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.

It seems surreal, but I have just crossed the equator from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic. I seem to be in one of those deserted parts of the ocean, so far from the shipping lanes that the last time the AIS spotted anyone else was a tanker four days ago at a range of 10.8miles.

And yet I am up to speed with the Budget, the Ukraine deals (both of them) and all the guff on Facebook – and it is after reading a friend’s reaction to the budget that I have been sitting out in the cockpit in the sun with the Kindle unopened on my knee, watching the water go past in a welter of foam and thinking about what one particular friend has posted.

She has taken issue with Rachael Reeves’ assertion that we need more people who ‘take risks’ and ‘back an idea with their savings’ to become ‘wealth creators’.

My friend says the idea that anyone can become an entrepreneur is a fairytale: You need access to money, the right connections – you need to know how to ‘play the system’ – and the lack of morals to do it.

I’m not so sure that’s true.

In 2005, I had no job and, at the age of 50, it was quite clear I was not going to get another one. Somebody offered me an opportunity that at first glance seemed to be one of those ‘dodgy schemes’. But the total investment was £199 and, since I had nothing else, I thought it worth the risk.

The deal was that I would have to do something I wouldn’t necessarily want to do (but then, as they say, if you work at something you enjoy, it’s not really work.)

I didn’t enjoy this – but I did work at it and eventually grew comfortable with it. At any rate, it was worth putting up with it for the money.

I have just looked up the total they have paid me over the ensuing 20 years. It averages out at £27,964 a year.

I will admit that there are many people who earn more than that – but, by the same token, there are many who earn less and would give anything for that kind of security. Because this was not a wage that would stop being paid if I stopped working. This was what they called a ‘residual income’. Indeed, I stopped working at it full-time in 2016, and now I hardly touch it – although I still get paid every month.

I admit I was lucky. I had no alternative: I had to give it my all from the word go (most people start part-time). I had to risk £199, which I could ill afford (now it’s only a tenner). In a lifetime of sometimes questionable decisions, it remains one thing I got absolutely right, and I am intensely proud of it.

I didn’t need ‘access to money’ or the ‘right connections’ or any of that. Just hard work.

That’s fair, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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