It could have happened in the middle of the Atlantic – imagine that.

But then, I don’t suppose I would have been in a hurry in mid-Atlantic. Not like I was in a hurry after seeing off my son Hugo on the plane from Grenada back to the UK, and promptly dashing up to Antigua to meet grandson Ben.

But that wasn’t the problem. I made it to English Harbour with 24 hours to spare. I’d even had time to buy some super two-part glue and fix the leak in the dinghy before setting off (Hugo and I had spent half the time pumping it up again – even, on one occasion, pumping it up as we were going along.)

The super two-part glue didn’t work – even after three days to cure on the passage up the Windward Islands, it was leaking as badly as ever. In the end, I took it to Seagull Inflatables. They said it would need a patch on the inside as well (how do you do that?). They’d have it ready tomorrow at the latest.

Then, no sooner did Ben arrive, and I noticed the stitching on the sacrificial strip of the headsail was coming adrift. North Sails could do it the same day.

But with a two-week itinerary already mapped out – Barbuda, St Eustatius, St Kitts and Nevis, Monserrat and back to Jolly Harbour – there wasn’t even time to get any more butter after the yachtie in front of us at the Covent Garden Supermarket pinched ours off the checkout (and we even gave him a lift back in our taxi!)

So, you will understand why we were frustrated to find that not even the trade wind was playing ball. The whole Windy forecast for the Leewards had turned blue for “No wind at all – zilch, nada”. We considered our options over the Antigua Yacht Club’s breakfast (the menu runs to two pages: everything from steak and eggs to something called “chop-up”.) Of course, we could try doing the whole trip in reverse – starting with the shorter passage to Montserrat, even if it meant motoring. The fuelling berth was closed and both the garages were out of diesel…

We had enough, I reckoned. Particularly if we could sail some of the way.

In fact, with three sails up (the headsail goose-winged on a pole and the super-zero set behind the main, we managed three knots for most of the way.

But the wind died around lunchtime as they said it would, and we chugged along, the pair of us laid out under the bimini. The decks too hot to walk on.

And then the engine stopped.

It didn’t lose power or stutter as it might if it had run out of fuel.

It just stopped. And, although it would start again, as soon as I put it in gear, it didn’t want to know.

Looking over the stern, there was something trailing out behind – some sort of pale, diaphanous material. We hooked it up. Fishing net. Lots and lots of fishing net.

Actually, writing this at anchor in Montserrat with the catch stuffed awkwardly into two black bin-liners on the foredeck, I cannot believe quite how much of it there is.

I went down with a knife and cut it off the prop strand by strand. This sounds heroic, but actually, I can only hold my breath for 45 seconds. Thank heavens for the Nemo electric breathing apparatus. I always knew that one day it would do something more important than just help with cleaning the bottom.

So, after breakfast (boiled eggs, toast – the last of the rancid butter) we shall be off to see the abandoned city of Plymouth. Apparently it’s the “modern Pompeii” buried under ash from the 1995 volcanic eruption.

Nothing to it, really…

• I just asked Google about Chop-Up: It is a traditional Antiguan vegetable mash commonly served at breakfast, especially on weekends, alongside saltfish. It consists of boiled and mashed eggplant, pumpkin, okra, spinach or callaloo, creating a soft, flavourful mixture. It is often sautéed with garlic, onions, and sometimes thyme.

Monday 20th April 2026

Just coming up to Antigua

Sailing the direct route is all very well, but the wind shadows in the lee of the islands stretch for miles – and they’re not even proper shadows: one minute you’re in a flat calm, the next, you’re pulling down two reefs, and the boat’s putting her gunwale under anyway.

I woke up grumbling: “This is worse than the Doldrums.”

That was when I discovered I had engine trouble. I’d noticed it a few weeks ago – just as a momentary loss of power, the sort of “cough” which tells you it’s time to change one of the fuel filters. I have a schedule for this: once a year for the main filter, once every six months for the pre-filter. Of course, I never get as far as the reminder popping up on my phone. There’s always a problem before that, and changing filters is my go-to solution for all things mechanical.

It doesn’t always solve the problem, but changing filters has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?

Anyway, this time, I never did get around to it before because I had Hugo with me, and we were always too busy going out for meals. This time, the engine – after any number of warning hiccups – actually stopped.

I changed the little Racor pre-filter: The engine ran just long enough to empty it, and then stopped. I changed the main filter.

It might be relevant to mention that the wind was not shrieking in the rigging while all this was going on (if it had been, I would have been sailing). Instead, I was rolling gently but regularly – which at least meant I could match my rhythmic swaying with the jug of diesel in one hand and the open filter in the other.

The fuel only started slopping into the bilges when I had to hold the filter still to screw it on (that is, still relative to the engine, not the rest of the world.)

It all took so much effort and so much time, that if there was any justice, it would have kept running all the way to Cape Capucin and the return of the trade wind.

But there is no justice. After five minutes, the little 21hp Nanni hesitated, thought about it, thought better of it, gasped its last, and died.

I do remember standing there, thinking that I had been asking for trouble, putting all the tools away. I got the spanners out again. Stage Two of fuel starvation involves checking the flow from the tank. Stage Two is not very pleasant.

I have a 50-litre tank. It is tucked away under the port cockpit seat, behind the engine. I believe it has been there since the boat was built in 1973. It has no inspection hatch, no access. There is no way of cleaning it. The time to address this shortcoming would have been when I had the engine out for a new propshaft and cutlass bearing sometime around 2022 – but the boat had been sinking at the time, and I had other things on my mind.

The thing that makes checking the flow from the tank a last resort is that you have to disconnect the pipe from the pre-filter and, if nothing comes out, get down with your head in the engine bay and blow into the pipe (which tastes of diesel – which is very unfair if there isn’t any diesel coming out of it.)

I got down with my head in the engine bay. I got my mouth around the pipe (it reminded me of the straw for the Piña Colada in the beach bar in the Limon Cays – except for the taste.) I blew.

What is supposed to happen is that you blow, and you can hear the bubbles in the tank. Of course, all you are doing is blowing the muck back into the tank so it can block the pipe again (just not today, if you wouldn’t mind).

But this time, nothing happened. No sound of bubbles echoing in the half-empty tank. I blew harder. I blew until I was blue in the face – and received various warning signals that I should stop blowing, but you don’t need to know the details. Anyway, this wasn’t working.

I fetched the dinghy pump. This is a serious implement that came with the defunct True Kit dinghy from New Zealand. It has a pressure gauge that goes up to 14psi. The dinghy pump it was that cleared the blockage in the outlet pipe of the loo in Santa Marta (and caused several people in the marina to think there had been a gas explosion). I attached it to the pipe, sealing the joint with a wodge of gaffer tape the size of my fist.

I pressed down on the pump handle. It wouldn’t go more than halfway. I tried again – wouldn’t even go halfway. The pressure on the gauge rose alarmingly. Suddenly, there was some sort of commotion in the tank. The handle went “clonk” at the end of its run.

I was back in business. I motored placidly the rest up the coast of Dominica (interrupted only by short-lived blasts of 15kts apparent and then back to nothing).

It wasn’t until I switched off for the last time that I noticed the smell – rather like the smell that had accompanied Hugo’s observation: “There’s smoke coming out of the engine.”

There was too. I may have mentioned this before, and on that occasion, the heat exchanger was dry. At least I found a hole in the pipe. This time, there was no explanation – a good job, I keep plenty of coolant – anyway, I was supposed to be awake. At one point, we were only three miles offshore. I needed something to do…

Sunday 19^th April 2026

20 miles west of Dominica

Wind: E2. Barometer 1016

Distance to Antigua; 98M

It’s hardly going to be more than three days, but it seems like a voyage already. The last time I looked, we were doing seven knots bang on course for English Harbour.

Of course, if I did sail the direct course for English Harbour, it would mean crossing a good bit of solid ground on Guadeloupe, but with a small detour, we should be there by Monday afternoon – plenty of time. Ben doesn’t land until after lunch on Tuesday.

Just at the moment, I’ve been sitting in the cockpit, reading Peter Townsend’s second book. Peter Townsend was the Spitfire ace who became equerry to King George VI and, more importantly, fell in love with Princess Margaret – well, if The Crown is to be believed, Margaret threw herself at him, and he didn’t have much chance.

Since we can assume that everyone has seen The Crown, I won’t repeat the story of how this ruined both their lives (alternatively, just ask and I’ll pontificate). What I didn’t know was that he married again, went to live in France and wrote the definitive book about the Battle of Britain Duel of Eagles – that’s the one I’ve just finished. He followed it up with Duel in the Dark, the story of the Blitz and his part in it, leading a night fighter squadron when the only hope of finding the enemy was a large helping of luck.

*

Maybe the sensation of a proper voyage is helped by taking the direct route. The Windward Islands are arranged like a bow, bending to the left as they go north. The direct route is therefore the bowstring, and pretty soon, you’re well offshore. Yesterday, I was 30 miles off St Vincent. Now the distance to Martinique is 50 miles. By Sunday evening, I’ll be closing Guadeloupe.

But it does mean there’s hardly anybody else here – just the occasional tanker on its way up from Venezuela, and they keep well out of my way. I had to reef a couple of times for rain squalls, and at one point, the vane for the Hydrovane slipped from the vertical to the horizontal. I remembered just in time to put a line on it before I started fiddling. Imagine if I lost it. Should I carry a spare?

While thinking of Hawkins and his vane (I call the Hydrovane “Hawkins”), some while ago, the fabric started to split. They warn you this is going to happen – it’s the ultraviolet light – and I have a spare. But it’s my only spare, and I have a long trip coming up, so Hugo and I started sticking it together every time we took it down. It is now covered in bits of black duct tape attached with a variety of different glues – I thought it would be useful to find out which was best. It turns out they all work, and the vane is still going, although I’m not sure I ought to turn up to Antigua Race Week with it in its present state.

*

I woke up when everything landed on top of me. That’s what happened in the Great Knockdown a couple of years ago, although this morning, it didn’t include the fridge – just the new extra-strong glue for the dinghy, a bag of chain markers and the spare cabin lamp left over from when I bought one too many.

Still, it was a rude awakening. Outside, there was a lot of flapping and crashing going on. When I went to bed, I wondered whether I should reef the main – it didn’t really need it, but I like the idea of a quiet night. In the end, of course, I didn’t – and now this.

I poked my head out – and found we didn’t have a reefed headsail (I thought I’d at least done that). Instead, it turned out I had full sail up in 21kts. The Rival can cope with this – just not comfortably. I reefed both sails and went back for breakfast. I’m so out of practice after having Hugo for three weeks that yesterday, I hadn’t made the overnight porridge. Today was an improvement – although I’d forgotten how much water to add and overdid it.

Still, I did get to try the new nutmeg syrup. I bought this to go with the Bob’s Red Mill Pancake Mix left me by the Canadians on the catamaran. Nutmeg is a speciality of Grenada, and I got to like it over breakfast in the One Love Bar (two pancakes, syrup and eggs sunnyside up). All I need now is a second frying pan.

Saturday 18^th April 2026

30 miles west of St Vincent

Wind: NE 4. Barometer: 1013

Distance to Antigua: 212M

Why does it always have to be a race?

I’m on the way from Grenada to Antigua. I have 3 ½ days to do it. I should be all right, it’s 350 miles, and the trade wind is obliging with 18kts of close reach. Of course, the Caribbean Current would rather I went to Costa Rica – and, I must say, I would have no objection, but my Grandson, Ben, is flying to Antigua on Tuesday, so that is where I have to go.

By Tuesday.

I was supposed to leave yesterday. My youngest son, Hugo, had just flown back after three weeks of hammering up to Martinique and dawdling back through the Grenadines (and yes, we did have dinner at Basil’s Bar on Mustique and lobster on the beach in the Tobago Cays.)

Actually, it was just as well I had Hugo with me, because the anchor windlass packed up on the morning after we arrived in the middle of the night in Bequia blithely paying out 85m of chain.

So that meant a morning on the dock at Spice Island Marine getting it fixed – and then the dentist to get a bridge fitted to fill the gap where a baby tooth collapsed (at the age of 77!)

Except, when I arrived on time for the appointment, they hadn’t finished making it. Come back tomorrow. This was particularly annoying because I had rushed my lunch with the three Canadians from the catamaran next door.

So, one way and another, I was a full 24 hours late in leaving (even if it did mean the Canadians gave me all the fresh food they couldn’t leave on the boat or take back to Vancouver.)

*

Doomscrolling, they call it. Hugo was always telling me off for wasting my life away on Facebook.

I would tell him it was work – if I found a sailing post that I had already addressed in the blog, I could post a link. It’s called “traffic”.

Except that somehow, he would always catch me looking at Trump and his latest madness: There’s just so much of it, and the more you click on it, the more you get. Half the time it was AI, said Hugo (how did he know?)

And now I have been caught out good and proper. Late at night (it would be late at night – Trump always posts late at night, it’s an age thing), I saw a post about him being so pissed with the Pope calling him out over Iran that he went and cancelled an $11million federal grant to a Catholic children’s charity in Miami.

Now, admittedly the Miami Herald, the Daily Beast, CBS and a whole lot of other news organisations, ran the same story, but I got pulled up by an Australian sailor and Trump fan who pointed out that in fact the funding was pulled back in March – before this latest spat.

The Aussie called me John “Cut and Paste” Passmore and said that I, of all people, should know better.

He’s right of course. Must fact-check. No more sharing in the small hours. Hell, no more doomscrolling in the small hours.

But it is addictive, isn’t it?

Anyway, I’m suddenly finding myself a whole lot busier. Having Hugo aboard for three weeks meant that my digital education has taken a giant leap forward. For one thig he got out the GoPro which I bought more than a year ago, completely failed to understand and put away in the focsle to rot.

Now the plan is to accompany the blog with video, and we certainly filmed a lot, although he insisted I should film myself doing interesting things – reefing, hoisting the Super Zero (the wrong side of the headsail sheets), pulling up the anchor by hand. There is a good ten minutes of this, filmed from behind and featuring two straining bottoms.

I take a different view: There are any number of hugely successful YouTube sailing channels featuring regular high-quality video. Steve and Janet of Sailing Fair Isle used to work in television. Riley and Elayna with La Vagabonde send theirs off for professional editing every week. I can’t compete with that – and so I shouldn’t try.

What makes the oldmansailing blog special is that it’s written – and there are people who still like to read. – and some are kind enough to say they like my writing. But also, I notice that some of my YouTube videos get a lot of views even though they show not much more than the boat going about her business at sea. I can understand this: I spend hours watching the waves (it’s better than watching Facebook Reels). So I propose to record the blog posts and add them as a voice-over to whatever is happening out there.

Right now, what’s happening is that we’re clipping along at five knots in 17kts apparent 30 miles off the coast of St Vincent.

With enormous pride, I can tell you that my autobiography Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier – a Wonderful Life with ADHD, is now available on Audible, read by the inimitable Charles Robert Fox, who narrated Old Man Sailing, the Good Stuff and at least two of the Voyage books.

But this is the big one. This is the book I am really proud of. It was the first to be written (although the last to be published).

When I was 68, Tamsin my wife, raised the possibility that I might have this thing that makes 5% of the world’s population slightly odd – at least, when viewed from the perspective of the other 95%.

And sure enough, when I went for the test, they told me that not only did I have it, but I was in the “1% of the most severe cases”.

At last, I had achieved something!

On the other hand, it can be a crushing experience to have your whole life explained to you when you are practically at the end of it. I dealt with it the way I deal with everything: I wrote about it.

It made pretty depressing reading. If this was an autobiography, I didn’t much care for the central character.

So, I wrote it again.

And again.

Over the course of seven years, I rewrote that book six times. Each time, I looked for the fun. I looked for the jokes, the uplifting stories. Most of all, I wanted an exciting life – Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier…

And it was all there: First love at 14, the obsession with boats – the thrill in discovering that people would pay me to write (I would have paid them to let me).

Charles Fox, after narrating the last nail-biting chapter, wrote to me: “I really enjoyed the book – quite a whirlwind between funny reminiscences and very personal observations. I think this will do very well.”

I could have told him that. Reviewers of the first edition (before I changed the title) said:

Excellent book, interesting and amusing; an honest review of a life spent chasing an idea. Many painful truths I recognise in my own life, perhaps I too have ADHD? Not written as a self-help book, but it certainly made me reconsider my life decisions and maybe answered some questions. Thank you.

..

Insight into an ocean adventurer’s ADHD history and coping strategy – not for the faint-hearted! John Passmore is soo readable, always a real pleasure to read
..

The book was interesting from the very beginning. So honest and open, unlike some other personal memoirs. John knows instinctively how to take his reader on the journey of a life well lived.
John would argue that he is forgetful, but I would say that the details which he has recalled from his childhood and right through an eventful life make this an exceptional read. Entertaining and informative.

..

Even under the new title, someone found it: “Well written, great point of view and sense of humor.”

If you don’t have an Audible account, and would like to order the book as part of their free trial, you can do so through my link. Then, if you carry on, Amazon will send me a little thank-you: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/B0GXL6LPSX/?source_code=AUKFrDlWS02231890H6-BK-ACX0-507044&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_507044_rh_uk

Champagne sailing for Hugo

The consensus was that we would be mad to sail from Grenada to Carriacou on Wednesday and then all the way back again on Friday.

This Caribbean wisdom was assembled around a table in the One Love Bar in Prickly Bay. The table was for four but already accommodated five old West Indies hands – and now, with a bit of shunting around, made room for seven, and four more bottles of Carib, this being happy hour (two for four East Caribbean dollars – about £2.25).

Going north at the bottom of the island chain is a pain, given that the Trade Wind is the “North East Trade”. No problem up in the Virgin Islands if you’re heading for the Dominican Republic, but down here, your course is actually going to be east of north – and don’t forget the current going east to west between the islands.

Anyway, why would we want to come back so soon anyway? Carriacou is lovely.

Ah yes, well, this is where I get to show off a bit. At the ripe old age of 76, it appears I still have my baby teeth – or had. The last of them crumbled soon after setting out from Gran Canaria en route to St Helena. I had the remains extracted soon after arriving at the end of February and am now embarked on an apparently endless series of appointments to get a bridge fitted to fill up the gap.

And the next appointment was on Saturday. The difficulty was that my 23-year-old son Hugo has come to join me and is expecting some typical Caribbean “champagne sailing”. I could hardly expect him to hang around Grenada for three days (no matter how cheap the beer).

“Never mind,” said Paul (Sigma 36, Dartmouth UK), “leave the boat in Carriacou and take the ferry back.”

“They run commuter ferries every day from Tyrrell Bay to St George’s,” said Mike (South Africa, old double-ender, rudder in pieces – all numbered in the hope of putting it back together.)

You see: Our $4EC was well spent. Whatever you want to know, head for the One Love – and sure enough, it really was hard work going north. We set out at six in the morning and arrived sometime after eight at night – and it was only supposed to be 38 miles.

Never mind, Carriacou is lovely – even if the bay is full of dismasted boats left over from Hurricane Beryl and waiting for insurance companies to find buyers looking for a “project”. Hugo after a cheap boat, but even he baulked at the catamaran astern of us with the port bow entirely missing.

The main problem was that the only ferry running on a Saturday was the car ferry, which takes two-and-a-half hours each way and leaves at five in the morning.

This is not something that troubles you if you are having lunch at the Gallery Bistro where John and Anne Osborne from Huddersfield serve the best food on the island – which people will cross the street to tell you as you sit eating it at a little wrought-iron pavement table (although, of course, on Carriacou, there are no pavements.)

Anyway, we decided that if you’re after “champagne sailing”, it’s a bit silly to spend five hours on a ferry when you can ride the trade wind back to Prickly Bay at the best part of six knots all the way, ending up with just five (very snappy) tacks from Point Saline into Prickly Bay – even if we did arrive back in the One Love after they rang the bell for the end of Happy Hour.

Explain to me the logic: I have a flight booked to join the family for a week’s skiing in Austria.

Actually, I have three flights booked – Grenada to Toronto with Air Canada (5hrs), Toronto to Frankfurt again with Air Canada (6hrs), Frankfurt to Salzburg  with Austrian Airlines/ Lufthansa (55 minutes). This is the sort of thing you get used to when you live on a boat four time zones away but still rather like your relatives.

But on the day before take-off, I receive an email: Lufthansa pilots are going on strike. My journey cannot now take place. All my flights have been cancelled. I am offered alternative arrangements via London Gatwick – departing and arriving one whole day later than originally planned.

This makes no sense at all: Just get me to Frankfurt and I’ll take the train to Salzburg (5hrs 48mins). I would miss dinner, but I would still be on the ski lift with everybody else by 9.30 on the first morning. Why wasn’t I given the choice?

“I’m sorry, but that’s not the way we do it,” explained the Expedia rep when I finally got through to a human being on the phone.

But yes, we had a wonderful time – for six days instead of seven, of course. But the weather was generally good. The snow was particularly good (and yes, I did record a “skiing on 77-year-old-knees” video but I’m not going to release it until I really am 77 in eleven days’ time.

The real trouble is that all this got me to thinking, as I made my way back to Prickly Bay – this time with my 23-year-old son Hugo – that maybe, at 77, anybody can get to be a “Grumpy Old Man”.

By this time, Samsara had been on the hard at Spice Island Marine Services for nearly three weeks. I had considered the estimate of $10,000 for an epoxy paint job (no thank you), inspected what was under the beautiful teak capping on the toe rail (about a hundred screw holes for securing the said beautiful teak capping, and the grotty aluminium extrusion before it), so it was no wonder she leaked going to windward in anything of a blow. I walked round the hull with the yard foreman and worked out where the CopperCoat needed to be touched up – especially the bottom of the keel and the Hydrovane rudder which hadn’t been painted at all.

They were going to do that while I was away.

Except they didn’t. When Hugo and I walked into the yard an hour late (delayed incoming flight) the bottom of the keel was still a scarred off-while from 53 years of stony groundings – and the hydrovane rudder was still the same black plastic as when it came out of the box last summer.

But this was Sunday evening – nobody to complain to – so we went for a beer in the One Love Bar (just in time for happy hour – two bottles of Carib for four East Caribbean dollars, about £2.25).

Then we had another two (why wouldn’t we?)

It was on the Monday morning that Nigel, the antifouling specialist, came round to check that I was happy with his extensive touching up – he wanted to make sure there were no white spots anywhere, so it seemed churlish to bang on about the big white spot under the keel – not to mention the uniform black of the Hydrovane Rudder. Besides, none of the rest had been sanded to “activate” it, so it wasn’t going to work anyway.

When they put us back in the water (“splashed” as they say over here), everybody was so understanding about the engine not starting, that we left the boat in the lifting dock and went back to the One Love while the little 7amp charger did battle with 110ah of totally dead AGM cells.

Yes, I will rig up a small solar panel to keep the engine-start battery topped up next time I go away – the 500watts all over the back of the boat charge the Lithium house bank.

Of course, it was happy hour again – but this time with a bunch of old friends (and some new ones) to share in the misery. It’s just that somehow it didn’t seem like misery anymore.

Now I’ve got a new engine-starting battery, and Hugo, who converted his van and is now thinking of moving up to a boat, made it fit and drilled out the terminals. So, we’ll only be a day late in setting out for Carriacou and then onward to Martinique.

Besides, if we can be bothered to blow up the dinghy, the West Indies Beer company is only ten minutes walk from the dock on the other side of the bay.

How about this: 3,747 miles in 29 days. That’s an average of 129 miles a day, or 5.4kts.

That’s what you get sailing from St Helena to Grenada.

It would have been faster if I’d gone inside the island of Fernando de Noronha off the corner of Brazil, but I had the twin headsails up, and found myself possessed by a peculiar ambition to sail all the way without touching the sheets.

It certainly made up for the three weeks of windward work on the last leg.

I was going to turn it into a separate book – The Voyage #5 but it would have been pretty boring – just endless days of sitting in the sun, one foot braced against the other side of the cockpit, reading Tapio Lehtinen’s account of sinking during the  2022 Golden Globe Race, while the Spotify “oldmansailing” playlist rolled through its 50hrs 43mins from Ben E. King to The Beatles.

In fact, everything would have been fine if it weren’t for Starlink. Elon Musk has a lot to answer for. This man has fundamentally changed the pace of ocean voyaging. Oh, there are people who still manage without it – the couple on the steel 40-footer anchored astern of me here admit they’re dinosaurs – not even a watermaker. But they completed their first circumnavigation 30 years ago, and you can get set in your ways after three decades.

I now have to accept that I am addicted to the news – it comes from a lifetime of setting the morning alarm at two minutes before the top of the hour to allow time for tuning the little Sony short-wave transistor to the least-bad World Service frequency. Now I download current affairs podcasts and get more and more depressed about the state of the world.

So, it was just as well, really, that I found myself sinking.

What happened was that Starlink allowed me to log onto the Windy app every day to establish that tomorrow was going to be another 100-mile-plus day. It was just a question of whether it was going to be a 120-mile-plus day and, therefore, a two-beer lunchtime celebration. Then suddenly, without any warning at all, the Trade Wind turned from solid green on the screen to a sort of wispy pale blue. In other words, a calm.

This couldn’t happen. It was against all the laws of nature (I blamed Donald Trump and his one-man contribution to global warming). Anyway, at least I knew it was coming. I spent an hour dismantling the two headsails, two poles, eight sheets, halyards, uphauls and downhauls – and got the boat reaching to the south with a couple of reefs.

This, of course, put the lee rail under, and the lee rail, I had established on the way down the South Atlantic, was the source of The Leak.

It was OK, really. At least now I knew where it was coming from and how to fix it (I was going to get a new toe rail in Guatemala, where teak is cheaper than plywood (it grows wild, apparently).

The only fly in the ketchup was that the automatic bilge pump switch packed up (as they do), and the next thing you know, the water was over the cabin sole. There were packets of teabags floating down there.

More importantly, the electric motor for the watermaker pump was now totally submerged. Fortunately, I now count myself as the world’s leading expert in the treatment of drowned electric pumps (see the “knockdown” post from a couple of years ago). The one thing you must not do is give them any electricity – at least, not until they have spent a morning soaking in a couple of changes of fresh water and then an afternoon sitting in the sun and the wind to dry.

Then you need to run them to replenish all the water you’ve just used to get them going in the first place. Only after that can you sit down and wonder whether you should leave the pump down there – where another flood will mean going through the whole process again. Or whether the crew can be trusted to keep hand-pumping regularly enough to maintain the water level below the bearings.

I decided the crew wasn’t to be trusted. I filled every receptacle I had with fresh water and then dismantled everything and stowed the motor in the wardrobe locker. When I needed some more water, I would just have to put it all back again (I was getting quite good at inserting the bolts for the pump head by feel).

It was fortunate that 24 hours of screaming reach dropped us nicely into the middle of the Brazil Current, which runs for 2,000 miles up the north coast to the Caribbean. Really, there is nothing like a couple of 150-mile days for taking your mind off your troubles.

So, what do you think I made of “Saturday February 7^th: 163M”…”Monday February 9^th: 176M”…  “Thursday, February 12^th: 186M”?

Think about it: 186 miles in 24 hours is an average speed over the ground of 7.75kts. That is some serious progress in a heavy cruising boat on a 28ft waterline.

I shot round the top end of Tobago, where Navionics calls it “The South Equatorial Current – up to about 4kts” and arrived in Prickly Bay in the middle of the night, rather in the manner of a runaway supermarket trolley. In other words, a tad unprepared. It took me an hour of drifting around among the anchored (and sometimes unlit) boats before I could get the anchor chain untangled enough to persuade it over the side.

Now all I’ve got to do is edit 10,055 miles and 112 days into The Voyage #4. At a cool 123,404 words at present, it’s shaping up to be something of a blockbuster.

After seven years and racking up 21,000 views, it is time to retire the oldmansailing “Good Health” video.

I have just spent two days in the South Atlantic recording the new one, and doing a good deal of swearing every time I fluffed my lines and had to start again – including an absolute paroxysm of language just as I was getting to the end and an alarm went off to remind me to turn on Starlink for the midday communications (it’s on all the time anyway – there’s no shortage of sunshine for the batteries.)

In honour of this great occasion, I have a favour to ask friends of the blog: Would you mind playing the new video through to the end and giving it a like and a subscribe and all those other things that help it on its way (you can go and make a cup of tea while it gets logged as “viewed”).

This is the link: https://youtu.be/R0IeCUcfLH0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That Doldrums weather…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, that track on Polarsteps:

And some of those sunsets…

Enough sunsets – Ed.