There is so much discussion about Coppercoat anti-fouling I thought I should post my pennyworth.

For non-sailors who would like to persist with this post, Coppercoat is a brand of antifouling paint intended to stop things growing on the bottom of your boat. It does this not by using the normal chemicals but copper powder held in epoxy paint. A light sanding exposes the copper and, as Nelson knew, there is nothing better than having a copper bottom.

When I bought Samsara she had about ten layers of conventional paint below the waterline. Since all of it would have to come off, it did seem like the ideal opportunity to upgrade.

Besides, she was a cheap boat. I could afford to splash out on extras.

However, I did have a bit of history with copper antifouling. Back in the 1990s, I had tried something called CopperBot on the catamaran Lottie Warren. Within a year, it developed enormous blisters.

The consensus was that because the boat had been built in a shed in Falmouth without today’s strict humidity controls, the Atlantic winds had blown a good helping of moisture into the lay-up.

That wasn’t going to happen this time. Not only had Samsara been epoxy-treated already but it was now mid-summer and anyway, she had been sitting on the hard for months. Indeed, the survey found not so much as a percentage point of moisture. The yard made a beautiful job of it. The finish was like glass.

So why did it come up in blisters three months later?

As you can imagine there were a lot of anxious phone calls between owner, yard and manufacturer (with everyone blaming everyone else).

Eventually, we all decided to blame a fourth party – the company which had applied the epoxy treatment back in the 1990s. Conveniently (or perhaps consequently) they were long-gone. Anyway, the consensus was that the treatment had been done the cheap way: Instead of three coats of filler and then two of epoxy, they had applied one of epoxy first which smoothed out a lot of the bumps so they could get away with only two applications of filler before finishing with a single layer of epoxy – which, of course, didn’t keep the water out.

Since nobody was offering to finance a new application, I decided to live with it until I couldn’t avoid painting over it.

And then something odd happened.

Nothing.

It didn’t get any worse.

The blisters broke and fell off, leaving little white spots like a teenager’s chin. But by the third year, I realised there weren’t any more of them. Each time she came out of the water, I photographed the problem and there seems no doubt about it: The before and after photos were identical (and the one above shows the worst of it).

Admittedly it does look a bit odd but the spots are mostly well spread out and in between them the copper does do its stuff: When I dry out against a quay in June or July to grease the prop and change the anode, I take a pack of pan-scourers underneath and, scrambling around in the mud in my B&Q waterproofs, I can clean the slime and the occasion strand of weed in a couple of hours.

So yes, Coppercoat does work. However, I would suggest applying it only to new epoxy – or, best of all, a brand-new boat.

There was no escape from Lockdown 2.

November 5th was not the time to stage a dash into the Atlantic like I did in the summer. Instead, I found myself anchored in Kirkwall Bay in the Orkneys, waiting for the weather so that I could jump to Peterhead which, being on the mainland, was a better place to send away the mainsail for repair.

Anyway, Scotland wasn’t in Lockdown. Scotland was in the tiered system – not that it made a great deal of difference: All the pubs were shut and the restaurants weren’t allowed to serve alcohol. Even the magical little Wireless Museum was closed for no better reason than it was simply too small to operate social distancing.

Peterhead was also in the Scottish tiered system – which was just as well because, as usual, the marina wi-fi didn’t stretch to the visitor’s pontoon. However, they did have it in the café at the Fishermen’s Mission and The Dolphin chipper down by the quay – and Peterhead, being a major fishing harbour, has very good fish and chips.

It was the next stage of Sailing Home for Christmas that was going to be the difficult bit: England was in full Lockdown once more and there are precious few all-weather anchorages on the north-east coast. It would have to be marinas – which were all closed.

I did consider sailing the 400 miles to Essex non-stop but what with the thermometer never getting above ten degrees and only eight hours of daylight, you’d have to be a bit of a masochist for that. Besides, the wind never stayed fair for more than 24 hours at a time.

The clincher was that I had been offered a second spinnaker pole in Blyth and I wasn’t going to turn that down. I rang the harbourmaster: Would he let me in?

Oh yes, the port was open. It was just the marina that was closed.

Well, did he have somewhere I could tie up – perhaps in the fishing dock…

His advice – by which I took to mean “official advice” – was to go into the marina anyway. After all, there wouldn’t be anyone there to tell me not to.

I did, arriving at four in the morning for good measure. The visitors’ pontoon was festooned with plastic tape designed, in the absence of a dockmaster, to signify “Go Away”. I tied up anyway, not realising that one of the consequences of the pontoon being closed was that nobody had hosed off the seagull droppings – something I discovered only later having trodden them all over the boat inside and out.

Also, of course, with nobody in the office to give me a code for the gate, I couldn’t get out of the place – not even for a takeaway at the chippy across the road.

I stayed for four days – not plugging into the electricity since I didn’t expect to be charged for being shut in.

The next stop involved a bit more subterfuge – which is why I had better not say where it was. Everybody I rang cautioned: “Don’t tell anyone you’ve spoken to me.”

This proved to be a bit awkward when, five minutes after making fast, a berth-holder checking on his boat (permitted under the regulations, apparently) asked straight out if I had permission.

“Oh yes,” I told him airily. “I know everyone. I’m quite a regular in the winter, you know. It’s all OK. I’m aware of the regulations. I’ll be very careful.”

On the strength of that, I got straight on the phone to a friend who had planned to drive over for coffee. He had presumed I wasn’t “anal” about regulations. I had to tell him that suddenly I had become precisely that.

Six days, I stayed there – until the Windy app promised a spinnaker run down to Walton Backwaters. I could slide in there without telling anyone at all. Indeed, nobody would even know I’d arrived.

Indeed, nobody did – until I was obliged to put into yet another marina because the “spinnaker run” turned out to be six hours of engine – something that never happens in the summer. It was such a surprise to the machinery that the relief valve on the calorifier took fright at the heat and pumped all the freshwater over the side.

Still, given what usually happens to me in “Lockdown Cruises”, I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

It appears there are now many non-sailors following this blog (notice how I refrained from calling them land-lubbers).

They are, of course, welcome. However, some have pointed out that a lot of the content seems to be written in a completely foreign language. What is someone who has never been sailing to make of cringles and thwarts – let alone futtocks and bumkins?

So, now you will find a tab at the top of the page taking you to a glossary. If there are any omissions, please let me know…

In the farthest and dustiest corner of the attic, hidden behind the water tank and covered in cobwebs and bits of decayed birds’ nests, you might be lucky enough to find a battered old trunk.

Prise it open and, just maybe, it will be filled with yellowing papers – letters, receipts, old certificates…

Piece them together and there is your grandfather’s life story.

Most exciting of all, it might be an untold life story – or at least a long-forgotten one – suddenly brought to life as if the years have fallen away and it is yesterday all over again.

In rather the same way, I have stumbled upon an online copy of of the 1988 edition of the Rival Owners’ Association newsletter – and there on page 11 is a collection of my newspaper despatches from that year’s singlehanded transatlantic race.

It might as well be another lifetime but I can remember exactly how it felt to sit at Largo’s chart table, laboriously dictating over the single-sideband radio to the Evening Standard. In those days – when newspapers were still written on ancient OIympia typewriters, journalists out of the office would file their stories over the telephone to “copy-takers”. These men (they were always men in those unionised days) who would sit with bakelite headsets clamped over their ears saying: “Yes… yes…yes…” and, occasionally: “Is there much more of this?”

No matter how good you thought your story might be, the copy-taker had always heard a better one.

In my case, dictating on hi-frequency and having to bounce every syllable off the ionosphere, it was even more tiresome – which is why “spume-filled decks” became “fume-filled” and the readers were treated to the concept of “carpet skippers”.

All of this is particularly timely since, in just a week’s time, we will be pulling out our smartphones to download live video feed from Alex Thompson and the other competitors in this year’s Vendee Globe Race.

Still, if you want to see what it was like in the old days, you can find those ancient despatches here. (For authenticity, I have not edited-out the carpet skippers.)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CM1YiEHAtuUU017Y1FRND6Zay0bTabOxMg6H3VpCO-U/edit?usp=sharing

Since the number of followers of this blog leapt from about 70 to something over 500 virtually overnight back in July, it’s clear there a lot of people reading this who are not normally “into” sailing. That means they have no idea what is going to happen over the next ten days (and I don’t mean the American election).

On November 8^th, in Les Sables d’Olonne in France, a British yachtsman called Alex Thompson will begin his fifth attempt to become the first non-French sailor to win the Vendee Globe round-the-world-non-stop race.

If there is any justice at all, he should succeed – if only out of pure, dogged persistence.

But don’t forget that more people have climbed Mount Everest, more people have been into Space than have ever sailed around the world alone and non-stop.

I have just watched a 50-minute YouTube video which demanded two cans of beer and a basinful of emotion as I sat here in Peterhead in Aberdeenshire waiting for my mainsail to come back from the sailmaker and, I must say, I ended up feeling that some people really are special.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about, grab a box of tissues and click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puIgYu7q7ck&feature=emb_rel_end

For those who asked about the result of the rum taste test: Marginally, just on the palate, Lamb’s won – but there is more to it than that.

If Lamb’s was going to be a permanent feature, I would have to adapt the bottle-holder to take the distinctive octagonal-shaped bottle. Also, there is the little matter of the £16 price tag (compared to £10 for Aldi’s – or, come to that, Lidl’s own brand).

Admittedly, both of these cheaper versions are only 37% proof, compared to 40%  for Lamb’s. But I’m not trying to get drunk – in fact getting drunk would be a very bad idea. So the extra alcohol is money wasted.

Putting it all together, this means that, when I feel like it and when safely tucked up in harbour (like now, in Kirkwall in the Orkneys), I can justify a second tot.

So, no contest, really…

Being an old boat, Samsara has a proper chart table – big enough for a full-size Admiralty chart folded in half. There’s only one in there now – a rather battered copy of No. 2: British Isles (all the way from Brest to the Faeroes). It sits right at the bottom because I don’t use charts much anymore.

Oh, there are some Imrays trapped forever behind the bookcase but why wrestle with an armful of paper when you can use a screen the size of a paperback.

Actually, I don’t use paperbacks either. I have a Kindle.

…or did have.

And this is where we get to the reason for looking in the chart table. I had searched it thoroughly several times looking for the Kindle which went missing towards the end of August.

As Cal, the villain in Titanic said to his henchman: “Search the ship! There are only so many places she can be.”

There were only so many places the Kindle could be – but believe me, I had searched them all (just as I searched for the brand new snatch block that disappeared three years ago). The chart table was such an obvious place for the Kindle that I searched it several times.

I was only looking in there today because I was after the big heavy shackle that was a key part of my invention for keeping the anchor buoy from wandering off when the tide falls. I took it off because I suspected it was helping the line to wrap itself around the chain. Since we may be here in Loch Shieldaig for several days more waiting for a wind without any north in it that I thought to while away an idle 20 minutes by rigging the shackle again just to make sure.

But where was the big heavy shackle? I only took it off a couple of days ago. It must be somewhere. Everything has to be somewhere…

And the obvious place – the place where things get put if you don’t have a hall table or a fruit bowl, is the chart table.

Here’s what I found in the chart table:

Seven cigarette lighters – six of them working (I now have push-button ignition on the cooker).

Two rubber erasers

A micro-SD card

Watercolour notebook with only the first six pages used.

Watercolour paintbox (dried up).

CO2 cylinder that doesn’t fit any of the lifejackets on board.

A very organised little box containing the nail scissors I had been looking for in my spongebag, half a dozen ballpoint pens including a Mont Blanc that spent a couple of years in the bilges and will never be the same again, a fitting for the Aries lift-up gear which is no longer needed but which I plan to give away if ever I meet someone who could use it, a packet of elastic bands (they could come off the shopping list).

A pair of sunglasses with one lens missing.

A piece of plastic from which I cut a square to help with the fitting of the cooker gimbals and which might be needed again in similar circumstances.

Instructions for fitting the CO2 cylinder which doesn’t fit any of the lifejackets.

A saxophone reed (I play the clarinet).

Wallet.

Spare wallet (for replacing lost wallet when it gets lost).

Bicycle bell (still to be fitted).

A pair of fittings for battery terminals.

A pair of drawing compasses.

Various dried-up notebooks.

Instructions for the radar which I use so rarely, I have to look up how to work it each time.

Piece of teak that split off the toe rail.

Envelope of receipts.

Plastic bag of “important items” – passport, cheque book etc.

Similar plastic bag of instruction manuals that seem get consulted regularly.

… and…would you believe it… The Kindle, accusingly displaying the “battery absolutely flat” symbol.

I couldn’t believe it. I shrieked in delight. I danced around the cabin. I hugged the little block of microchips to my breast. I kissed it.

You must understand the significance of this moment. For more than a month, I had been fretting – wondering if should buy a new one. After all, it was the third that I had lost. The original – the one Tamsin gave me for my birthday, I lost I can’t remember where. The second (all singing, dancing and waterproof) which she gave me for Christmas to replace the first one, I left it on a train not three months later … and now this, the third, which I bought second-hand on eBay because the whole business was getting expensive…

And there it was, in the chart table all the time. It sits opposite me now, it’s little yellow charging light, a beacon of hope for all things lost.

…and sure enough, I found the shackle where I had put it, on the shelf beside the navigator’s seat, underneath all those useful bits of 3mm line with bowlines tied in one end.

As for the snatch block… well, we’ll just have to wait and see. Everything’s got to be somewhere. There are only so many places…

Wild and totally remote from civilisation is how they describe Loch Scavaig and I am still here. I have sampled all three anchorages and am back in the one they call Loch na Cuilce which is sheltered on all sides (although, as we have learned, the wind does come shrieking off the mountains).

I have been thinking about Ben Gunn. Do you suppose that if Ben Gunn were to be rescued today, it wouldn’t be a piece of cheese he would ask for – but a mobile phone?

In Loch na Cuilce not only is there no mobile signal, there isn’t even an FM radio signal. Currently, I am fascinated to discover whether President Trump will indeed succumb to the Coronavirus he dismissed so lightly. I don’t like to think that I wish anyone ill but, you must admit, it is a fascinating scenario.

Consequently, I have been reduced to prowling the cabin, the little transistor an inch from my ear, trying to catch the very rudimentary news from Absolute Radio which is the only station that reaches here – even on Medium Wave.

And that is why you are getting so many posts all at once. I thought I would get a whole lot published from Tobermory but somehow I didn’t feel like re-living the previous couple of weeks – and, now you have read about the embarrassment in the Sound of Islay, you may understand why. It takes a bit of serenity to put these things into proportion – and there is nothing quite as serene as Loch na Cuilce.

You anchor right in the middle of a pool set deep in the cirque of the Black Cuillins of Skye. Then, if you take the dinghy and tie it to the rather wonky steps for the boat that brings the climbers who stay in the squat, windowless bothy on the shore, you can walk up the hill.

I say “walk” but it is a steep hill and you will need your hands to get up as well as your feet.

At the top, there are views that most people only ever see in photographs. Of course, I took more pictures so that you can see them too. But taking photographs is not the same as standing at the top and breathing in and remembering to stand up straight and thinking: This is what you came for. This is something special. This puts life into perspective.

You will have heard of Sod’s Law: If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

I would like to introduce you to Old Man’s Law which states that if you have lived long enough for Sod’s Law to wreak its havoc on your life, then a third law, the well-known Law of Averages will kick in and dictate that sometimes OId Man’s Law will prevail.

And Old Man’s Law dictates that “If something can turn out well, then it will.”

I like Old Man’s Law – and it has been working it’s magic lately.

If you are reading this in the southern part of the United Kingdom – or, heaven forbid, you are on a boat in the English Channel, you will be well aware that you have had nothing but wind and rain these past few days. Depression after depression has been tracking up the Channel as they were on rails.

I might have been down there. You may remember I was in Liverpool and had to get to Blyth in Northumberland – which, although hardly any distance at all as the crow flies, is a long way round by sea … either to the south, down the Irish Sea, round Land’s End, up the Channel, turn left at the North Foreland, across the Thames Estuary and up the North Sea.

Alternatively, I could go North, up the Irish Sea, through the Hebrides, turn right at Cape Wrath, through the Orkneys, right again and down the North Sea.

The only trouble with that was that it was already getting towards the end of September and the Autumn is not the season for sailing Northern Scotland. However, I reasoned that not only was it a shorter distance but it would be much more interesting, I was not in a hurry, I could pick my weather, take short hops…

And what has happened? The sky is blue, I have just been walking on the Black Cuillin mountains of Skye in my shirtsleeves and looking down on Samsara anchored in the pool of Loch na Cuilce, reflected in the completely still waters.

According to the book, this is “one of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring anchorages in Europe. It is wild and totally remote from civilisation.”

Admittedly, I did have to pay my dues – spending two nights of unsettled weather during which violent katabatic winds rocketed off the mountains which, in heavy weather, according to the old sailing directions ”are capable of blowing an anchor out.”

This did give me a little concern on the second night when there was a gale warning for Sea Area Hebrides – but that covers a lot of sea and, according to the last time the Windy app had a mobile data signal, the worst of the wind would be over in the West.

Besides, the anchors they had in the old days – CQRs and Fishermen – probably would have blown out. A 20kg Rocna on 10mm chain holding a 32ft bought weighing only 5000kg, can be classed as a storm anchor.

Many cruising boats do indeed carry a storm anchor – a massively-oversized brute traditionally stowed in the bilges (the most-central, lowest point to help the trim). This is all very well except for one tiny detail: When the storm arrives in the anchorage, you want that beast well dug into the bottom. You don’t want to have to be getting it out, hauling up the everyday anchor, changing one for the other while you try not to bump into anyone else or, come to that, the inconvenient bit of land you are trying to avoid in the first place…

All the same, I did wake up now and then as the boat snatched at her cable and went charging off across the pool at an angle of heel you would expect from a decent breeze and full sail.

That’s one advantage of being up here out of season. There isn’t anyone else to bump into – not a soul.