Clearly, I must be doing something very different.

Judging by some of the Instagram comments, I am being lumped together with the YouTube sailing channels. I had this discussion with Paul early on (it became rather heated). He, too, had the idea that, because I post on YouTube, I want to be a “YouTuber” – I want to make my fortune by encouraging people to pay for “exclusive content” and “merch” and the like.

No, no, a thousand times No. YouTube is for cute young couples wearing not many clothes (Sailing La Vagabonde), or retired fifty-somethings with a lifetime of video expertise (Sailing Fair Isle) – or just anyone willing to film every moment of their life (pick your own favourite from the hundreds out there).

I am different. I am a writer. I have been from the age of 20. It’s what I do – I would do it even if nobody read it (and you would be surprised at the amount of material that never sees the light of day).

The video channels are merely advertising for the books. The Oldmansailing Book Club on YouTube is a blatant teaser: Watch onboard video while listening to me reading an extract from one of my books. At the end of each episode, I say: “If you would like to know what happens next, we will be returning to this title in ten weeks’ time … alternatively, you can buy the book on Amazon…”

Please understand that I would still like to make my fortune – the idea of laying up in Guatemala for a month, having the whole of the interior professionally painted and varnished and the hull Awlgripped while I attend a month’s residential Spanish course is still a lifetime ambition.

But I would be paying for it out of book royalties. That’s what I know. I have no interest in becoming an internet performer. Indeed, the idea of asking people to pay to watch me setting sails or pulling up anchors – or just drinking cold beer in the sunshine fills me with revulsion. The whole Patreon thing seems like begging – or at the very least a street performer passing round the hat.

And yet people still don’t get it. A comment on Instagram yesterday said: “If you would like me to access the blog, I require 6 dollars a month. And for that price I will retweet it with endorsements in X.”

They meant it kindly, but they still misunderstood. It does not cost $6 a month to access the blog. The blog at oldmansailing.com is free – it has always been free (all the way back to 2017). What people are getting for their £6 a month is the book: Samsara Circles the World – my version of Chichester’s classic Gipsy Moth Circles the World.

I will publish mine, just as he did, when I get back to Plymouth – except, I won’t have to put myself in the hands of a traditional publisher. I will publish it myself on Amazon, keep total control and make it available instantly all over the world.

But in other ways, I am being very traditional indeed: I am doing exactly what Charles Dickens did with The Pickwick Papers. He published it first in instalments as he wrote it. With Barnaby Rudge and The Old Curiosity Shop, he cut out the middleman entirely by starting his own magazine – the modern equivalent of the oldmansailing books page where the ten titles are linked to my Amazon Associates account (effectively, making me both wholesaler and retailer.)

All of this seems to me entirely ethical. I am creating something of value. People recognise that value and are prepared to pay for it.

So please, please don’t think of me as a YouTuber or an Internet Personality.

And please don’t think I am asking anyone to pay for “content”. They are buying books.

And there is always something magical about buying a book.

Get yours here

Why don’t I wear a harness?

This is a contentious topic. I used to wear a harness – indeed, I contrived a sort of “self-rescue system” involving a line around the scuppers on both sides, which I could reach up and pull to disconnect the self-steering.

Then, when the boat rounded up into the wind and stopped, I would unclip and manhandle myself round to the stern, where I kept a folding boarding ladder. However, it should be said that Rivals have a reputation for just carrying on by themselves with no one at the helm.

Anyway, the theory was that I would climb up the ladder, dry off and count my blessings over a cup of tea with a large slug of rum in it.

However, when I became seriously old, I rather doubted that I would have the strength to do all this in the sort of conditions that caused me to fall overboard in the first place.

Of course, the real purpose of a harness is to stop you falling over at all – the tether is supposed short enough to stop you before you reach the rail. But to do that, it has to be so short it is impossible for the person on the end of it to move about at all – fine for clipping on to perform a ticklish job with both hands while standing up at the mast (in which case it’s better to lash yourself to the mast) but hopeless for a job like rigging a spinnaker pole which involves lots of moving around.

I have spent many hours thinking about this – I’m not short of time to think – and I have imagined myself falling over the side, coming to the surface, treading water and watching my boat sail away.

And I’m OK with that. I was born in the first half of the last century. A lot of people from that era are living in care homes by now – and we’ve all got to go sometime. I think I should be allowed to decide for myself how I live until that time comes, and how I go when it does.

Once this online discussion had started, we got to: “That’s all very well for you, but what about the people who will be obliged to mount a hazardous and costly search and rescue operation to look for you.

“That’s easy,” I replied. “My next of kin are under instructions to say that I do not want a search and rescue operation.”

“Ah,” responded some know-it-all, “the rescue authorities won’t take any notice of that. How do they know your next-of-kin don’t want you dead?”

Good point. I have now written to HM Coastguard as follows:

I wonder whether there is any way you can keep on file my request that no search and rescue operation should be initiated if it is suspected that I have fallen overboard from my sailing yacht.

I should explain:

I am 77 years old and, a few years ago, I decided that I would no longer wear a harness at sea. I found it cumbersome and knew that if I were to fall over, it was unlikely I would have the strength to pull myself back aboard.

Also, now that I have well over 100,000 social media followers who watch my daily videos, I am sure I would face intense pressure to give up and put myself into a care home.

Frankly, I would rather spend my last moments treading water and watching my boat sail into the sunset.

On the other hand, if I hit the proverbial container through no fault of my own, sink, and activate my EPIRB, then yes, please do come and get me.

The reason for asking this now is that I had assumed that if there should be an emergency, you would contact my next-of-kin, who are under instructions to request no search & rescue. However, someone made the point that you would still go ahead because you could not be sure that my wife didn’t want me dead!

I hope you can help in this. I hate to think of anyone getting involved in an expensive and, possibly hazardous, operation to rescue anyone who would prove so ungrateful.

I have now received the following (inconclusive) reply:

I have replied:

_____________________

It’s one of the perennial questions.

Well, I do have a fishing line – with a huge, murderous-looking hook. It was on the boat when I bought her, and I’ve never opened it.

Then I became a vegetarian. The reasons were complicated – mostly too much time on the internet.

This started years ago when Tamsin asked me to carve the boiled ham at Christmas. Have you ever smelled boiled him? It’s disgusting. It smells of rotting flesh. Why is that, when it tastes so good?

Maybe there was a good reason so many religions ban pork. I looked it up. It turns out the pig is a true omnivore. It will eat absolutely anything – its own excrement, the rotting flesh of other pigs…

I stopped eating pork.

And that was the start. Next, I fell into the argument that there is enough food-production capacity in the world to feed the whole world – if only we stopped growing grains to feed to animals so we could eat the animals instead.

I watched Cowspiracy on Netflix and stopped eating meat altogether.

Then, I watched Seaspiracy and stopped eating fish (I’m very easily swayed).

For three or four years I ate neither meat nor fish. I ate a lot of kidney beans and nuts. I would have an egg occasionally with a full English (vegetarian) breakfast, but I didn’t buy eggs when I went shopping. I didn’t even buy butter or cheese.

And I thought I must be tremendously healthy.

But I did wonder where my muscles had gone.

This became a particular concern when it came to the outboard: When I had my first Rival 32, Largo back in the 1980s, she came with a Suzuki 2hp two-stroke outboard. I used to pick up this thing in one hand, swing it over the rail, climb down into the dinghy and clamp it to the transom – all the while holding it in the one hand and thinking nothing of it.

When I bought Samsara, I bought another little Suzuki, just the same.

So why couldn’t I pick it up in one hand, swing it over the rail, etc?

Come to that, when I looked at photographs of myself with my shirt off, why did I see this little old man with tiny stick-thin arms? What had happened to those powerful shoulders I remembered from 40 years ago?

I brooded and ate more kidney beans.

And then, on the family skiing holiday in Austria, picking the invariably unimaginative vegetarian option (Austrians – like Germans, Hungarians and so on, don’t really “get” vegetarianism), I found myself backed into a corner by the family insisting that “as you get older, you need more protein”.

It came to a head when the youngest, Hugo, joined me in the Caribbean and (under instructions?) conducted an inventory of my daily protein intake.

It was abysmal – honestly – hardly more than a third of what I should be getting; and I couldn’t see an easy or palatable solution.

So, just like that, I started eating meat. By the time I got to Barbuda and Robert de Niro’s “Nobu” beach restaurant, I allowed my grandson Ben to introduce me to wagyu steak.

So, for the voyage from Plymouth to Sydney, I have 30 tins of corned beer, 57 tins each of mackerel, sardines and herring (except there’s a shortage of sardines in Europe because of the global warming effects on the Moroccan fishing industry, so even more mackerel to make up…)

I don’t have fond memories of tinned stewed steak, but I did throw in some meatballs in tomato sauce because I think I was given them as a childhood treat – now I’ve opened one, I can’t think why.

So the obvious solution is to catch fresh fish. YouTube sailing channels are full of attractive young people wearing not many clothes posing with mahi-mahi, wahoo and tuna.

My first problem is that when I used to get becalmed in the old days (I don’t get becalmed now I have Hawkins the Hydrovane) I would lean over the side and watch the fish nibbling at the growth around the rudder – wonderfully coloured fish in the tropics: yellow and blue and lime green…

The idea of putting a hook over the side seemed uncomfortably like planning to eat my neighbours.

Then there is the practical side: If you are towing a big hook behind a boat doing five knots, any fish you are going to catch is likely to be a big fish. Once you get it into the cockpit (presuming you can get it into the cockpit), it is going to thrash about for all it’s worth. Even a full crew finds this stage a challenge. A singlehander – particularly the sensitive type who doesn’t actually want to hurt the fish in the first place – is going to find himself on the losing side.

Of course, you could argue that the thing to do is, when you first suspect you have a monster on the end of the line, just cut him loose – but then the poor thing has to spend the rest of its life with a hook in its mouth and trailing 15metres of line around behind it.

I once moored next to a fishing boat in a Scottish harbour. The fisherman had left two lines over the side. He came back as I was having breakfast in the cockpit, reeled in the lines and had two little fish. One at a time, he held them down on a slab and gutted them while they were still alive.

No, I’d rather reach for a can of sardines and comfort myself in the knowledge that the sardine had no qualms about eating crustacean larvae and baby barnacles…

When I bought Samsara, she came with two 100-litre fibreglass water tanks tucked away under the bunks. This was a huge improvement – Largo only had a single 25-litre stainless tank in the bilges (it once lasted me for 32 days).

But Samsara’s  tanks leaked around the inspection hatches – as soon as the boat heeled, you could see it pouring out.

I tried a variety of suggestions to fix them – re-seal the inspection hatches, of course – cut up one of those floppy buckets and try and glue a big patch over the top…

Eventually, I threw them into the skip at Dover Marina and installed two Plastimo flexible tanks. They were as leak-proof as the website claimed – it was just the connections that leaked. Obviously, if the tanks were going to flex, the connections would need to flex too (a bad idea with connections).

This was when I wished I had not thrown the old fiberglass ones in the skip, but instead, had sent them off to be copied in polyethylene. But I was stuck with the flexible ones for my first Atlantic circuit.

This was when I became captivated by the idea of a watermaker. Every day in Bequia a bright yellow catamaran roughly painted with the words “Water, Diesel, Laundry” would cruise around the anchorage touting for business. I needed some water, so I gave the skipper a wave.

I don’t remember quite what I paid for that water – I know it wasn’t cheap – and within a couple of days, it smelled of bad eggs.

But the experts were adamant: Samsara was too small for a watermaker.

It was months before I thought of the solution: Get rid of one of the water tanks and put the watermaker in its place. If I had a watermaker, I wouldn’t need two tanks.

The low-pressure pump still had to be in the bilges because that has to be below the level of the high pressure, but at least there was room for everything.

Well, this didn’t work out quite the way I hoped (see https://oldmansailing.com/the-watermaker) The significant problem that I had never considered was that I made such a mess of trying to measure for the new (rigid) tank, that I suggested the yard manager should take over the whole project – if he got the measurements wrong, he would have to pay for a new tank.

The upshot was that I ended up with a particularly conservative new tank – with absolutely no chance of it failing to fit. Just 55litres. Also, every time I flushed the system with freshly-made water – which you’re supposed to do after each use – I would be losing 20 litres. Watermakers are designed for boats with big fuel tanks. In the end, it was decided that I should run it every day and give it a 45-second flush every three days, using just seven litres.

The plan worked well enough – it was just that this wasn’t ideal. Besides, what happened if it broke down – and I was left with just that 55-litre capacity. I know you can catch rain – but you do need somewhere to put it…

And then I met Michael McLoughlin. Michael runs The McLoughlin Boat Company in Waterford. He builds traditional wooden boats. He also does some engineering, some shipwrighting, electronics when they’re called for. He spent a year fixing watermakers.

I gave him my list. It was a short list. He made some suggestions for additions.

One of them was: “There’s a lot of space back there behind the engine. You could get another water tank in there.”

Not just any water tank either – a 110-litre water tank. That’s twice the capacity I had before. I would be tripling my water-storage capacity. Wouldn’t that be useful on a circumnavigation! Apart from anything else, with the forecabin now used as the shed (with the dingy up there and the Brompton folding bike, not to mention 100metres of chain and a 20kg Spade anchor right on the stemhead, Samsara tends to float nose down – you can tell that by the way water in the scuppers gathers just forward of the drains.

Everything would have been fine if it weren’t for the new engine. My 18-year-old 21hp Nanni had been overheating. Michael and his sidekick, Kevin gave it a thorough going over – new heat exchanger and all (cost a fortune). When it was all over, Steve from Peachment, the UK & Ireland Nanni agents, called to ask why I was ordering all these spare parts, then didn’t wait for me to get through all the explanations before saying: “You should have called us. We would have done you a deal on a new one.”

But that was before the sea trials of the reconditioned old one. It still overheated… because all the abuse over the years had cracked the block. It was only good for scrap.

Peachment did do me a good deal – a really good deal. Conor, of Colfer Engineering, who handles Nanni distribution in Ireland, installed it free of charge. We launched (again), but this time, Michael and Kevin weren’t happy with the amount of vibration. They insisted the engine should be re-aligned now the boat was in the water. They wanted me to stay another day.

I don’t believing in staying another day – not when I can just get to the OCC party in Falmouth if I leave by six o’clock. Steve at Peachment and Conor of Colfer would have to sort it out. Steve wasn’t happy about the weight of the new water tank right over the stern gear. Meanwhile, I had a hundred miles of calm with the vibrating rattling my back teeth. I mentioned it on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube. All right, I complained on Instagram, Facebook etc.

Sure enough, every amateur naval architect came up with dire warnings about suddenly adding 110kg  to a previously buoyant section of the hull. Steve worried about distorting the hull (on a 1973 Rival, built like a brick conservatory?)

Besides, it never is going to be 110kg is it? Every time I fill it up, I’m going to be emptying out 20litres flushing the watermaker…

Also, what’s 110kg – the weight of a pair of teenagers in the cockpit…

When I got to Falmouth, Peachment arranged for Rustler Yachts to send round an engineer who confirmed that the engine was out of alignment d (and the coupling was distorted) but it won’t do any damage (except to my nerves).

I’ll see if I can get it sorted in Poole. Conor says he’ll pay.

Besides, if this sort of thing didn’t happen, wouldn’t life be dull?

The plastic 55l tank

New 110l stainless tank

Watermaker under berth

Low pressure pump in the bilges

I had better do some explaining.

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

You get my point?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing was ever the same again.

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

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

And pumped it out to everyone.

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

People loved that.

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

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

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

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

The thing about Michael is that he can see potential.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going ashore (finally). Credit: Seamus Breen on the pilot boat

“You’re not stopping in Bermuda? Or the Azores?”

It was something people had trouble processing – to sail directly from Sint Maarten in the Caribbean, directly to Ireland.

“But that’s, what? Four thousand miles?”

“About 3,500, actually. It’s what I do. I sail long voyages and write about it.”

It’s true. There are three “Voyage” books. The fourth – Torquay to Grenada, is finished, and I planned to get the final edit done at the same time as writing the fifth (Sint Maarten to Ireland).

All I had to do was sail the 3,500 miles (3,603 as it turned out, in 39 ¼ days) and sit down with the laptop every few hours and write about the minutiae of daily life on a small boat in the middle of a big ocean – the weather, the meals, the hunt for the last packet of pistachios, why I hadn’t brought enough sultanas, books, Netflix downloads expiring. Should I waste Starlink Data updating Spotify so I could learn Tequila on the clarinet… and the dreams, of course …what happened to the dreams?

It was all going rather well as Samsara skipped north with the trade wind on the beam, the sun shining, the spray flying – and stuff happening. The induction hob went on the blink. I can get 2,000 words out of the induction hob going on the blink – can I bear six weeks of cold food? No coffee; no redbush tea! How much fuel did I have for the little alcohol stove? I’d never used it at sea. Would it spill burning alcohol and burn down the boat?

Make that 3,000 words – and another 3,000 sailing back to St Martin (the French side) to buy another hob … but then fixing the broken connector halfway…

And this was just as well because, when I embarked on this life, I was only mildly concerned about how I was going to pay for it. I am a great believer in Mr Micawber’s philosophy: “Something will turn up”.

It wasn’t always like this – anyone who has read Old Man Sailing or, more particularly, my autobiography Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier will know the story.

And sure enough, something did turn up – the first book was a success “A word-of-mouth bestseller”, said Yachting Monthly.

But, like all bestsellers, sales dwindled over the years – how many people go into Waterstones today, looking for The DaVinci Code?

The answer, of course, was to write more books. Look at my old classmate Peter James – he’s written more than 50 (and sold 24million).

My output so far totals nine. I’m only just getting started, but the Horse Latitudes helped.

Every sailor knows about the Horse Latitudes. Every sailor since Columbus. This meteorological phenomenon sits between the Trade Winds and the Westerlies:  “an area of light and variable winds”. No problem for a boat like Samsara with her big, light headsail, the Super Zero, and her Hydrovane self-steering, which copes with light weather much better than the old Aries. We might only make 20 miles some days, but we do make progress.

Until we didn’t. On May 18, we came to a complete standstill. The sails hung like washing in a utility room. The wind charger didn’t stir. The only thing that moved was the ocean swell – and every jar and bottle in the galley (in a concert of chinking and clinking as the boat rolled and rolled again as if this might go on forever.)

Of course, I knew it wouldn’t. I have Starlink. I have the Windy App. I knew the wind would return in the early hours. Meanwhile, I could amuse myself with my phone. I recorded a “Welcome to the Horse Latitudes” video. How did they get their name? (Ships short of water would throw the horses over the side. Not very nice.) I uploaded it to Instagram. I could spare that much data. It was only a minute and nine seconds.

They were one minute and nine seconds that changed my life.

It was only an hour or two later that Instagram sent me a notification: 50 people had “liked” my video. That was odd. I’d never had one of those before. The children once told me I had 11,000 followers. I had never worked out where they came from. Next thing you know, I had 20,000 likes… then 50,000…

And that’s just “likes”. Would you believe these little videos have received 3.9million vierws?

Today, as I write this in Power’s Bar in Ireland’s Dunmore East, it appears that 93,200 people have taken the trouble to “follow” me – and another 19,376 on Facebook. The YouTube score is 5,660… Then there’s TikTok – a mere 2,089 (but I’ve only just learned about TikTok).

And just as I am adding up the figures (120,325), I discover what this means: Every day, I get about a hundred messages and comments from all these people (all over the world) who feel they know me. They write as if we’re in the middle of a conversation (which I suppose we are): “I’ll stand you a pint.”

“Why aren’t you wearing a harness?”,

“Put a slug of rum in that tea!”

“Why aren’t you wearing a harness?”

“If you need a lift…”

“Why aren’t you wearing a harness?”

Somebody wrote that they were coming specially to meet me.

I’m not used to this. Oh, there might be a reader who sees the “oldmansailing.com” on the sailcover and comes alongside in their dinghy when they’re on their way ashore. One even brought a book to be signed!

But this latest attention is completely outside my experience – and, frankly, it spooked me. For 36 hours, I stayed cooped up at anchor (the weather helped). Besides, I still hadn’t finished The Voyage #5. I was three days behind. When I reached the end, I found I had only 32,629 words. I need 100,000, so I can chuck out the boring bits. This one’s never going to see the light of day.

But then, does it need to? Already, book sales on Amazon have more than doubled – if this goes on, every month is going to be like Christmas. My daughter, Lottie, WhatsApped from Australia: When am I going to start selling “Merch” on the blog?

Quick, log onto UpWork and get a guy in Pakistan to design an “oldmansailing” hat. Then  I have to learn how “dropshipping” works.

I can become an Amazon Associate. Does that mean I make another 4% from dropshipping my own books?

Apparently, I am a “mid-level influencer”. But, because the videos are less than two minutes long, the “retention rate” is close to 100%. The algorithm loves this. The videos pop up in feeds from The Philippines to Paraguay.

Then an email from the USA: A developer has a contract to pre-load his “Sliides” app onto every android device sold in The States. He needs to add “content” to demonstrate it. Can he add mine?

At 45-50million new Android devices a year? Sure, why not?

I’m living in a bubble, rolling through 50° every two seconds. I must go ashore.

What happens?

The pilot boat goes past. A crewman comes out and takes a picture of me in the dinghy – posts it: “He’s arrived.”

I go for breakfast in the Bay Café: Gary and Aileesh are in the ice cream shop next door. They have a Rival in New Ross boatyard. They buy me a coffee. A man called Eddy comes by – in full cycling gear: “I’ve been following you.” Gary and Aileesh take my washing to the laundry. Later, I discovered they paid for it, too.

I still have to get up the river tomorrow. It’s 18 miles, the current runs at 2 ½ kts, and still don’t know if I can count on the engine. But Steve sends a message: “I’ll be going back to New Ross on Sunday (bright yellow Van de Stadt 30). Happy to ride shotgun.

An old friend tells me I’m famous.

I might not be used to it. But I think I can live with it.

Motoring up the river with no wind and a dodgy engine – you don’t want it to stop suddenly when you have neighbours like this. Thanks to Steve and Jason for “riding shotgun”.

Nobody is more surprised than me.

The oldmansailing Instagram account is now closing in on 90,000 followers. Across all social media platforms, the short videos I have been posting have encouraged well over 100,000 people to follow oldmansailing in one form or another.

Who would have thought…

The trouble is, I have always been rather disparaging of sailing YouTubers, particularly the young and attractive ones who never seem to wear many clothes. I’m probably jealous.

Also, isn’t there something rather odd about people who can’t pull up an anchor without getting out the GoPro and filming themselves doing it?

And now I’m one of them.

So, I had better explain how it came about: A couple of months ago, after flying from Grenada to Salzburg for the family skiing holiday, I flew back with my son Hugo for three weeks of champagne cruising around the Grenadines – champagne referring not to the wine, but the sparking spray as we thrashed up and down the islands with the trade wind on the beam and the water temperature never dropping below 29°C.

One day, I got out the GoPro and asked Hugo, “Can you show me how to use this thing?”

When he was about 13, he used to ski with an early model stuck on top of his helmet. Now he’s 23 and couldn’t believe how much technology had moved on.

Painstakingly, he taught me about “Quick Capture” and “Frame rate”. Together, we examined the 101 attachments that came with the kit (head, chest, adhesive, flexible…)

We filmed each other, the sails, the waves, my feet – that was by accident. I have promised never to do it again. But gradually, I learned.

While all this was going on – in fact, for the best part of a year – I had noticed a niggling worry about money.

When I embarked on this life back in 2017, I was not entirely sure how I was going to pay for it. I had a fair bit coming in, but also, I had a family. Indeed, at that stage, four children who were still far from independent.

However, as always, I stood with Mr Micawber: “Something will turn up.” I said. It always had.

Sure enough, the Old Man Sailing book came to the rescue. People liked it. They told their friends. Yachting Monthly called it a “Word of Mouth Bestseller” – well, it was Number One in the Amazon Sailing Books category.

But, over the years, sales declined. I suppose that’s always the way with Bestsellers. How many people today go into Waterstones for The DaVinci Code?

I wrote more books – that was the answer. My old classmate Peter James has written 38 books and sold 23million copies. That was all I needed to do.

I’ve managed nine so far.

Meanwhile, I discovered Skool.

If you haven’t come across this, it is an internet platform designed for people to turn their skill, their hobby, or just their passion into a course for other people with the same interest – and, like everything on the internet, there is the opportunity to “monetize” it. You charge for different levels of engagement.

In a blinding flash, I realised that I could transfer the blog to Skool. I could add a “paid” level for the GoPro videos. I can sit for hours and watch the sea. Surely other people would like to do that – or, more specifically, other people would pay to do that…

Painstakingly, I copied and pasted the entire nine years of this blog from WordPress to Skool – all the pictures, all the comments. It took forever. Finally, I launched it. I invited people to pay for the videos.

Nobody wanted to.

I offered a once-a-week video call (imagine that from the Southern Ocean!)

Nobody wanted to pay for that either (especially since I wasn’t actually in the Southern Ocean).

With my tail between my legs, I begged (and paid) the clever chaps at LCN.com to rescue the old site from their electronic dustbin.

And, while all this was going on, I was still playing with the GoPro, until one day, without really thinking about it, I posted a little video on Instagram.

Then, something that had never happened before: A notification. 25 people had “liked” my video. Then 50… 100.

That was on May 18^th. Today is June 13^th – not a month later, and those little videos – none of them more than two-and-a-half minutes long, most of them not much more than a minute – have racked up 4.4million views.

And that’s just Instagram. There are another 2.2million on Facebook. YouTube: 347,000. TikTok…

And the likes … thousands of likes. And comments. Fifty comments a day: “You’re an inspiration”,  “I want your life”, “I sold my boat because I thought I was too old. Now, I’m going to buy another” – and of course: “How do you sleep? ”, “Don’t  you get lonely?”

There was one from a man who noticed that around the cabin I had pictures of “beautiful women in bikinis” – Tamsin, back in the 90s.

The one that did probably more than any other to spark the algorithms was: “Where’s your harness?”

There’s nothing Instagram likes more than a post that encourages discussion (have you ever seen a fisherman in a harness?) Eventually, I made another video: “I used to wear a harness, but now I’m 77. Health & Safety doesn’t apply.” Besides, everybody had seen the photo of the steeplejacks building the Rockefeller Centre, sitting on the girder eating their lunch – well, think of me as one of them. If I fall off, it’s my own lookout.

It didn’t help. I just got deluged with people asking about those who would have to risk their lives looking for me (at considerable expense).

“Ah”, I fired back. “My next-of-kin have instructions to say I don’t want a Search & Rescue operation.”

“No good,” replied somebody who obviously had something to do with Search & Rescue. “How do they know your wife doesn’t want you dead?”

Good point. I have now written to HM Coastguard as follows:

I wonder whether there is any way you can keep on file my request that no search and rescue operation should be initiated if it is suspected that I have fallen overboard from my sailing yacht.

I should explain:

I am 77 years old and, a few years ago, I decided no longer to wear a harness at sea. I found it cumbersome and knew that if I were to fall over, it was unlikely I would have the strength to pull myself back aboard.

Also, now that I have well over 100,000 social media followers who watch my daily videos, I am sure I would face intense pressure to give up and put myself into a care home.

Frankly, I would rather spend my last moments treading water and watching my boat sail into the sunset.

On the other hand, if I should hit the proverbial container, sink, and activate my EPIRB, then yes, please do come and get me.

The reason for asking this now is that I had assumed that if there should be an emergency, you would contact my next-of-kin, and they are under instructions to request no search & rescue. However, someone made the point that you would still go ahead because you could not be sure my wife didn’t want me dead!

I hope you can help in this. I hate to think of anyone getting involved in an expensive and, possibly hazardous operation to rescue someone who would prove so ungrateful.

Meanwhile, the Algorithm had gone into hyperdrive, and the book sales were skyrocketing. At every opportunity, I posted replies with little additions like: “As anyone who has read my autobiography Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier will be aware…” or “There’s a whole chapter on this in my first book Old Man Sailing…”

It was like Christmas. Every December, sales leap from 100 a month to 200 or 300. This month – and I’m writing this early in the morning of the 14^th – they stand at 141. That’s going to put me right back to where I was before I started worrying about money.

And it won’t be the end of it. In the Canaries, a few years ago, I met Steve and Judy from Sailing Fair Isle. They make a full-time living off YouTube – and that includes flying visits to the Annapolis Boat Show to be lauded for the “Episode of the Year”. Obviously, marine equipment suppliers beg them to test their latest products (there’s no need to return them).

But you need 4,000 watch hours before YouTube turns on the money. How long was it going to take me to get to 4,000 hours at 1.5 minutes at a time?

I had an idea. I put together a 20-minute video of “scenes from Samsara” – me in the cockpit tacking, the water going past. Me reading a book, the water going past. Me scampering about the deck (more controversy – no harness, of course). For the audio track, I read from the blog. The “watch hours” shot up – only 1,648 to go!

I will be able to buy a new mainsail – 100m of Cromos stainless steel anchor chain. I will be able to pay for all the meals and drinks on the skiing holiday without compromising the “self-insurance” fund.

But why was I reading from the blog? People could get that for nothing. The following Sunday, I read from Old Man Sailing, the book – just the first chapter. I called it The Oldmansailing Book Club.

And here’s the kicker: At the end, I explained that, next week, I would be reading the first chapter from The Good Stuff – and the week after that The Voyage #1. If you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to wait nine weeks for that title to come round again.

Or, of course, you could buy the book…

How long can this go on? I have no idea, but with the Francis Chichester 60^th Anniversary Challenge coming up, I think we can say that the next year is assured.

After that? Well, I’ll think about that tomorrow. Something will turn up…

Since the 1980s I had been a devotee of the Aries windvane self-steering. Tough as old boots, the worse the weather, the better it worked.

The trouble is that self steering is so important on a singlehanded yacht that you stop thinking about it logically. It becomes an emotional subject.

Then, I broke the rudder stock on the way to the Caribbean and ended up sailing 1,500 miles with it held together with string. If I’d had a Hydrovane with its own rudder, this wouldn’t have been necessary (in fact, the rudder stock would never have been under too much strain in the first place).

Finally, I backed the servo paddle of the Aries into an underwater obstruction in the slip at Varadero in Aruba, and later it broke in the middle of the North Atlantic on the way back.

Next, it got tangled up in Dutch customs – and the long and short of it was that I bit the bullet and bought a Hydrovane.

And I have not looked back.

I was so pleased, I made a list to send to the company:

Advantages of the Hydrovane over the Aries and other servo-paddle gears:

1. You have a permanently-installed emergency steering system instantly available in the event of primary steering failure.
2. The cockpit is clear of tiller lines
3. In fact, if you can lift up your tiller, the cockpit is completely clear.
4. The reins or “snaffle lines” can be adjusted to the smallest degree. The Aries required a sharp tug to alter course by 6° at a time – so to change by, say, 20° would require six tugs (providing the ratchet engaged every time, which it didn’t always).
5. The Aries ratchets needed a lot of maintenance. They would get clogged with salt. If sluicing with fresh water didn’t clear it, the whole apparatus had to be hauled inboard and dismantled, and the ratchet worked by hand with WD40 for half an hour.
6. The light air performance of the Hydrovane is immeasurably better than the Aries. If there is enough wind to move the boat, the Hydrovane can steer her. The reason for this is that the Hydrovane rudder is semi-balanced, so it takes hardly any effort to adjust. Better still, any flow of water over the leading edge helps it to turn. Servo-paddle gears have to overcome not only the resistance of the water, but the friction of two or three blocks on the steering lines, even before dealing with the inertia of the ship’s rudder. Consequently, servo-pendulum gears require a much faster flow of water.
7. In heavy weather, when it is sometimes necessary to apply weather helm on the main rudder, an electronic autopilot working in windvane mode can sense when this is needed.
8. There is no paddle sticking out to the side where it can get broken by passing flotsam or pick up a fishing buoy.
9. And no clamp on the tiller to work loose and fall off at awkward moments.
10. Finally, the Aries paddle has to be lifted out of the water at anchor; otherwise, the whole apparatus “clonks” all night with every ripple.
11. Mounting a Watt&Sea Hydrogenerator on the Hydrovane shaft gets the former lower in the water than would otherwise be possible. This means the Sargassum weed gets caught on the shaft, leaving the propeller free.

Advantages of the Aries over the Hydrovane:

1. It is easier to get the paddle out of the water when not in use – unless you happen to have a sugar scoop stern, which makes getting at the Hydrovane rudder a doddle. Anyway, you don’t need to get the Hydrovane out of the water because it doesn’t “clonk”.

…and if you’re wondering why I call it “Hawkins” – that’s after Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I like to think he’s grown up now, about 19, a fine strapping young man standing up at the wheel in all weathers, never resting – and too polite to question my habit of huddling below when things get unpleasant

Other people argue over politics or religion. Sailors argue over anchors.

When I started sailing back in the 1950s, my father taught me that the ultimate in anchors was the CQR. The makers wanted to call it the “Secure”, but the regulators wouldn’t allow a name that could be seen as some sort of guarantee. However “CQR” sounds a bit like “Secure”. So, the “CQR” it became.

It was a revelation to yachtsmen who had only known the Fisherman – a fine anchor in rock or kelp. But it used to drag through sand and mud at the speed of light. The CQR was a “plough” anchor. It used its curved flukes – taken from the design of the agricultural plough, to slow its passage through the substrate. After all, it took a team of draught horses to pull a plough. How much force could a 2 ½ ton yacht exert – and 2 ½ tons was about the size of an typical yacht in those days.

Of course, the 1950s yachtsman didn’t actually trust the CQR to be “secure”. He checked his transits regularly. In a blow, he might sit up in the cockpit with a pipe of Navy Cut and keep an anchor watch. Father always used to lie to a scope of 3:1 by the leadline – never more. And he never added anything for the height of the stemhead above the water (although, in a Folkboat, it wasn’t much.)

When I got my first boat – the little 18ft Caprice, she came with a “plough” (a CQR copy), five fathoms of 1/4in chain and plenty of rope. I never questioned it.

Largo had the same – but 3/8ths. I remember getting up one night off Pottery Pier in Poole and wondering why all the other boats were leaving.

They weren’t. I was going backwards.

By the time Lottie Warren came along in 1992, Simpson Lawrence had invented the first of the “new generation” of anchors – the Delta. You can still see them today on charter yachts: They’re cheap and charter crews aren’t going to anchor anyway. They go to marinas or pick up mooring buoys (at the third attempt).

Serious sailors give an absolutely absurd amount of thought to their anchors. Samsara came with a huge and rusty artefact on the foredeck which might once have been a 35lb CQR but there was so much play in the hinge that the geometry must all have been shot to hell. I bought a 20kg Rocna – but only after watching hours of underwater videos of anchors skidding across the seabed without digging in.

That Rocna served me well – not least in Alderney in a northwesterly gale when the swell hit the harbour wall and shot 60ft in the air.

But I had three problems with the Rocna.

1. It was so big (and the 20kg was one size up on the makers’ recommendation) that I couldn’t get it through the pulpit to bring it on deck when I needed to.

2. It presented so much surface area to the sea when the boat was punching to windward that once going up the North Sea, it jammed solid between the bow roller and the windlass and I had the devil of a job freeing it.

3. It gave me nightmares after I saw a YouTube video of a Rocna failing to reset after a sudden and violent 180° wind shift.

After number 3, I conducted my own test in the Summer Isles off the west coast of Scotland: I deliberately drove over it at about a knot and a half, simulating a wind shift. There was the jolt as it plucked out of the seabed. I waited for the second jolt as it dug in again.

The second jolt never came. I puttered in stately fashion all the way across the anchorage until I was in danger of grounding on the other side – the Rocna dragged merrily all the way.

Now I have a Spade. I dig it in with the engine slow in reverse – gradually stretching out the chain until it’s bar-taught at full revs. The thing about the Spade is that it resets without breaking out. It keeps on digging – just in the opposite direction. Or so I’m told…