shop (what do you think they said) and the deli…

Eventually, since I had tried everywhere else, I tried the chemist. Oddly enough, they had some of those half-sponge things. Apparently, they used them for cleaning the chemistry set. They were only £1, so I bought them – not that I thought they would be much good for cleaning the bottom of a boat.

By now I was so obsessed by the whole nonsense that I explained it to the man behind the counter.

It was a moment as significant as Moses getting to the top of the mountain and saying: “Actually, I was looking for some tablets of stone. I don’t suppose you’ve got any…”

Because then the man behind the counter divulged the best-kept secret in the history of boat maintenance. He did it with all the sense of occasion that he would employ in taking a tube of hemorrhoid ointment off the shelf and sliding it across the counter.

Here is what he said: “Why don’t you do what the fishermen do?”

• Why, what do the fishermen do?

And here it is. This is what the fishermen do: They put half a bottle of bleach in half a bucket of water and get a garden spray – the sort of thing you use for greenfly – and they spray the bottom of the boat with bleach. That kills the weed. Then, over the next few weeks, it falls off. Fishermen don’t want to pay for expensive antifouling. Bleach is cheap.

I didn’t believe it. I mean, who would? If it was that simple, why didn’t everyone know about it?

All the same, if there was a chance of avoiding three hours scrabbling around under the boat with the green slime…

I didn’t have a garden spray in the cockpit locker, so I used the brush that goes with the dustpan. It turned out to be ideal for slapping on the bleach. Instead of three hours with the scouring pad , it took me just 30 minutes – although I suppose, I should also count the other two-and-a-half hours watching it dry from the pub terrace.

Well, of course, it didn’t work. A week later, there was still a fringe of weed a couple of inches long all around the waterline. I’d gone to all that trouble for nothing. Serves me right for being so gullible. I expect the chemist dined out on that one for the rest of the summer.

But wait. It is now fully two months later. I am in the Canary Islands. The water is warm. I have been swimming off the boat and, as you do, I dived underneath to see what was going on down there.

Would you believe it? There was not a scrap of weed to be found anywhere – not the fine green beard that grows on the waterline. Not the barnacles around the prop and the rudder – just a light dusting of algae that came off in clouds when I brushed it with my hand.

Of course, I do have to quieten my conscience about adding half a bottle of bleach to the world’s oceans a couple of times a year.

On the other hand, my saucepans have never been so clean.

Sunset over the anchorage at Playa Blanca – and it’s still 26°C in the cabin

Every year up until now, October has been the turning point. Time to start making my way home for Christmas – three months holed up in the Walton Backwaters with the seals and the geese, slowly poisoning myself with carbon monoxide as the charcoal heater leaked more and more smoke into the cabin.

Out would come the long underwear, the winter-weight sleeping bag – until, sometime around January, I would put the winter one inside the summer one … and still not take off the long underwear.

Maybe you don’t wish to know this. Anyway, this October, I am anchored off Playa Blanca in Lanzarote. The temperature in the cabin is 30°C, but with the breeze blowing through the open hatches, it’s cooler than the cockpit. Anyway, you can’t read a laptop screen in that kind of sunlight. Also, there’s enough sun and wind to keep the cheap little fridge going 24hours a day. Before lunch, I had a beer that was every bit as cold as it would have been ashore in the Sailors’ Bar.

Of course, things didn’t start out like this. My first attempt at leaving Falmouth lasted just 90 minutes. That was how long it took to realise that all the freshwater had leaked into the bilges where the automatic pump dumped it with the utmost efficiency straight over the side.

I considered carrying on, reasoning that I had enough water in bottles, beer in cans and the liquid content of tinned food to keep me going for three weeks. All the same, it wasn’t sensible. Also, it was easy to go back.

Anyway, one of the gas burners had packed up – not a disaster, but if I needed a gas engineer, Falmouth was the place to find one, not the Bay of Biscay.

As it happened, no sooner had I dropped the sails than the engine overheated. Abandoning this trip was turning out to be an excellent decision. So I sailed to within ten metres of the Falmouth Haven Marina pontoon and then motored for the ten seconds it took to reach the berth – and still the alarm went off.

Falmouth Marine Services came out that very afternoon and left me overnight with a heat exchanger full of neat descaler – whenever I had used this powerful acid, I diluted it as per the instructions. But then instructions are written for wimps. The next morning, the water flowed where it should.

The gas problem turned out to be a simple matter too. I managed to fix that myself (oh, alright then, the Facebook community told me what to do).

The water was another matter. Over the next three days, I made five excursions to the out-of-town trading estate at Penryn, home of Screwfix and B&Q. According to Google Maps, it is 2.5 miles on a bicycle. But I wasn’t on a bicycle. Half the time, I was pushing the bicycle uphill. The trip took 50 minutes (only 20 coming back, though).

Each time I made it, panting, to the top of the hill, I thought this would be the last. But, after the new components didn’t fit or weren’t compatible with the old ones or just dripped for no apparent reason, I had to cheer myself up by going out for dinner – something that should be a reward for getting it right.

By the time I had two water tanks that didn’t leak separated by an isolation valve that didn’t leak either, I was so pleased with myself, I went out to dinner again – to celebrate.

Finally, on the Friday (I’ve given up being superstitious), I completed the new Brexit paperwork a second time and headed out past Black Rock feeling that, at last, the adventure had begun.

I was a bit premature with this. After four days, here is a list of what didn’t work:

1. The heat exchanger: Although it had been fine after its dose of descaler, evidently another little crab had crawled out of its home in a corner of the water jacket to block another tiny channel.
2. The water-driven generator. Despite its new bearings, this refused to turn until the boat was doing five knots and, even then, didn’t charge.

Of course, that might have had something to do with…

3. The solar panel failed to charge the battery. This goes through a regulator which also deals with the water-driven generator. The panel was certainly generating electricity – yet, even when I connected it to the wind generator’s completely separate regulator, nothing reached the batteries.

The worst of it was that all of these things exacerbated each other to produce an electrical crisis: My sole means of charging was now the wind generator which, of course, is least efficient when sailing downwind – which is what I hoped to be doing for the next thousand miles.

I went round the boat switching things off. I didn’t need the VHF – there would be no fishing boats out here. That was 0.2 amps. The instruments could go too – another 0.2 amps. I could always switch them on when I needed to look at them.

I discovered that the autopilot on standby still consumed 0.1amps – what a waste! I could turn off the AIS and the GPS because I was the best part of 200 miles from land, and so pilotage was hardly a concern – and as for being run over by a supertanker; well, I could keep a lookout – I should be doing that anyway.

I did switch on the masthead tricolour when it got really dark. This uses 0.2amps. Was it really necessary? I was well out of the shipping lanes since I was heading for an arbitrary point in the ocean 150 miles west of Finisterre, and I couldn’t think why anyone else would want to go there. Besides, a ship ought to pick me up on radar. The tricolour would be just to confirm I was a sailing boat – and I have noticed that ships in the open sea avoid me by at least a mile.

The switch panel looked very strange with only one clothes peg on it.

You may think that clothes pegs on a switch panel would look odd anyway, but I use them to show me what I need to turn off sometime.

At this point, I felt some sympathy for Tom Hanks and his crew in Apollo 13 when they’re trying to get back to earth on battery power that wouldn’t run a coffee percolator.

Anyway, I only needed to spend one night stumping around the boat saying: “Failure is Not an Option”. After breakfast, when the neat descaler had had its 24 hours in the heat exchanger, I started the engine and delighted in the sight of water pouring out of the exhaust. Also, now the batteries had drained all night, the solar panel found the oomph to charge them – so I wouldn’t need the water-driven gizmo anyway.

And finally, after a week of what I had calculated to be a two-week passage, the Portuguese Trades kicked in. These are supposed to blow north to south down the Iberian peninsular. Sometimes they do. This time, they did.

It was my first experience of trade wind sailing – albeit without the flying fish (although I did pass a turtle going the wrong way). For seven days, I ran under twin headsails, the main furled on the boom. In all that time, I only touched the sheets once – and that was to reef. A couple of times a day, the course would need adjusting but apart from that, Samsara ploughed along in a welter of foam reeling off, on one occasion, my best day’s run ever – 155miles distance made good.

I read, I ate, I listened to my 47hours of Spotify playlist – which, thanks to the fancy new phone, would actually play for 47 hours instead of stopping inexplicably in the middle of every third chorus.

And every day, it got warmer. By the time I had reached the latitude of Casablanca, I had stopped worrying. I was starting to enjoy myself.

***Track the old man at: https://www.noforeignland.com/boat/5260073720872960

The one thing that really frightens me – more than the prospect of hitting the container; worse than having the Orcas take a bit out of my rudder, more pressing than being attacked by pirates – is lightning.

You can avoid Gibraltar and the Red Sea – and as for finding that container some dark night … well, if you’re going to worry about that, you’d better not go offshore at all.

But to be in the middle of an ocean with bolts of lightning cracking and spitting and smacking the sea all around you – is to discover in the most powerful terms just how small and insignificant you really are.

And it scares the living daylights out of me.

Consequently, rather like the obsessive who immerses himself in conspiracy theories, I have been spending hours trawling the internet, trying to find a way of avoiding this.

The research has not been encouraging. For instance, did you know that in Florida, the insurance industry calculates the risk of a sailing boat being struck by lightning is 3.3 in 1,000?

Never mind, I have decided Florida is off-limits too.

Meanwhile, it was time to look into lightning protection devices – particularly those wire brush affairs people stick on the tops of their masts. They cost around £200, and nobody seems to know whether they work – certainly, the manufacturers make no such claims, preferring instead to waffle about the “point discharge principle”.

I did find one company that would fit their gadget “at least two metres” above the highest point of my vessel and then connect it to a web of copper bonded to the bottom – all of which was going to cost more than the boat.

Another search came up with the statistic that I am more likely to be struck by lightning on a golf course. Still, if there is nothing I can do to prevent it, maybe I had better get ready for when it does happen.

Apart from the little matter of blowing out all the seacocks (I bought a large foam plug),  the main concern seemed to be melted electrics: Once the batteries and the alternator are gone, it doesn’t much matter what’s happened to the VHF, AIS, GPS  and so on.

However, boats today are rattling with portable devices. It seems like boasting, but aboard Samsara, I have two old mobile phones still loaded with Navionics charts, quite apart from the new one with the super camera – and that’s without counting the tablet.

All of which could survive in a Faraday Cage.

You need to know about this. This is wonderful. Apparently, in between inventing electrolysis and electro-magnetism, Michael Faraday discovered that a container made from wire mesh or metal plates will shield its contents from electromagnetic forces.

At the first sign of a thunderstorm, I could put all my portable devices inside a Faraday cage. Then, even if everything else had melted, I would still have rechargeable lights, my hand-held vhf and – most importantly – four devices running Navionics.

OK, so the purists will say I should have paper charts and a sextant. But consider the cost of paper charts for a cruising area that is getting bigger every year. Then there are the tables to stow – and the book on how to work out the sights, since it is nearly forty years since I last had to do it.

Compare that to five portable devices giving my position to three decimal places and enough charts to take me a quarter of the way round the world.

Of course, none of them will be any good once the batteries are flat, so the next item on the emergency list had to be a folding solar panel.

As for the cage itself, traditionally this is the oven but mine has a glass door, so doesn’t count. I looked up “Faraday Cage” on Amazon and discovered that they sell them (of course they do), but it is only big enough for car keys. Apparently up-to-date car thieves scan the electronic codes through your front door and then take the BMW off the drive.

So mine is a steel biscuit tin; big enough for everything – and maybe, even a packet of digestives to go with the cup of tea when all the fuss is over.

Of course, there may be another world war and somebody might shoot down all the GPS satellites, so I have a book called “Emergency Navigation” tucked away behind “Caribbean Pssagemaking”. This is full of advice about floating an iron rod in a bowl of water to find North and how to make a shadow board to measure solar time. I haven’t opened it.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever open it – because, right at the end of all this research – almost as an after-thought, I discovered there is, after all, a proven protection against lightning strikes.

It’s true. No yacht, anywhere in the world, has ever been struck by lightning if she had a Lego man stuck to the top of the mast.

Really, it has never happened. It must be true because I read it on the internet.

Ergo, as Mr Faraday would have said, if I were to stick a Lego man on the top of my mast, I would be on the right side of the statistics.

I went to some trouble over this. Whilst I could find no definitive answer to the question of which figure was best (a fireman, perhaps or a superhero?) I opted for a pirate with the boat’s name on his jumper.

Also, I did make sure he was facing to starboard – that is most important. How foolish would it be to become a statistic because the Lego man was looking the wrong way?

The mini-break is a great idea: A three-day weekend: All the excitement and relaxation of a holiday without having to give up any holiday time. Bridget Jones lived for the mini-break.

You can have a mini-voyage too. Anyone who wants the experience of an ocean crossing without upsetting the boss or disappointing the family has only to think small.

I was in the mood for thinking small after getting falling-down drunk over the seafood platter in Tobermory (and actually falling down).

The resulting dislocated shoulder meant that the following morning, instead of scooting south behind the spinnaker, I was having trouble lifting the kettle.

In fact, it was a full two days before the arm showed any signs of being useful again – and by that time, the wind had gone.

This was serious. I had to be back home for a family party. Naturally, I could jump on a train from just about anywhere – but that gets expensive if you start from an island in the Hebrides (even with a Senior Railcard).

Day after day, the Windy app showed the route south in a sort of wishy-washy blue with tiny arrows wandering aimlessly. I’d be fine if I were to set off for the Azores. There was plenty of wind down the West coast of Ireland. But I couldn’t start the grand voyage yet – I’d overstay my 90 days’ EU allowance (thank you, Brexit).

On the other hand, looking at the daily charts, there was something to be said for the outside route: As long as I made for a point 100 miles off Erris Head, I should carry the wind all the way – even if it did add an extra 200 miles to the route for Falmouth. I could still be there in a week.

I made an expedition to the Co-op for fresh supplies, topped up with a can of water and left after lunch.

By dusk, I had managed 15miles.

That’s the way it is with voyages – if you have 700 miles to go, there’s no point in starting the engine on day one.

Conversely, there is no point in spending the night becalmed off the coast, staying up to look for fishing boats and ferries, when you can anchor just about anywhere in the Hebrides and sleep through the night.

And sure enough, by mid-morning the next day, the wind had filled in, the spinnaker grabbed it with both hands, and we were off on a course which, if continued for long enough, would indeed take us all the way to the Café Sport and a litre of ice-cold Sagres.

But I’ll be doing that in September. For now, I was heading for a little chequered flag on the screen marking a completely arbitrary patch of Atlantic, which – according to the Windy app – was the nearest point to the coast still boasting a “green” wind. Green is between ten and twenty knots. Green is what you want – green from the right direction is even better.

And it was. Of course, I lost the twice-daily updates as soon as the mobile signal dropped out southwest of Tiree. But isn’t that all part of a voyage? If you get Windy updates, you also get emails and Facebook loons and bank statements.

Instead, I sat in the cockpit and tried to take photographs whales. There was a small pod of them – no more than six or eight. They had the same blunt heads as pilot whales, but these swam independently instead of bunching together. Also, they were bigger – getting on for ten metres in length – and they kept their distance, not like the dolphins who swim around the bow and criss-cross under the boat. I decided I need a better phone – one with a decent telephoto lens.

I started reading Robin Knox-Johnston’s  A World Of My Own about his 1968 first non-stop circumnavigation – anyone’s first non-stop circumnavigation. It must have been more than 40 years since I last read it, and I was surprised to find that, out of the shipping lanes, he would sleep for as long as he pleased. On one occasion, he was worried that he had slept for 18 hours and missed Christmas Day!

This was interesting because, although the shoulder seemed to be healing, it ached terribly when I lay still. I knew this to be normal because, as always when something goes wrong, I had doubled the daily helping of my food supplement. When I did the same after spraining my ankle skiing, the pain woke me in the middle of the night. I presumed this must have been the soft tissue repairing itself because, in the morning, everything was back to normal.

However, on that occasion, I didn’t have an alarm waking me every half-hour. What with that and the throbbing shoulder keeping me awake for the first 29 minutes, the look-out system wasn’t working.

What would Knox-Johnston do? As I sailed farther and farther out to sea, the coastal traffic disappeared. Would it really matter if I slept for longer? The way I looked saw it, if the boat needed attention, she would wake me soon enough.

And so the sun shone, the spinnaker floated in its element, swaying gently from side to side, and the bow wave roared as the miles ticked down to that chequered flag while I slept the sleep of the afflicted (if not the just).

I am always disappointed to arrive and find that there’s no flag at the waypoint – just a limitless expanse of sea. Nevertheless, I doused the sail and turned Samsara’s head to Valentia on a brisk reach. Every three hours, the coastguard broadcast confirmed this wise decision: As predicted, there was still no wind in the Irish Sea.

There was no wind off the south of Ireland either. Look on the bright side: These were just the conditions I needed for sea-trialling the new auxiliary.

I think I have written before about my frustration without outboard motors. Back in the 1980s, when I had my previous Rival, Largo, I carried a little Suzuki 2-stroke and swung it around in one hand. To see me then, you would think it weighed no more than a loaf of French bread for a picnic.

When I bought Samsara, I set out to find another little Suzuki 2-stroke – not easy since they don’t make them anymore because of the emissions. But I didn’t want a 4-stroke. You can’t swing one of those about in one hand – partly because they weigh half as much again but mostly because if you happen to tip it upside down, all the oil leaks into the cylinder.

But the 2-storke was fine. Until it stopped working. There was always a good reason for this – as a variety of mechanics explained to me while proffering their credit card machines.

What I needed was an outboard that I could lift in one hand and which would never go wrong. What I needed was an electric outboard. No maintenance, no fuel, no emissions, no noise…

For £150 I bought what the Chinese manufacturer called a “trolling motor”. Admittedly, it didn’t go as fast as its petrol cousin, but it would push me in the little dinghy against a 20kt headwind and a harbour chop, and it would run for an hour or more if I reminded myself I wasn’t in a hurry and was sparing with top gear.

Better still, it would push Samsara in a calm – well, I presumed it would. Think about it: You can move a 10metre boat with one hand in calm water. Surely an electric outboard should get her going at half a knot.

All I had to do was find a way of fixing the motor to the boat.

This was my solution:

Yes, Heath Robinson would be proud of me. The old outboard bracket has been cannibalised with the addition of a couple of fenders to make a tiny catamaran which, secured alongside, tows the mothership rather in the manner of the yard workboat bringing her in for a haul-out.

It worked. The prototype needed a bit of adjusting for lateral torsion but it succeeded in pushing Samsara through a flat calm at more than half a knot.

For about half an hour. I think it was the jump leads that killed the idea: Getting the battery power from under the navigator’s seat up into the cockpit, over the side and down to the waterline called for 3metre jump leads. Even with the 80W solar panel on the stern gantry and the 150W collapsible array spread out on the foredeck, the voltage dropped like a barometer in hurricane season.

Still, it got me past one of the Skerries, and eventually, as always happens, the wind returned to blow us across the Celtic Sea to Falmouth.

Directly.

That is to say; the wind was directly astern. By the time it reached Force 5, we were bowling down the Atlantic rollers goose-winged and reefed with everything strapped down tight.

Except for me.

I had to keep popping up every 20 minutes now we were back in amongst the traffic. Also, I had the aching shoulder to keep me awake.

I solved this by zipping myself tightly into my sleeping bag like a baby tucked snugly into its crib.

It’s not something I had thought about very much, but I did read somewhere that people who sleep on the streets should not zip up their sleeping bags because, if a bunch of drunks decide to have some fun with them, they will need to get out of bed and onto their feet fast.

It’s the same with people sleeping on boats with the wind behind them.

My first sensation was that I was no longer on the downhill side. The boat must have gybed. The mainsail, now backed but pinned to windward by its preventer, caused me to slide slowly but inexorably off the bunk.

It was while I was working out where my hands had got to, which of them could be moved and where the zip of the sleeping bag was hiding, that I fell directly onto the hard edge of the windward berth (now the leeward berth), hitting it – as you might have guessed – with my injured shoulder.

It was while I was lying on the floor whimpering and still trussed up like an eBay parcel that the thought came to me that nobody else was going to rescue the boat. It was just as well I was up to here with Knox-Johnston.

Yet, this was exactly what singlehanded voyaging is all about: The communing with the wilderness, the teaspoonful of philosophy, the frustrations and occasional interludes of euphoria – and, of course, the pain and the moments of sheer terror.

In eight and a half days, I experienced it all – and all without the carrots finding the time to go black.

After mentioning that I need to get the anchor chain galvanised, I was deluged with gloomy warnings that nobody does it any more. Chain is so cheap nowadays that it’s considered as disposable as electric kettles.

But I’m very attached to my chain. I expect it’s as old as the boat – so, 48 years – and, at a chunky 10mm, is far too heavy for a boat of less than 10metres.

On the other hand, it does match the 20kg Rocna and I sleep very well knowing I have all that down there on the bottom. Also, I remember the story of how Alfred and Rosemarie Alecio lost Iron Horse in the Indian Ocean.

I have tried to look up the reference. Nevertheless, I am so sure I remember every detail that I will repeat it here (and stand to be corrected). They had an old boat too – and, although they had no reason to doubt the steel fitting which passed through the wooden mast and to hold the shrouds (no I don’t know what it’s called), they reasoned that since it had been there for twenty or thirty years, it must need replacing. They had a new one made in the Far East.

It failed. It just broke and they lost the mast – and in due course, their beloved boat which was also their home. They were picked up by a tanker off Madagascar.

I have great faith in my chain – more than I would in a new one. The saving is by-the-bye.

The place to go used to be the Wedge Group in Birmingham. They had a machine that kept it moving in the tank so that no spots got missed. However, they have moved premises and didn’t feel it economic to set up the chain facility again.

One by one. I called all the other UK galvanisers on Google. One by one,  they called back and said they had stopped doing anchor chain, suggesting I buy a new one.

Except for Highland Metals in Elgin. They said, “of course”. Apparently, they hang the chain on wires and jiggle it from time to time. You don’t get a perfect result, but most people consider it good enough.

Elgin is only 15 minutes from Lossiemouth where there is a “man with a van”. So I shall put in there on the way to the Shetlands this year. Turn-around is two weeks, apparently, so a circuit of the Moray Firth and a few days in Edinburgh seems like a plan.