After a frustrating day in the Doldrums, it was amusing to take a close look at the Polarsteps track. You can do this by clicking on “2025” at https://www.polarsteps.com/JohnPassmore/15574045-2025 and then enlarging the map and going back up the track until you find yesterday’s tangle.

Because that’s what it looks like – 28 miles of actual progress in 20 hours, sailing in every direction on the compass, and some that aren’t. The finished track resembles not so much a grown-up voyage as the Marauder’s Map of Dumbledore’s study the night before the trip to Tom Riddle’s Cave: pacing… pacing…endlessly pacing…

But, I’m pleased to say I woke up this morning to hear the wind charger humming and the ensign flying with a confidence that spoke of: “Come on, guys. Let’s go places!”

So, we’re now heading south at four knots.

If you’re wondering where I’m going all the way down here – well, it would be tempting fate to reveal that too soon, but you will find all the details – and the reason behind it in the new book: The Voyage #3: Panama to the Isle of Man (available at all good Amazon stores in Kindle and Paperback).

Best of all, the first review is in – always an exciting moment. Someone calling himself “Capt Craig” writes: “Passmore was a professional writer, and it shows. His writing is eloquent, entertaining and engaging. His focus on the voyage rather than the destination is fairly unique and makes for a very different travelogue.”

He gave it five stars (why wouldn’t he?)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpl150ze4o

The BBC reports that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get treatment on the NHS for adult ADHD. Whether you believe this mental condition is a narcissistic affectation or a genuine handicap for 5% of the world’s population, there is no hiding the overwhelming demand for professional help.

I was lucky; I contacted the ADHD Foundation back in 2017 – I doubt they are so free with their consultations now. They told me mine was in the 1% of the most severe cases (finally, I had excelled at something!)

But I did not go to a psychiatrist. There was no way I would take psychotic drugs in the hope of a “cure”.

Instead, I came to terms with the condition. Indeed, I learned to embrace it – which, I would suggest, is a much better solution.

The story is told in my book Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier: A wonderful life with ADHD.

I had to rewrite it six times before I learned to appreciate the central character. Now people tell me it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Certainly, I am intensely proud of it.

If it helps anyone else, then that is a bonus.

https://amzn.eu/d/bbM5CS3

The stopover in Torquay was supposed to be a relaxing few days of light provisioning interspersed with a couple of good meals in company.

Instead, it started off with a godawful thrash round to Dartmouth, motorsailing into a Force6 to get the autopilot fixed. No fewer than three electronics engineers had fiddled with this, but it took Devon Marine Electronics to sort it (but only if you can get here today!)

The other major item on the maintenance list would have to wait until the Canaries. You might consider this to deserve a bit more importance than I was giving it (the alternator had packed up) but I had a new one wedged in the spares locker under the starboard berth and I reckoned that I wouldn’t need to charge the batteries – not now I have a Watt&Sea  hydrogenerator as well as 900W of solar panels and a Rutland 1200 wind charger. The boat is a floating power station.

And I certainly shouldn’t be needing the autopilot anyway, not now I’ve got a Hydrovane.

The Hydrovane, I must tell you, is quite the best thing I’ve added in years – possibly forever (and here I’m going to upset the Aries fraternity).

Yes, I was an Aries afficionado for decades – ever since I got my first Lift-Up gear in 1987. Samsara came with the same model – which made it almost 40 years old. It’s sad end off the Grand Banks and at the hands of DHL and Dutch customs, I have described elsewhere. This was the first real test of the Hydrovane.

In no time at all, the “crew that never sleeps, never needs feeding, is never seasick” was upgraded to “shipmate”, so fondly did I think of it. The difference has been simply astonishing. For the first time, the cockpit is not divided by tiller lines. In fact, in anything but the heaviest weather, I have taken to lifting the tiller vertically to get it out of the way – after all, I’m no longer using the ship’s main rudder – that just trails along behind the keel, hardly moving.

Nor are there “reins” xxx for adjusting the course to get caught up in the winches – the new “snaffle lines” being routed neatly round the guardrails.

I have made a list of nine distinct advantages of the Hydrovane over the Aries and only one on the other account (the Aries is easier to lift out of the water).

All of which meant the device acquired human characteristics and deserved a name. So, he has become Hawkins as in Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, now a strapping 19-year-old standing at the helm in a T-shirt in all weathers…

He was going to have his first real test as we passed Finisterre. I like to do this at a range of at least 100 because of the Orcas. This time, there was another reason. Readers in the UK might not have heard of her, but Storm Gabrielle was a major event of late September in the Atlantic. She started as a tropical storm east of Bermuda xxx and thoroughly roughed-up the Azores before arriving off the Iberian peninsula with predicted winds up 60kts.

Last time I came this way, I would have been steamrollered completely. Now, with Starlink and the Windy app, I could lay my plans. These involved edging over to the west so that I would just slide above her in easterly Force7s and then turn south as they backed to the north.

And so it worked out – at least to begin with…

I laid out my 80m of 14mm multiplait in a bight astern, I returned the tiller to its proper place and set up Hawkins with some weather helm from the new telescopic tube which fits into the Autohelm socket – and off we went. Like a rocket.

With no main and a headsail that got smaller and smaller as the windspeed climbed higher and higher, the boat was ploughing along at seven and eight knots in a welter of spray with me battened down inside, shining a torch through the new companionway window to see the vane wandering lazily this way and that as if it was a run down to Osborne Bay for lunch.

The trouble was, I had miscalculated Gabrielle’s progress just slightly. Instead of skirting the “red wind” and staying in the sub-30kt orange zone, I was a bit startled to discover we had skipped right through the red bit into the blue part. The “blue part” is 40-50kts.

And so it was – at least in the gusts. I measured one gust at 49kts (you can see it on the YouTube video below) and don’t forget we were doing 8kts downwind at the time which, even if you allow for keeping the waves 30° on the quarter, must still amount to 56kts of true wind.

And that, if you were wondering, works out at just over the border into “Severe Storm Force11” country.

The worst of it was that this was a gust, and if I set up the weather helm to cope with it, once the blast returned to its usual 40kts, the ship’s rudder would try and push the stern into the waves.

The answer, it came to me, as I peered through the window at the mayhem outside, was to replace the telescopic rod with the autopilot and set it to steer by the wind.

The autopilot (the newly replaced and repaired) autopilot is one of the “intelligent” breed that can assess weather helm. It proved itself on the last Atlantic crossing, so well that it earned its own personality (“Eric” is in his 50’s with an earring and many a yarn about crewing Shamrock for Sir Thomas Lipton in the 1860s xxx).

Anyway, the two of them talked the same language – the language of the wind – and it was fascinating to see how they worked together, neither one of them raising a sweat.

We rode like that for 48 hours clocking up day’s runs of 119 and 112 miles. It would have been more but by the end of the second day, the headsail was down to the merest scrap of reinforced Vectran around the clew. Really, I reckon there was no more than a metre between sheet and stay, which means the actual area can have been no more than half a square metre – and we were still surfing at up to ten knots.

I daresay the Rival Owners Association will be relieved to hear this. It was only afterwards that I discovered someone had raised concerns that my GPS plot on one of the marine traffic apps had suddenly stopped. Well, it would have done, wouldn’t it? They only work when you’re in mobile phone range, are within reach of a ship with the upgraded equipment, or you’ve paid an annual subscription to tell people where you are.

If you want to know where I am, it’s easy (and free). Just search for me on Polarsteps. Not only do you get a position every five minutes, but a commentary and pictures as well. Just be aware that when I’m offshore, it only gets synchronized when I’m online.

After that, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. Gabrielle wandered off to trouble xxx cities in Portugal and left behind a lovely northerly airflow to carry me the rest of the way.

I spent a good deal of it luxuriating in the previously out-of-bounds aft corner of the cockpit with a couple of kapok cushions, a cold beer and Tom Cunliffe’s splendid venture into the thriller market, his novel Hurricane Force.

Apparently, he wrote it years ago and left it sitting in a drawer. Roz found it and said: “You know, this is rather good.”

Clearly, the hallmark of something extra special.

… and here’s that video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7ivDfaweTgY

It was half an hour before the boat was due to be hauled out. The new engine was due to arrive tomorrow. It was all going to be very expensive.

And then a woman I had never met before knocked on the coachroof: “I’ve been reading your blog. Your overheating trouble: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow? That’s what it was for us – just thought I’d mention it…”

I wish I knew her name. I’d like to thank her.

As readers who have been paying attention will know, Samsara’s venerable Nanni 21hp has been running hotter and hotter over the past several years. By the time I arrived in the Isle of Man, I had to sail into the harbour and then get a tow into the marina.

A succession of engineers pored over it at various times. All of them sucked their teeth and shook their heads. They examined the impeller; they suspected the heat exchanger. Nothing they did made the slightest difference.

I tried muriatic acid. I tried citric acid. I kidded myself there was a slight improvement.

I waited six days for the charmingly encouraging Pat Ryan to get one of his lads to have a look. In the end, I phoned Rab McCluskey in Douglas, who had been so keen on the heat exchanger. We came to the mutual conclusion that it was a 20-year-old engine. Maybe the time had come… it had given good service… every machine has a finite life…

The new one was going to cost just over £5,000.

I winced, but what could I do? I emptied the savings account.

Nobody had mentioned the exhaust elbow. Actually, I had never heard of the exhaust elbow.

And yet I heard about it a second time half an hour later. Scott Nelson, the Boatworks yard manager, hadn’t even got Samsara onto the slip when he said: “Before you go to all the trouble and expense of a new engine, I just wondered: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow?”

So we did. Bob the engineer took it off. It really is an elbow – a little right-angled piece of rubber hose, except it seemed to have lost its flexibility – hardly surprising when you considered that it was completely choked with carbon.

Honestly, you couldn’t see daylight through it. The tiny hole in the picture is only there because Scott poked it with a pencil.

“Can you cancel the new engine?” he said.

Actually, that was remarkably easy. It wasn’t about to arrive tomorrow. It was still in Holland.

Now I’m in Torquay, looking at YouTube videos about how to change your alternator and with a new mantra to remember: Diesel engines need to be run hard from time to time…

The exhaust elbow (or if it has another name, I don’t know it). The little hole wasn’t there when we first took it off.

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.

You know you’re in a different league when the shipwright suggests making the new hatch cover out of aluminium.

But I did say that Mooney Boats in Killybegs on the northwest coast of Ireland caters primarily for fishing boats. Big fishing boats. There’s a Killybegs boat working the waters of Chile at the moment.

I came here because it was the only yard I could find that would let me stay on board while the boat was out of the water – and also had the trades available for the long list of repairs and improvements I had been working on in the two years since the last refit at TLC Marine in Conwy.

And what a good choice it turned out to be.

Take a look, for instance, at the bracket for the electric Remigo outboard. I have written elsewhere about my idea for whirring silently through calms as the big 400W solar panel recharges the internal battery almost as fast as it discharges. We shall see how well this works, but it was getting the angles right that worried me.

I had drawn pages of diagrams and even tried to measure the slant of the dinghy transom with the chart table protractor. At Mooney’s they just set up a laser on a tripod.

And note the forklift truck – so much easier than setting up staging to work from. In fact, I didn’t see a ladder in the whole place – let alone the usual boatyard variety with hooks for scratching topsides. Instead, they gave me a steel staircase for climbing aboard (delivered by forklift, of course).

What about freeing the pulpit nuts? They’d been there since the boat was built, and over the ensuing 52 years had morphed into putrid brown blobs with no discernible flat surfaces to hold a spanner. I didn’t even notice they were off. I would have liked to have seen it, only there’s no room for more than one in the chain locker.

That’s why I had to have a new electrician. The first one, an enormous man who had clearly never been on such a small vessel before and had to squeeze through the companionway like toothpaste, pointed out (very reasonably) that if he tried to get under the chart table to disconnect the aerial for the AIS, he would probably cause more damage than I had already. The idea of him getting into the forepeak to move the windlass controller out of the damp was simply laughable.

I got to know most of them over the month I was there. They were called Sean and Seamus and Darron with and ‘o’ and Damien with an ‘e’. They treated me with amused tolerance – especially when they heard what I get up to and that I’m all on my own – and that was before they discovered how easy it was to drill all those holes through Samsara’s fibreglass hull.

But as the days went by, the list grew shorter: The great chunks of stainless steel to bolt through to backing plates for the Jordan Series Drogue; the ingenious washboard-cum-cockpit table and finding a way to stop the chart table emptying itself if the mast goes below the horizontal (like it did 400 miles north of the Canaries two years ago.)

In all, there were 94 hours of labour on the bill. But Mooney’s charge is only €55 an hour.

That’s less than £48!

I can only think I was getting some sort of pensioner’s discount. As Lee Mooney, the Managing Director, gave the OK to put me back in the water, even though the bank transfer hadn’t actually reached their account (“you have to have a little trust,” said Lee), there was certainly a lot of interest in where I was going next.

“Only to Galway.”

I didn’t want to frighten them.

The new aluminium cover for the lazarette

The washboard doubles as the cockpit table – now locked in place by pins holding it into a slot at the back of the cockpit and the pin on the tiller for the autopilot – ingenious.

The forklift, the staircase and the laser for getting the angles just right…

The chandlery is a bit startling…

…and they are just right.

Outboard stowage

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.