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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recycled recycling

Molas

The Congresso

Re-enactment

The Swimming Pool

There! It’s done! I’ve ordered a new dinghy and an outboard to go with it.

Actually, I rather hope the outboard – the electric outboard – is going to do more than just go with the dinghy. But more about that in a moment.

The first thing to acknowledge is when to admit your mistakes – and the little True Kit Stowaway dinghy was definitely a mistake. I got all enthusiastic when I wrote about it from Aruba but since then it’s been a disaster.

Oh, it’s easy to row – the clever catamaran design keeps it mostly out of the water so it just skims along the surface with the minimum of effort.

Yet there are still three drawbacks – all of them catastrophic.

1. It takes ages to blow up because you have to fit and partially inflate the floor and then switch back and forth between the air chambers as it all comes together (and then do it all again because you forgot to the seat and the valve caps got trapped underneath.)
2. Because the Stowaway does not have a solid transom (and therefore cannot take an outboard) it doesn’t have a self-bailer either. Until now, I had no idea how much water comes aboard a dinghy in a stiff headwind – it just drained out again. With this, the water was over my ankles. The shopping was underwater – and I had the devil’s own job turning the whole thing upside down afterwards to empty it out.
3. The rowing position is upright with your feet flat on the floor rather than leaning back and bracing against the transom. This means the rower sits directly on the bones of their pelvis rather than their comfortable fleshy buttocks (well mine are comfortable and fleshy). The result was a saltwater sore on the bum which wouldn’t go away until I stopped rowing completely.

The True Kit Stowaway dinghy – a mistake

So, I have ordered a 3D SuperLight TwinAir. I have had two of these in the past and they’ve been brilliant – apart from one small and important detail: The rowlocks fall to pieces in no time at all. Obviously, the makers don’t expect anyone to row their product. I had to have stainless inserts made to replace the plastic parts and then sewed the rubber together when it split. This time I shall sew it as soon as I get it…

But the biggest development is that I shall no longer be rowing those long hard passages against the wind. Did you read what happened during the two miles against the Tradewind in Barbuda?

It’ll put a link at the end.

Anyway, I have now ordered a RemigoOne electric outboard. I was turned on to the idea of electric by Steve and Judy on the Sailing Fair Isle YouTube channel. We met in the Canaries and then again in Grenada and Aruba. They were given an ePropulsion 1.0 Evo (and then the company’s little Elite model for comparison). But then they do have 72,000 subscribers.

I didn’t want an ePropulsion because this is about more than getting ashore in the dinghy. I want an electric motor that will propel Samsara through those big ocean calms that can last for 24 hours and more.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve nothing against going nowhere – I can sit in the cockpit with a good book for as long as you like. It’s the rolling I can’t stand.

My theory is that if the boat is moving through the water – even at just a knot or two – the keel will stop acting as a pendulum which only increases the rolling, but instead will convert the forward motion into lateral resistance as it is supposed to do. This in turn means the sails will stop shaking out any wind that gets into them and a couple of knots through the water might be translated into a couple of knots of apparent wind – which might then increase the forward motion even more so that I can throttle right back and, according to the specifications, one charge of the Remigo will keep me going for twelve hours.

And the RemigoOne – unlike the ePropulsion Evo – is designed to go on the back of a yacht (admittedly a small one. They specify 8m and 1.5t.) Samsara is a bit chunkier than that. All the same, it must have some effect, surely…

Something else to think about is that an outboard on the back of a yacht in an ocean swell could very well get dunked in the water. The Remigo is completely waterproof. It doesn’t even have a twist-grip on the tiller. I reckon I can get a stainless steel fitting made up for the transom and just lean over and slot it on and off when I need it.

The more I think about this, the more exciting it sounds. Remember the time I had to get alongside in English Harbour in Antigua and the diesel would only run for four minutes on what I could pour into the filter from a can. It was a calm day, I bet a Remigo would have managed that.

Also, the Remigo has a remote control – after all, you don’t want to have to scramble over the back of the boat to stop it…

Then there’s the matter of fuel. Currently, I’m in the San Blas Islands of Panama – people stay here for years but no matter how self-sufficient they may claim to be with their watermakers and spear guns, they still need diesel and there isn’t any. You have to sail 40miles to the marina at Linton Bay to fill up. Imagine how fantastic it would be to just plug your motor into the big folding solar panel and top up for nothing?

And no maintenance: Everybody here has two strokes because of the power-to-weight ratio. But you know how ticklish they are to keep running – and how noisy and smelly…

I’m not even planning to use the motor on the dinghy all the time. Rowing is still my chosen form of exercise – that and walking along white sand beaches to bars made of bamboo with palm-frond roofs to keep the sun off the beer.

But sometimes an outboard would be useful – and the Barbuda escapade isn’t the only instance. Out here there are plenty of places where it’s half a mile to the shore and even in a dinghy with a self-bailer, you can still get very wet sitting up on the seat and rowing into 20knots.

Cowering at the back of a dinghy next to a 3hp outboard will raise the bow and keep the spray where it belongs.

Best of all, the RemigoOne isn’t made in China like everything else, but in Slovenia – and I’m very keen on all things European.

As far as I can tell, there is only one downside. The nice folks in Ljubljana have given me a discount in return for any publicity I can drum up – and although they fully expect me to give an honest opinion, they have made some polite suggestions – a blog post about unpacking it, first impressions and so on. All the same, I can’t help feeling that real publicity means YouTube.

I do have a YouTube channel. Amazingly, it has 2,000 subscribers (10,000 on Instagram – heaven knows why. I never go near it because it’s full of adverts). Anyway, it does rather put my 959 blog subscribers into perspective

 Steve and Judy on Fair Isle worked in television. They know what to do. I bought a GoPro and was so frightened of the online instructions, I put it back in the box and haven’t dared to try it since. Besides, my son Hugo might come back soon. He filmed the “Tour of my Rival 32” – and that racked up 17,000 views.

On the other hand, now that I am officially a freeloader, I do feel a certain obligation – and I’m just sitting here in the sun, waiting for everything to arrive. What else have I got to do?

Meanwhile, those links:

Using an electric outboard to propel a yacht: https://www.oldmansailing.com/electric-outboards/

A long way to row in Barbuda: https://www.oldmansailing.com/a-long-way-for-a-lost-hat/

The RemigoOne electric outboard

https://remigo.eu/

Stainless steel inserts for the rowlocks

Stitching the rubber rowlocks back together

…and the other side

…until the rubber gave way

Also, you can see some video of the Stowaway in action on the oldmansailing YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@oldmansailing

Update March 2nd 2025

The new 3D dinghy has arrived (a white one this time) and I started changing the plastic inserts for the rowlocks – only to find they have changed the design. Whether this is as a result of my endless complaining in Googletranslate French, I cannot say. But now the 8mm plastic tube which used to break in no time at all, is a meaty 20mm fitting which seems to be part of the rubber moulding. It certainly doesn’t seem capable of movement – and I very much doubt I could get it out if I wanted.

I hope this means that the moulding itself will not flex – in which case it will not break and there is no need to sew in reinforcing as I had planned to do on the day it arrived.

If, they have indeed solved the problem, then I believe the 3D TwinAir Superlight, at 2.3m and 13kg is indeed the perfect dinghy.

A reader has taken me to task for the “gloaty tone” of the last post which launched my ADHD MLM book.

I did wonder whether I should add it to the blog or just leave it as a personal Facebook post – after all, it hasn’t got much to do with sailing. But then, one of the most common traits of ADHD is the total disregard for other people’s feelings.

So, apologies for that.

Also, the reader was confused about my various sources of income – and since another symptom is “a compulsion to share inappropriate personal details” I can tell you that by far the largest slice comes from Network Marketing which is why I take the opportunity to mention it whenever the occasion arises.

 Also, of course, I get something from the books, and the food supplement which is not Network Marketing but Affiliate Marketing (you can look up the difference) –  and we mustn’t forget my dear little UK Old Age Pension…

So, as you might imagine, it does make sense to plug whatever is appropriate – as long as I don’t do it too often. The thing that I find really offensive is those people (YouTubers mostly) who refuse to talk to anyone or to answer emails from people who don’t pay into their Patreon account every month.

I hope I shall never be reduced to that.

Meanwhile, as you may have read in my Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier book, I do have to make up the £342,500 I lost by being too bored to read a contract. Anyway, I regard having to work as good for the soul.

For instance, here I am on my way back to the San Blas islands and so far I have met an American who has been there for five years and a German who claims he has not left the islands – not even for a day – in the last eight! I know there are said to be 365 of them, but they are all packed into an area 30 miles by 10. That doesn’t sound much like cruising under sail to me.

So instead, I am planning a trip of 15,000 miles. There will be nine stops and I reckon I can get three “Voyage” books out of it.

I won’t say any more about that now – I might change my mind about the itinerary. Afterwards, I could spend a year in the San Blas to recover.

This is the new book – the ninth book – and by far the most expensive.

The Kindle version sells for £20. It’s £25 in paperback.

But then it’s worth a lot more than that. To be precise, it’s worth £546,893. That is how much the information it contains has been worth to me.

In 15 days time, it will be more.

How much more, I cannot predict. That’s what makes the 20^th of the month so exciting for Network Marketers like me – when the residual income from the little part-time thing I started back in April 2005 drops into the bank account just as it has every month since May 2005.

On that very first payday, the figure was only £90 – but of course, that was still more than three or four times the price of the book today. Now, for the same amount of work, it would be a hundred times as much…

So, I have felt the need to explain in the blurb: “Either this works or you get your money back…which is just as well, because it is a very expensive book. There’s a reason: I could have put the same information into an online course and charged $999 for it. But I think the people who publish online courses probably make more from them than they do from Network Marketing. I am a Network Marketer, not an internet entrepreneur. Also, I want people to value the information – that’s why there’s the money-back guarantee. Anyway, you can always download a sample and find out what it’s all about before you spend any money at all…”

Another thing: I need to know it’s going to be worth publishing – because I am aware that it could get me into a lot of trouble.

Every Network Marketing company in the world – every MLM business – tells its new recruits to start by talking to their family and friends. Who else would you start with?

But the trouble with that is that the new recruit is so excited about having their own business, so dazed with the prospect of untold riches, that they don’t just talk to their families and friends, they pester them – say all the wrong things. I know, because that’s what I did – and that’s why it didn’t work. It’s why it doesn’t work for most people – why MLM companies have such dreadful reputations as “dodgy schemes” or “pyramid scams”.

But somebody must be making money – how else can the industry be bringing in $1.6 trillion a year?

And there has never been a time when people have needed an extra income more than they do today. Inflation is rampant around the world: Wages have been stagnant for decades – and, of course, at the bottom of the pile are the people with ADHD – the people who don’t fit into the world of work as it has been designed by the other 80% of the population.

That’s right: 20% of people have ADHD – that’s 1.5 billion people who struggle to keep a job (who don’t even get paid enough when they’ve got one).

So, whether you have this peculiar mental kink or you just don’t think you have enough money coming in, here is your answer. Don’t take my word for it. Don’t buy the book. Instead, just download a sample for nothing and then decide.

Think about it: How different would your life be if, on the 20^th of next month, you were to see one hundred times the cover price drop into your bank account – and then, month after month, that figure continue to rise – until in 20 years time, you are able to click on the company app and see a grand total of £546,893?

Or, in your case, considerably more…

https://amzn.eu/d/8VjZP2W

This is The Graveyard in Linton Bay, one of the most popular anchorages on the Atlantic coast of Panama. You can see four wrecks (not counting the one in the middle sitting upright on its bilge keels with just the mast sticking out vertically like a lamp post).

All of them dragged their anchors in a stiff northeasterly at one time or another and bounced across the rocks and coral to end up in front of the Casa X restaurant. Nobody bothered to do anything about them and now they provide the clientele with a salutary view over their $10 Platos Completos.

Samsara might have joined them yesterday.

Fortunately, it appears that although I can be very forgetful about taking shoes when I go ashore or running the watermaker with the inlet closed or (as has just happened) boiling the kettle dry and only realising because of the funny burning smell) I do seem to be more reliable about the important routines.

For instance, it may seem pedantic and annoying for my neighbours but every time I set the anchor, I have a habit of backing up until the chain is taut and then gradually increasing the revs until the little Nanni 21hp is screaming in reverse with water boiling all around the cockpit.

When this happens, the boat is supposed to stay where she is, transits of buoys and trees and boats and houses all steady on their bearings. Only then do I let it idle for a bit to recover and then shut down (to everyone’s relief).

It’s a trick I learned from Shane Acton when he returned to the UK after setting the record for the smallest boat to sail round the world. He had an outboard but couldn’t really afford the petrol to run it, so the only time it got used was to set the anchor.

“Only thing it’s good for,” said Shane.

I’m not sure I’d put it quite like that, but using the engine to dig the anchor into the bottom has got to be just as important as getting out of a marina in an onshore Force 6.

Or, in this case, I arrived nicely on schedule from Porvenir in the San Blas and found a vacant spot equidistant from the Casa X and the Marina’s Black Pearl Restaurant. I let go in 13 metres, allowed the boat to drift back while I organised the snubber, put the chain on the cleat to spare the windlass, stowed the autopilot, switched off the electronics… and finally clicked the gear lever into reverse.

We backed down gently until we were level with Lulu the Swedish cutter I last saw in Curacao – although I hadn’t thought I’d end up so close to the American Westsail behind me. This was the first clue that something wasn’t right. We weren’t stopping.

Putting the engine back into neutral, I nipped up to the foredeck and planted my foot firmly on the “Up” switch (which is actually the “Down” switch but I wired them up back to front and couldn’t see the point of changing them all over again just for the sake of correctness.)

With the usual grinding and screeching from Mr Lofran’s machinery, 45 metres of chain crawled back aboard – and at the end of it, the anchor emerged backwards. That is to say: upside down – with the chain wrapped tightly around the crown and then back over itself so that I could have dragged it backwards all the way to Colon and it wouldn’t have shown the slightest inclination to dig in.

I got very muddy hanging over the bow, sorting it out – all the while feeling very glad I have a small boat with an anchor I can lift on deck with one hand (while holding on to the other side of the pulpit for dear life with the other).

Magnus from Lulu turned up in his dinghy just as all this was coming to an end – kind of him to offer to help but, as I say: small boats have their advantages.

So, by the time I had gone through the whole palaver all over again and Samsara showed no sign of shifting no matter how much the gearbox protested, the evening had advanced well towards the hour of the beer.

And guess what: At two o’clock in the morning, I was awakened by the wind charger screaming with delight at being able to produce 400W from a 30kt gust – right out of the northeast.

Here we are on the second day of the passage from Santa Marta in Colombia to the San Blas Islands of Panama and finally, I’ve settled down to write about it.

Writing a “passage piece” in the same way I would sit down two or three times a day as I do with the “Voyage” books is an idea that was prompted by the number of readers who keep asking when the next one is coming out.

Well, the answer is “when the next long voyage happens” – which won’t be until I set off from The Bahamas to The Azores and the Canaries in the summer.

But that doesn’t mean that three days running before the 25kt tradewind into the bottom left corner of the Caribbean is any the less noteworthy.

I did think about it when I decided not to set off at midday on Saturday after all – despite what I told the Colombian immigration officer. The trouble with leaving at midday is that Baranquilla is 40 miles away, which means you arrive off the river mouth just after dark – and the waters off the Rio Magdalena are notorious for being littered with all sorts of debris from the rain forest – like tree trunks which would probably come off best after meeting Samsara’s bow at five knots.

So, I decided to leave at midnight instead.

Actually, I nearly didn’t leave at all. Coming up to the fuel berth, I stepped on deck to slip a mooring line over the cleat and somehow got my foot on the wrong side of it, which meant that pretty soon I was lying on the side deck pinioned by my ankle up against the guardrail wondering in a dispassionate sort of way whether I was going to lose the foot. With a stiff breeze blowing the boat off at right angles and a couple of the boatyard marineros running to help, we managed to save the limb (if not my dignity). It was only later that I wondered why I didn’t release the warp at the winch.

Maybe I was too preoccupied with all the blood – not from the foot: The foot showed a couple of ugly welts but no sign of major trauma. But a large flap of skin was now hanging off the index finger of my left hand and there was more blood about the place than Santa Marta has seen since the days of the conquistadors. I anointed it with a mixture of my mineral solution and a liberal helping of tee tree oil, wrapped it in gauze and encased the lot in surgical tape.

When I have done this before, I have used white or blue tape. This stuff was more like Sellotape – so it was a bit alarming to see the blood soaking into the bandage and turning brown… and then black.

Gangrene turns bandages black doesn’t it? I should know. I’ve seen Gone With The Wind. But gangrene doesn’t set in for weeks, surely – and anyway, you can tell by the awful smell…

It was just as well the watermaker started playing up to distract me.

I have written about the watermaker in the post from Santa Marta, now it looked as though my bad decisions were coming home to roost. It seemed to me that making water was taking longer and longer – which was hardly surprising since the pressure gauge was definitely on the low side. One reason for this is that no sooner had Hemides and Leonardo fixed it from the last time I mistreated it, but now I ran it for an hour with the inlet seacock closed – at one point, the motor was too hot to touch. At the time, I didn’t think I had done it any real harm, now I wasn’t so sure. Anyway, there was nothing I could do about it. I don’t carry spare bearings, and wouldn’t know how to instal them if I did.

But I could tighten up hose clips. I could inspect filters.

The 5micron filter was completely black – OK, so I shouldn’t have been running a watermaker in a marina but that only holds good if the water on the pontoons doesn’t come out brown. I changed the filter and measured the output – still only 18litres an hour, when it should be 25. I would just have to run it for longer – at least I have plenty of electricity. After two days, I still haven’t seen the new Lithium batteries below 93% – that’s with electric cooking and all the instruments – the hours of watermaking…

But enough of that. We’ve been making great progress. With the wind from the ENE at 15-25kts, I left the mainsail stowed and just had the headsail poled out with two reefs. Of course, we do roll – particularly when the sea built up off Barranquilla and I had several waves break into the cockpit – one of them pouring in all over the galley (it’s always better the galley than the nav station). I couldn’t have any hatches open, but I never touched the helm and didn’t have much to do with the Aries, apart from leaning over the stern somewhat precariously to give it some oil – maybe it would be better not to stow the boarding ladder against the pushpit for long trips.

I say I didn’t touch the Aries – meaning I didn’t adjust the course. I am forgetting about MV Tema.

Motor Vessel Tema, registered in St John and bound for Baranquilla was a small, nicely painted cargo ship on a course to cross my path about ten miles away. I didn’t pay much attention to him. Motor vessels are always crossing my path. Making anything from 10 – 15kts, they treat little Samsara’s plot on the AIS as a stationary object and just go round us (making sure they stay the statutory one nautical mile out of our way).

MV Tema didn’t. I tweaked at the port rein of the Aries to make sure we got round his stern. And then again…

It wasn’t until the range was showing less than a mile that I thought to check how fast he was going: 1.6kts. More to the point, where normally it would say: “Making way under engine” (or the only alternative I have ever seen: “Anchored”) Tema was broadcasting: “Not Under Command”. The 1.6kts must have come from some sort of north-going current, although where that came from, I have no idea.

Anyway, now it was up to me to keep out of his way.

I was just returning from another Aries-tweaking session, when he called on VHF: “You are only eight cables distant . With a big swell running…”

I assured him I would pass behind him.

I did – but at a distance of only two cables, which – given the size of the Caribbean Sea – is just plain impolite. I did think of calling again to apologise. But what would I say: I was too lazy to read the whole of the screen?

It is a problem this laziness. I have noticed it at the beginning of other long trips, before I get into the rhythm of the voyage – or, to put it another way, before I make a point of sitting down with the laptop two or three times a day to write stuff like this.

On the first afternoon, I always like to get some sleep. But it is all too easy to get some more the next morning and, come to that, any old time. Of course I did have an excuse, what with all that time I had spent with my head in the bilges playing with the watermaker…

But now, on the third evening, I lay on my bunk looking up at the reflection of the sun and the water on the glass of the open hatch and thinking I really should get out in the cockpit with a beer and Alan Bristow’s Helicopter Pioneer autobiography. But it wasn’t yet six o’clock… although, of course, if I was heading west at better than a hundred miles a day, cocktail hour would be getting earlier and earlier…

I am hoping I have come up with an answer to the watermaker. I cut today’s session short because it was taking so long and the tank was almost full – but mostly because there was water streaming through the limber hole from the pump compartment.

Without doubt there is a leak somewhere – and if there is a leak then the watermaker unit will not be getting seawater at the pressure it is expecting and therefore can’t produce fresh water at the same rate. All I have to do is find the leak.

I did consider another hour of tinkering, but we’ll be anchored off a tropical island this time tomorrow (or possibly the next day. I want to arrive in daylight). Anyway, we won’t run out of water before then. Besides, getting to the pump and all the hoses and filters involves unscrewing the cabin sole which is now secured against capsize, following the unpleasantness north of the Canaries (see The Voyage #2). Then I have to remove a dozen six-packs of Club Colombia because in a “remote tropical paradise” you don’t know where your next beer is coming from. Besides, the new bandage on my finger is still looking very smart and I don’t want to get it wet.

While on the subject, I think I should be congratulated for typing this with a duff finger. I started out with the original bandage which was like something out of a Giles cartoon and really limited me to nine fingers. I know there is a tradition in journalism that many of the greats could type at the speed of light using only two fingers, but I started out with ambitions to be a proper Writer and felt the first requirement was to teach myself to touch type (and was never more proud than when I passed the National Council for the Training of Journalists 40-words-a-minute exam by a country mile).

Doing it with nine fingers has not been the same, but now I’ve snipped the end off the new and less ostentatious bandage – well, it’s more of a plaster really – things are pretty much back to normal. An injury needs some exercise, surely – help the blood flow and all that…

Now I’m in a pickle. Because I left Santa Marta at midnight instead if midday, I’m going to arrive at seven in the evening – just as it’s getting dark. Arrivals in the San Blas should be timed when the sun in high (and preferably behind you) so you can see avoid the coral and find a patch of sand to hold your anchor.

I’m planning to make my landfall at Aridup in the Ratones Cays. Eric Bauhaus says these are “a beautiful little island group. Water clarity is excellent.” He should know. He has devoted his life to The Bible of these parts, The Panama Cruising Guide

More to the point, neither Bauhaus’s chart nor the Navionics app shows a difficult entrance, such as might require perfect light.

I couldn’t cope with this before dinner, so I took down all sail – basically to stop and think. Then I set too with the calculator and worked out that either I could slow right down (and would probably still arrive too early the next day). Or, I could make a race of it: Averaging 5.2 knots would mean a two o’clock arrival.

I got up and gybed the headsail. When I came down again, the plotter said we were doing 7.45kts.

Also, I have a pinpoint position from someone called Chris on the Navily app showing where he dropped his anchor in sand in December 2024 (despite what another contributor had to say about needing to take a line ashore to a palm tree.)

I’ve just checked our average speed – 4.9kts – and with 79 miles to go, that is 14 hours which would get me in at 12.45 – plenty of time. In fact, according to Windy, before a couple of days of light weather, which would be perfect.

Now all I have to do is keep up the average.

All through the night, I woke up at hourly intervals, determined to wait until daylight to set the main – and at the same time watching the ETA advance from 1430 to 1500 and then 1550. At one point it showed 1643.

Finally, at dawn, I rounded up into a surprisingly strong wind and hoisted the mainsail. The ETA started going the other way. The waypoint appeared on the screen instead of being some theoretical feature of time and space which would become apparent when it was ready.

“1415”. I could live with that.

The other decision was where to enter the island chain. I still marvel at how we do this today. It must an age thing: Fifty years ago, approaching a reef-strewn lee shore completely devoid of lights or, indeed navigational marks of any kind, after a 350 mile passage without any terrestrial positioning would have been completely unthinkable.

And yet, here I am, about to make for the middle of a half-mile channel between two coral reefs…

Well, I was. I’ve done it before. When I arrived at Carricou after the Atlantic crossing, the passage through to the west side of the island was only half a mile wide. But I’ve just looked at the San Blas chart on my old phone (only because it was closer and avoided getting up). I wanted to check that the gap really was half a mile wide before I wrote it down, and this screen – for some reason – showed a different chart. Oh, the land and the reefs were still in the same places, but while the new phone shows two areas of “obstruction” as circles of little crosses, the old phone has them in blue just like all the other very shallow water.

“Obstructions” can by anything – a wreck on the seabed that might snag a trawler’s nets, redundant mooring chains in a harbour ready to foul an anchor…

Or coral.

Well, you don’t know, do you. I checked Bauhaus. He had them marked as 5metre soundings.

The alternative was a detour that would add slightly less than two miles.

Chicken…

By eleven o’clock, we were down to ten knots of following wind and only showing three over the ground. The ETA had clicked over past four o’clock – and the wind would get lighter the closer we came. I was loth to use the engine because I only carry 50 litres of diesel and don’t believe there’s anywhere you can get it in the San Blas (no ATMs either – not that there’s much to buy).

In the end, there was nothing for it: I hauled the Super Zero out of the forepeak. Rigging it under way can be a bit complicated – especially if the boat is rolling and the deck is really too hot for bare feet but not so hot that you absolutely have to stop what you’re doing and go and find some shoes.

It took me 25 minutes to rig it in spinnaker mode – that is wing-on-wing with the headsail which together gives me 90% of the area of my old symmetrical spinnaker (but with a lot less trouble, so it gets put up sooner, taken down later and used more frequently.)

I was pleased to see our speed jumped from 3kts to 4.5kts the ETA was back a 1400.

Time to settle under the bimini with the Kindle and a beer.

The mini-bimini is turning out to be a big success. Samsara’s original owner installed two built-up hatch covers in the afterdeck. I’m not sure why – although when I bought her I found they allowed just enough room for two big 14kg Calor gas bottles. Everybody else seemed to like the way you could sit up high on them and see everything – and of course the new bimini is right over the top of them. You do have to climb over the tiller lines for the Aries and move the boarding ladder – and position a couple of cushions just so (without dropping them over the side). But in the end, it’s worth the trouble. I spent hours up there in the heat of the day.

As predicted, the wind fell lighter and lighter the closer we got to the land, until I had just 2.6kts over the deck and the sails all over the place. There was nothing for it. I furled the headsails and turned on the engine – there was only eight miles to go to the waypoint.

And even though the new wider gap did add two miles, I was glad I had been chickened out of the narrow channel. Passing to the east, it appeared to be filled entirely with white water.

And so, at about 3.30 in the afternoon, Samsara crept between the two reefs to the south of Aridup. There was no one else about – no sign of life on the Island.

Until the a dugout canoe appeared from nowhere, anchored next to the reef and two of the three occupants disappeared over the side. Half an hour later, they were alongside offering me a pair of lobsters.

This was the difficult part. My Spanish was actually better than theirs – and so it was with a lot of gesturing that I had to explain that I don’t eat lobster. But I did give them the big frying pan I’ve been trying to get rid of for ages. Then they asked for soda and all I have is a limited supply of iced tea – but beer would do, apparently. I have plenty of beer (although I won’t if I keep on giving it to every fisherman who comes past).

So, the next canoe got a hat I don’t wear any more … and the third a cheery wave before I ducked down below apparently busy with something else.

Finally, a big Wharram catamaran with a junk rig on each hull and flying an enormous Stars and Stripes came ghosting in and anchored next door. After an excursion ashore, James and Yael came aboard to deplete the beer supply further.

It really is surprising how much social life you can find on an uninhabited island.

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The big awning

Years ago, we had a friend from Colombia. He was married to Tamsin’s best friend at the time. His name was Ruben and he was the most charming man you could hope to meet. I remember introducing him to my mother one Christmas – mother must have been in her late 80s by that time. Ruben had her giggling and blushing like a schoolgirl.

There was only one thing you had to know about Ruben: He was totally unreliable. He would say he would be home for dinner and arrive at three in the morning, banging on the door and wondering why everyone was asleep. A promise from Ruben was something you would believe with all your heart because surely someone so earnest and loveable could only have your best interests at heart…

But reality never seemed to align with aspiration.

His wife said it was because he had been spoiled as a boy – by his ten older sisters.

Now I know better. Ruben was Colombian, that’s all. In Colombia, the concept of mañana is taken to a level the Spanish can only dream about.

They didn’t tell me about this.

Instead, before I set off from Aruba, they told me that I could get anything done in Colombia: There was an excellent marina in Santa Marta with every facility – and it would be a fraction of the price of getting stuff done in the ABC Islands. I emailed the boatyard – absolutely, they could do stainless steel work. They had people to make awnings. This was a full-service yard.

Marina Santa Marta is indeed impressive. It’s not expensive, they take care of the byzantine check-in procedure with immigration and customs which normally requires an agent and anything up to four days. I’ve never seen such security: Not only do you need a facial-recognition scan to get into the marina complex but there are fingerprint sensors for access to the pontoons. There’s even a machine to check you into the loo…

And certainly, the yard manager would be round to give me a quote for the work.

He did come. It was just that he didn’t appear very familiar with the idea of a bimini or solid guardrails for mounting the extra solar panels. I showed him the arrangement on other boats. I insisted he take measurements (lent him a tape measure). He went away promising to come back with a quote in a couple of days.

I never heard from him again.

Besides, by that time, I had been introduced to Manuel.

Manuel is a great guy – and he’s got himself a terrific little business in Global Marine Services. He speaks perfect English and he knows everyone. Need a welder to build you a bimini, he’ll get Rubén to come take a look. Someone to make the fabric roof? Raphael is your man.

Actually, I wanted a big awning as well, covering the whole boat from the mast to the stern, with flaps for the late afternoon sun. Raphael came and looked (he had his own tape measure). Raphael and I got on like a house on fire, what with my Spanish lessons and Google Translate.

Dario, not so much. Dario was the rigger, except he had his own boat to maintain – and since he did charters, he couldn’t very well leave the boat sinking if he was due to take a birthday party out this evening, so would it be OK if he came tomorrow to move the winch from one side of the mast to the other?

Of course, courtesy of my online Spanish classes, I translated “mañana” as “tomorrow” and thought no more of it. A week later the winch was still on the wrong side and I was learning about the Indefinite Future Tense (in which mañana means “to procrastinate”.

In the end, Manuel came on a Sunday and did the job himself – and it turned out to be a much more difficult than it looked. Fittings that have been in situ for 51 years can be like that.

But Manuel wouldn’t charge me a penny (“My gift to you!”). Also, it gave us an opportunity to sit in the cockpit with a couple of cans of Club Colombia as the sun went down and the music on the party boats turned up, and discuss the fundamental problem.

“It’s the culture,” Manuel explained. “I’m Colombian and it drives me crazy, but there’s nothing you can do about it. Like you say in English: Herding cats!”

And let’s face it, I was the stranger in the country. If I didn’t like it, I should have stayed at home – and besides, everyone was so thoroughly friendly and eager to please…

Like the day I decided to get the watermaker motor repaired all by myself – without recourse to Manuel’s army of tradesmen. I looked up “electric motor repairs” and found a place that claimed to be open 24 hours. I didn’t risk testing that, but turned up at nine o’clock in the morning.

Three and a half hours later, Leonardo and Hermides had repaired the motor, freed the seized spare pump head – and only charged me £27 including the cost of the bearings.

Leonardo, Hemides and the watermaker motor

If everyone had been so efficient, I could have been in and out in a couple of weeks and on to Cartagena and the month of intensive Spanish classes I had promised myself. Instead, I was stuck in Santa Marta for more than six weeks as Raphael cut and re-cut the awning and Monday turned into Thursday and then next week, and his supplier let him down, which was odd because he’d said he had it all finished it, but just wanted everything to be perfect for me.

I think the real classic was when he told me he hadn’t been able to come on Tuesday because it was his sister’s birthday.

Well, you’ve always got to allow for the unexpected…

Still, it really is an impressive awning – and the little bimini looks as though it’s going to be good, too. And the sun is still shining and I seem to have developed a little Mambo shimmy after six o’clock…

With Raphael – smiles all round

Everyone is talking about ADHD – it’s in danger of becoming boring. Don’t worry, the ADHD people will get bored first (being easily bored is one of the most common traits). A friend sent me this piece from The Guardian because I “came out” as an ADHD freak in May last year.

Well, I didn’t so much “come out” as burst into the street proclaiming that my condition was in the 1% of the most severe (which must make me extra special).

More than that, I launched a book which had been seven years in the writing – ever since I was told I had this mental kink which affects 5% of the world’s population (or to put it another way, 1.5 billion people).

I make no excuses for plugging the book because I am intensely proud of it. It was the hardest thing I have ever written and people have been kind enough to say it is the best.

And then, on Christmas Day, an Amazon customer called Mark took the time out of his festivities to write this review:

Mark

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding life’s journey with ADHD

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 December 2024

Verified Purchase

Can’t believe how well this book explains ADHD and the journey through a life well lived …. It’s autobiographical pre-knowing about why certain life adventures and behaviours occurred and later it is all making sense of the diagnosis later in life. Explains the ordinary life many people have but special people have a totally different life as they are wired in a way that means we all need to read this book …. Sad on a personal level but other aspects are rewarding … this book resonates with one.

Fair winds to those like John.

You can find it here:

https://amzn.eu/d/84V6JUb

In this episode we look at Trusting Your Anchor, getting a Rival 32 to do 15 knots and Death on the Foredeck, among other topics.

Please note that if you have subscribed to the podcast in the past, I have moved to the Acast platform, so if you wouldn’t mind subscribing again, you will continue to receive an email every time a new episode is uploaded

… and an apology, I should have made this clear: The Old Man Sailing podcast is a series of episodes of between 40 and 50 minutes reading through the Old Man Sailing blog from the beginning, along with selections from the books. It does not replace the blog – rather it is intended for people who want to listen rather than read. Episode 15 takes us up to 2020.
On new posts, you get the choice of reading or listening.