Why do we do it?

Why do we live on boats?

Particularly, why do some of us live on boats alone?

Don’t you get lonely? Don’t you get bored? What about when the weather’s bad? When stuff goes wrong…

Well, all of that goes to make up days like today. For today is a good day.

I should explain: Today is Sunday. I am anchored in Moelfre Bay on the east coast of Anglesey – nine days since leaving Les Sables d’Olonne after a week of rather unsuccessfully trying to promote the French translation of Old Man Sailing.

The reason for coming back is because on Wednesday, my son Theo graduates from Liverpool medical school and I can’t miss that – any more than I can miss Lottie’s graduation in Liberal Arts from Leeds eight days later.

Originally all this was going to happen while Samsara was in Island Harbour on the Isle of Wight having the new tank and watermaker fitted.

Except the tank isn’t ready (foul-up in the paperwork, apparently). Well, that was OK. I could leave her anchored in Falmouth and take the train.

Arriving in my spot off Trefusis Point in time for lunch on Wednesday – a respectable 21 hours out of L’Aber Wrac’h – I had a whole five days to book a cheap old person’s ticket for the North.

Not so. Apparently, it’s going to be a train strike day – and the prices! £227 return! And that’s with a Railcard…

I considered the bus. I took the bus from Falmouth once before – leaving Cornwall before 6.00a.m and not arriving at home in Suffolk until almost midnight – feeling as if I walked all the way.

This is where Tamsin and a bit of straight thinking comes in: “Why are you in Falmouth? I thought you’d be somewhere up north…”

Well yes, but that’s without taking the Irish Sea into account – and getting round the Lizard…

Nevertheless, four hours after arriving, I was leaving again – just as things were livening up in The Chain Locker. I had to get round The Lizard before Falmouth Coastguard’s promise of “South-westerly 5-7 occasionally Gale 8” shut the door.

That was the first gale. Over the next three days we had three of them. Minehead Coastguard, Dublin Coastguard, Holyhead Coastguard – they all had their own particular tone for announcing the unpleasantness: “Gale expected soon” as if it was some sort of desirable event like a village fete or “Gale now ceased” (thank heavens for that) followed in the same breath by “Southwesterly gale 8 expected soon”.

At least we were going in the right direction – and there is nothing a Rival likes better than a gale of wind behind her. But, on the other hand, this was the Irish Sea, so the deck was running with water pretty much the whole way and all that crawling around gybing and reefing meant that my knees were never completely dry – which plays havoc with the sleeping bag…

By the northeast corner of Anglesey, I’d had enough of it. There were still 45 miles to go to Liverpool and although I should arrive three hours after low water with the flood to take me up the Mersey, Liverpool Bar is not somewhere you want to be with 28kts blowing straight up the channel.

And that was when Moelfre came into view – or, more precisely, the ships taking shelter in its lee. There were sixteen of them. If someone with 50,000 tons under them can drop the hook for a bit of peace and quiet overnight, I’m sure I can.

In fact, with a 1.5m draft, I can get right into the bay – another favourite spot: this time just off the lifeboat slip.

Except I was still in eight metres when the engine overheat alarm started screaming.

This is the loudest alarm on the boat (and boats these days seem to have dozens of them). Sure enough, there was no water coming out of the exhaust – just a hollow cough like an asthmatic smoker.

I stopped the engine and let go the anchor – in that order.

Suddenly everything was calm and quiet. I made a cup of tea – and a peanut butter, honey and apple sandwich – and got out the rum bottle – and found Global Gold’s Overnights on the Bluetooth speaker, now we were back with a mobile signal…

Investigating the innards of the engine could wait for morning.

…and this is where it gets really good.

Not because a first look inside proved it wasn’t the impeller or a blocked intake. There was a torrent of raw water pouring out of the side of the block and straight into the bilge. The trouble was, there was no way of seeing exactly where it was coming from – not without removing the oil filter, which would just make matters worse.

I began to think of options: Could I get an engineer to come out to a desolate bay miles from the nearest harbour? If I managed to sail all the way up the Mersey, would anyone tow me into the Marina?

And it was Sunday.

But wait: Facebook is open on a Sunday. I filmed a hasty YouTube short. Sure enough, ten minutes later Hans-Christian Hartleb in Berlin came back with: “Water exhaust rusted through, my first guess. Would need to be changed. Welding most difficult. Good luck.”

If only I could see round the back of the filter…

But wait again: Paul Masters on Clytie once told me how he looked at the holes for his keel bolts with a thing called an Endoscope. It seemed such a good idea, having a camera that you could poke into small spaces that I bought one myself and it’s been sitting at the bottom of the bits locker ever since. Today it paid for itself.

 The hose clip on the engine block inlet had given way. I could see it all on my phone screen as clearly as if I had crawled in there myself – the whole Irish Sea pouring in.

It took ten minutes to fix – honestly, no more. And no engineer coming out from Holyhead in a RIB at £80 an hour…

Then the sun came out.

In fact, this was one occasion to get out the posh beer glass. It is, after all, a very good day.

The Graduates

Dateline: L’Aber Wra’ch

Middle of the Night

Yes. It is 0030hrs, the smell of fresh-ground coffee fills the cabin, and I am wide awake, washed and dressed (in fresh clothes). Mozart’s Romeo and Juliet is playing on the Bluetooth speaker – and so, the day begins.

Maybe this takes a bit of explaining.

My body clock is fucked.

I’m sorry, but there is no other way of putting it. I left Les Sables d’Olonne on Friday after a week in which I managed to get one interview with the local paper and handed out several hundred leaflets, accompanying each with a little French sentence. I became rather proficient with this by the end.

According to Google Translate, it said: “May I give you one of these? It’s about the French translation of my book.” Once I had that taped, I added: “To get started, it’s half-price!”

This was a big success. People smiled and thanked me – but that may be because I was saying something else entirely. Who knows?

Then, on Friday morning, the Windy App changed its mind from flat calm to westerly 10-15 knots – and I was conscious of two children about to graduate back in England. Sometimes you have to take advantage of the weather – even if you’re paid for the marina berth until Saturday.

That’s one of the nice things about France, isn’t it? “Bien sûr” to a refund – you didn’t get that in a British marina last time I tried it.

So, with a big bag of petit pois dans la gousse from the market and all the water bottles filled up (yes, a new tank is another reason for getting back), I set off up the Biscay coast.

Twelve hours later, I had managed precisely 23 miles and was looking at a night of rolling about in 3kts of wind and sleeping for 20 minutes at a time because, apparently it was a perfect night for fishing – and fishing boats have right of way. French fishing boats the more so (it was outside Les Sables d’Olonne that Alex Thomson, fast asleep and waiting for the tide in the entrance, was rammed by a fishing boat and effectively knocked out of the 2008 Vendée Globe).

Very pretty and all that – but not much good for going anywhere.

On the other hand, I could just about afford the fuel to motor three miles to a bay on the east of Île de Yeu. Anchored at one in the morning, I slept late, pottered about on the Internet (I’m now £25 over my international roaming allowance) and left when the breeze returned at midday – which was what was supposed to happen in the first place.

But it did mean I was 26 miles closer to the Golfe de Morbihan – a wonderful inland sea and nature reserve and, incidentally, home to the grave of the great singlehander Bernard Moitessier. I had never visited either. It was halfway to the English Channel. The westerlies were due to hold for a few days yet. I could afford one stop…

Or two…

 The thing about the Morbihan is that the tides between its many islands run at upwards of six knots. It is not a place to be mucking about in the dark. On the other hand, there was a little bay only 13 miles away on the island of Hoëdic where I could anchor and get another good night’s sleep.

Well, that’s what I could have done if I hadn’t spent the day making painfully slow progress the 43 miles from the last place.

To while away the time, I did some more research on my cunning plan to slip in between the rocks to the south and discovered that all the beacons were unlit, and the Navionics App insisted: “Approach from the North”.

Instead, I spent the night wafting very, very slowly the 13 miles across to the Morbihan, arriving with the dawn and a rising tide. By lunchtime, I would have paid my respects at the graveside and be sitting down to a celebration Plateau des Fruits de Mer.

I had promised myself this on the sale of the first copy of Le vieil homme hisse la voile. Amazon assured me someone had indeed bought one (apart from the six I had ordered myself as review copies). I was reduced to sending out three of them on spec – which is a bit like posting them directly into the recycling bin.

On closer inspection, it turned out the mystery purchaser was in the UK, not Les Sables at all. But since both my sisters insisted (with apologies) that it wasn’t them, I convinced myself a celebration was still in order – particularly with the extra €32 from the marina refund in my pocket.

Except that didn’t quite work out because the 13 miles to the Morbihan took so long that I still hadn’t made it when the Windy App changed its mind again and announced that if I didn’t get out of Biscay by Wednesday, I would be trapped by a strong north-westerly airflow that would sit there well into graduation season.

Which was how I came to spend another much-interrupted night – and you can’t do that indefinitely. Your subconscious gets so used to alarms that eventually, it just ignores them. You end up not waking up at all. The secret is to vary the alarm setting – have the occasional decent kip for 45 minutes or so.

I set a course to the southwest of the Île de Groix – at least I might get some peace and quiet out there.

The blasted fishermen were there as well.

Also, there was a time when you could rely on a trawler to go in a straight line for a bit. Now they link their fish finders to their autopilots. They’re all over the place. At one point, I was setting the alarms for 10 minutes – which, basically, meant spending all my time getting in and out of bed.

Would you believe I still woke up to find one of them on a collision course at what the AIS measured at 863 feet? You’ve never seen anyone roll up a super-zero and gybe so fast…

By the time we reached the Raz de Seine, I was seriously spooked. It’s a long time since I’ve made this notoriously tricky passage (39 years, I worked it out). Also, I sold all the Brittany pilot books at car boot sales in the early 90s. All I’ve got aboard now is the 2021 Reeds – and the Internet, of course.

Reeds offered this on the Raz: “In moderate to strong winds, it must be taken at slack water. In strong wind-against-tide which raises steep breaking seas and overfalls, the channel must not be used.”

All well and good, but when was slack water? Navionics put it 0330 – or 0430 when I noticed the little exclamation mark and “Guernsey time” (why?)

Reeds insisted I should wait for High Water Brest +5½hrs  – which would be not until 0530. Then there was the Yachting Monthly site: they seemed to suggest +6½hrs.

Everyone agreed that the window for this “nastiest of Europe’s tidal races” was half an hour at most (some put it at 15 minutes). It would have helped if the My Tide Times app agreed with Tide-Forecast.com (which itself was adrift from Tidetime.org by four whole minutes).

And which of them was on GMT+1 and which +2?

You never got this sort of thing before they invented the mobile signal.

Once I entered the Raz, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. I might get a few catnaps crossing the Iroise, but you have to maintain 5½ knots if you’re going to catch the tide up the Chenal du Four. Even with three sails up, that meant motor-sailing all the way and nobody can sleep with my engine insulation.

By the time I made it into L’Aber Vrac’h, I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to tie up, get off the boat, march straight into the Restaurant Le Vioben and order the biggest Plateau des Fruits de Mer they had on the menu. I’d been reading reviews all the way along the north coast: a German guest was very complimentary about his six-course meal.

I might leave my own review for the Vioben. For a start, their website says they are open from 10am to 10pm but there were some very doubtful faces when I walked in at 2.30. Then they wanted me to order dessert before I’d even speared my first bulot.

Actually, I never did get to spear a bulot. There weren’t any on my plateau. At least half the bigorneauxwere empty as well.

And the final insult that will make it a one-star review was that sitting on the top of it all was an araignée. I kid you not – a spider crab. Now that’s cheap.

I said so.

The waiter said crabes were rare. No, they’re not. They’re just more expensive – the sort of thing, in fact, that you might expect for a meal costing €76 – and what was with the wet-wipe in a plastic sachet that was completely impossible to open once your fingers were covered in mayonnaise and bits of seafood?  How about a finger bowl with a bit of lemon floating in it?

Worse than that, I hadn’t consulted Google Translate before getting started on all of this, so I may have come across not only as rude but ignorant as well. Moreover, it had nothing to do with the beer before lunch or the bottle of Muscadet…

I can only claim lack of sleep.

I don’t remember getting back to the boat – just waking up at half-past midnight

If you’re still with me after what is apparently 1,662 words, that’s because it’s now four in the morning, and in the middle of everything else, I’ve been trying to find out why Facebook is refusing me permission to comment.

Maybe they know something.

Le Vioben’s version

Alternatively, last year in St Malo with Hugo.

…  in fact, there’s a bit of history to the plateaux.

This is the big news.

Forget meeting Kirsten Neuschäfer in the Marina office. Forget the local paper coming to interview me today – they did.

The big news is that I have a cockpit table!

Being able to sit up for breakfast in the sunshine with your plate in front of you and not drop apricot jam all over your lap is, I would suggest, one of the (few) advantages of new boats over old ones and something I have been trying to contrive in my 1973 Rival for as long as I can remember.

In fact, this ambition for al-fresco dining pre-dates Samsara. I wanted a cockpit table in Largo – and that was back in 1981.

The problem was always where to put it – for one thing, the Rival cockpit is snug, to say the least – which is just what you want for bashing into half a gale, but not a lot of good for fine dining. Also, what are you going to do with a cockpit table when you set off into said gale?

The obvious solution – as always with small boats – was to delve into the Lin and Larry Pardey philosophy of making everything on the boat serve two purposes (half a dozen would be better).

I thought about the lid of the chart table or a bunk board (too big); maybe a washboard (too small).

Meanwhile, there were other things to think about – a new one-piece washboard for one. By the time I had slotted in the old one’s three pieces behind me, it was time to go out again.

And, I must say, the new washboard with Its window so you can see why you don’t want to go out there after all and its 12 coats of varnish, really is a work of art. It is only now that I realise it is neither too big nor too small for a cockpit table. In fact, if only I could find some way of fitting it with legs, it would be perfect.

But maybe…

If there was some way of mounting it on top of the tiller, it wouldn’t need legs, would it? Maybe some folding attachment underneath…

I will spare you the trial and error – there is nothing more boring than mad inventors trying to explain the development process. Suffice it to say that because Samsara’s original owner, the extraordinarily innovative Birmingham engineer who fitted her out from a hull, had contrived two raised locker lids for the lazarette (which could double as seats high enough to see where you were going), one end of the washboard (sorry cockpit table) could fit under the handles. Then it turned out that the plastic container which soaks my breakfast porridge was just the right size to support the other end (more dual-purpose).

It turns out the whole thing is as solid as a rock. The raised seats make an excellent sideboard. Now you could hold a dinner party in Samsara’s cockpit. Well, a dinner party for two, perhaps.

So don’t all turn up at once.

Does everyone have those days when everything goes wrong? When, in fact, things go wrong from breakfast through ‘til suppertime for days on end?

And yet, while the catalogue of disasters piles up like unopened bills on the hall table, a tiny voice at the back of your mind keeps insisting that at any moment – it could be the very next moment –  something absolutely wonderful is about to happen.

Or is it just me?

I came to Les Sables d’Olonne because it is the world centre for singlehanded sailing. If there was anywhere on earth to launch the French edition of Old Man Sailing, this was it. Only last week, the whole town turned out to celebrate Kirsten Neuschäfer not only winning the Golden Globe singlehanded-round-the-world Race – but becoming the first woman to win any round-the-world sailing event, ever.

And in the process, becoming the single most famous sailor on the planet.

 I had this idea that all I had to do was turn up in Les Sables d’Olonne, and I could somehow siphon off some of the residual excitement and turn it into publicity for what is now called Le vieil homme hisse la voile (apparently, that works better in French).

My one bit of good luck had been running into an Australian in Lymington who had read the blog and came to say hello… actually, he didn’t at first. Instead, he stood on the quay watching me faffing about at the top of the mast, wondering if I would be able to get down again (I had accidentally disconnected myself from all means of support and was hanging on with my knees, so I knew I would be able to get down – just a bit quicker than I hoped).

All of this culminated in the astonishing coincidence that the watcher on the quay had grown up in Australia in the same small town as Don McIntyre, who runs the Golden Globe Race. He could put me in touch. I could ask Don to pass me on to all his media friends. I would be all over the local television news! My picture would be in the paper! The chat show hosts would be lining up their sofas on the dock! This was going to be brilliant!

Actually, no. Don emailed to say that the trouble with sailing and the French media is that there is too much sailing and not enough media. In fact, he hadn’t been able to get a single outlet to review the GGR film…

And as for my offer to send him a copy of the book: apparently, he hasn’t read a book in five years – unless you count the trashy novel on the Atlantic crossing in his Mini 5.80…

So, it is something of an understatement to say that things were not going according to plan. I had emailed everybody I could find on Google. I had asked politely if I might leave leaflets on the counter at the chandlery and the sailmaker (at least that’s what Google Translate said I was asking, it could have been something else.)

And then I got a puncture in my back tyre – and then another one straight after because I must have pinched the new inner tube with the tyre lever when I was changing it. So, I had to walk all the way across town to the repair shop following Google Maps (which meant going by pretty way).

After all of which, would you believe the Amazon parcel with the six copies of the book I had ordered for all those journalists and chat show hosts and reviewers, had not been delivered to the marina office after all.

“But certainly, not at all, for you nothing,” as the girl behind the counter put it.

But see here. Amazon has said my package has been delivered in your box of letters…

“Ah, the box of letters…”

Her colleague went to look.

It was while he was looking that I noticed the woman at the back of the queue – the one with the wild golden curls and the faded T-shirt advertising Epifanes yacht varnish and not pushing in when it wasn’t her turn or demanding this and that of everybody in sight.

There was something terribly familiar about her.

Surely, it couldn’t be Kirsten Neuschäfer herself – only the most famous sailor in the world, the darling of the media, the one person with access to more free publicity than you can shake a fluffy microphone at…

The marina assistant returned holding an Amazon package with my name on it.

I thanked him absent-mindedly, while saying to the patient Epifanes person: “Should I be congratulating you?”

She laughed: “If you must.”

So, I did.

And I gave her a leaflet.

And I told her my story (she did ask).

Then I gave her a book – and inscribed it.

And gave her a whole bundle of leaflets to give to her friends (her influential friends in sailing and the media).

And she was friendly and down-to-earth and thanked me as if she didn’t have every PR person in the universe pressing their products on her.

And she posed with me for a selfie.

When I got back to the boat, there was an email from one Blanche Poisson, of the Les Sables Vendée Journal. She would be very interested to meet me for an interview.

We’re meeting on board on Thursday. She says she speaks some English, but otherwise, M. Google will be our friend.

It is a law of nature in France (maybe it is a law of the Fifth Republic) that nowhere in the country is more than ten minutes’ walk from a bakery.

This means that at 7.00 a.m, as another blazing day began in Les Sables d’Olonne, the town was up and out for the morning’s baguette du moulin.

And I was up with them, nose to the screen, following Google Maps’ little blue dots to La Moulin de la Chaume (boulangerie et viennoiserie).

Actually, I wasn’t just up. I was up and bathed (well, a flannel, the little blue bowl balanced on top of the loo and a kettle of water courtesy of the marina shore-power). A fresh T-shirt and ready to face – not just the day – but a most important week.

For I am here to promote the French edition of Old Man Sailing: Le vieil homme hisse la voile (literally “The old man hoists the sail”). The translator, Christian Calliyannis, normally translates poetry and insisted it was a much better title – it has emotion in the words, apparently.

Apparently, he is right because Olivier Piquer in Montreal, who has narrated the Audible edition emails: “You have a beautiful book.”

This was important because it is a bit presumptuous to rock up in the world’s headquarters of singlehanded sailing and offer oneself for interview (via an interpreter, of course) to TV and radio stations, the local paper – and, frankly, anyone else who will give me the time of day. Particularly, when only last week, they were debriefing Kirsten Neuschäfer on becoming not only the winner of the Golden Globe Race but the first woman to win any Round-The-World sailing event.

But then recently, I have received an ego-boost. A review for the last book, The Voyage, from someone called Cassidy in the United States on May 11^th reads:

“John Passmore is my new favorite writer.

“It’s truly wonderful to read someone who infuses all their work with wit and charm. For better or worse, he is a self-aware individual who never attempts to hide his warts. Truly it’s the opposite, he embraces them with humor and acceptance. I can’t recommend his books enough. If you love sailing, you will of course love his works, but I’m certain you could never set foot on a boat and still greatly enjoy the time you spent in John Passmore’s tiny floating world. This is a quote from “Old Man Sailing” I now find myself sharing with everyone, “It is a great comfort to be stupid. Disasters about to happen do not trouble the minds of those too dim to imagine them.” If you can read that and not laugh, you simply have no sense of humor. We have all had that feeling. That moment when we realize the only reason we find ourselves amid a disaster was our own inability to see what was obviously coming our way. Read his books!!”

So, on the strength of that, in Baltimore at the end of the Jester Challenge, I went off on the bus to Skibbereen and got a thousand leaflets printed in French, complete with translations of some of the best reviews of the English version – along with boastful little sub-heads like “10 000 exemplaires vendus en anglais” and “882 évaluations Amazon. 4,6 étoiles”. If I didn’t get on telly, at least I could hand them out in a town which can’t really tell the difference between singlehanded sailors and minor deities.

I wasn’t deliberately setting out to test this theory as I embarked on the search for baguette. But Google Maps landed me outside the boulangerie Moulin de la Chaume only to find the door firmly closed. An ancient, curling print-out informed customers that the establishment would be closed from the 22^nd of June until the 6^th of July. A hand-written note beside it advised them that their baguette du moulin would be available from the distributor on the quay.

Retracing the little blue dots, I found no sign of a bakery on the quay. There were cafés open at a quarter past seven with Frenchmen arguing about politics over small cups of coffee and even smaller glasses of cognac. But no baguette du moulin.

Not wanting to interrupt their discussion about the riots, I looked around for someone else to ask. There was only the road sweeper in his orange jacket, emptying the bins. I polished a simple sentence and tried it out on him.

Only in France would you find a road sweeper who not only makes an effort to understand your tortured grammar but actually takes you to buy your bread: “But certainly one may buy baguette du moulin. One may buy it from the automat for pieces.”

And certainly one might: A machine delivers warm bread down a chute every morning (and hot pizza by night, according to the sign).

It was a good start to the day – and given that, I turned to my new friend, the road sweeper and asked him: “Do you like the sail?” It was a reasonable question. He was, after all, resident in a town which turns out several times a year to line the breakwaters and wish Bon Voyage to one bunch of sailors or another.

But yes, he liked the sail. In Les Sables d’Olonne, all the world likes the sail.

I gave him a leaflet. He paused to read the headline: “Fascinating history which addresses well also to sailors or landlubbers”.

He smiled. He thanked me extravagantly.

And he put it in his pocket – not the bin, which was most gratifying.

An early morning walk through the back streets of Les Sables d’Olonne for the breakfast baguette.

Ƒor a 6.5m boat, Anna Lusja II has a very powerful foghorn.

It’s electric. It would not disgrace a small coaster.

And it is pointing into her own cockpit.

When it went off in Baltimore Harbour, I nearly jumped out of my skin – and heads popped out of hatches for half a mile around.

But then Kris Matuszewsai doesn’t mind being being noticed. This is just as well. His home-built, self-designed breaking-all-the-rules boat is bound to get noticed.

Look at the picture – because no description is going to do her justice. Some of the failed attempts at conveying the last finisher in this year’s Jester Challenge are “a floating egg”, “a box under sail”,  “The Tardis meets Captain Nemo…”

Anna Lusja II

Let’s put it this way: Kris is an engineer who approaches problems from the perspective of “Here is the difficulty. How do we get round it?”

His difficulty, two years ago, was that he had sailed his 21ft Colvic Sunbeam, Anna Lusja I, from Greece to Portugal, the Canaries, the Carribbean, back to Europe and he really wanted a boat with a Great Cabin at the stern.

At the same time, he didn’t want anything over seven metres so that he could get it onto a trailer singlehanded. Also, he wanted a boat that could take the ground, that he could build himself and (after one forestay failure and three broken shrouds over the years), he did not want standing rigging.

Meet Anna Lusja II – 6.5m overall and 2.5m in the beam. Essentially square. Flat-bottomed with two ballasted asymmetrical retractable keels, twin rudders, steered by two whipstaffs; she has two separate cabins (the great cabin at the stern), a protected cockpit in the middle (green water has never entered the cockpit), two junk sails on unstayed masts and (well, why not) a composting head.

Kris sat in his great cabin, his elbow on a chart table winking with electronics and said: “I knew what I wanted.”

Kris Matuszewsai – I knew what I wanted.

You must admit that if you don’t mind being stared at, overhearing rude remarks from people in waterfront bars and everybody at the start of this year’s Jester Challenge wondering whether you are actually going to get over the start line at all – or simply drift sideways into Plymouth Breakwater, then the Ocean-going Bathtub might be just the thing.

OK, so he did arrive in Bushe’s Bar in Baltimore a whole day after everyone else. But on the way down the North Sea from Poland, with a stiff north-easterly behind him, he was clocking a consistent six knots and surfing at up to ten.

So, if you meet him in the Bahamas, be nice.

The great cabin

The cockpit – with two whipstaffs accessible from both cabins.

It was a bit like waking up on Groundhog Day – every morning, the Windy app showed the same forecast: a whole week of north easterlies.

Well, that was fine. I could stay in Sixhaven marina right in the centre of Amsterdam. I could go to Haarlem on the train and see the Frans Hals Museum – I’d already been to Leiden for the Saturday market and spent whole days following Google Maps down cycle paths and getting lost in the Van Gough Museum.

Best of all, the Aries self-steering was fixed. I was all ready for the start of the Jesters in Plymouth – but that was nearly three weeks away. All I had to do was make sure I got to the West Country sometime in the next month…

If you don’t know about the Jester Challenge, you should: It’s for eccentric (usually eccentric) singlehanders in very small boats who got kicked out of the OSTAR.

In the old days, like when I did the transatlantic back in ‘88, the smallest class – the Jester class – was for boats between 25 and 30ft. It was named after Blondie Hasler’s curious junk-rigged Folkboat, Jester.

But the Royal Western’s race committee, sitting in their expensive hotel accommodation in Newport, Rhode Island, after welcoming all the winners in their big boats, got fed up with waiting a month or more for the little guys to turn up. So, they raised the lower limit to 30ft.

A bunch of the excluded small-boat sailors promptly rebelled: “Sod it, we’ll organise our own event,” they said. “And we won’t have any nonsense about rules and regulations and safety inspections. Or prizes, come to that…”

So, on Sunday, 43 of us will set out simultaneously from Pwllheli and Plymouth to sail to Baltimore in Ireland with no more formality than having to sign a “blood chit” stating that if we sink, it’s our own stupid fault. Last year the destination was Newport – the weather was awful. Nobody got there – but on the other hand, nobody needed to be rescued. They all retired to ports around the Atlantic in seamanlike fashion with dignity intact. Two years before that, it was the Azores in the sunshine.

My boat, Samsara, at 31ft 10in, is technically too big for the Jester (but we know what they think of rules and regulations). Apparently, the skipper’s attitude is more important than overall length.

Besides, this year we will be in Baltimore for the gathering of the O’Driscoll clan. Last time, it was the Pirate Festival. I daresay the Guinness will flow just the same.

There has been only one small insect in the liniment: As I unfolded my bike in Ijmuiden to go and get my stupid black Brexit passport stamped by the immigration office on the other side of town, there was an important-sounding splash as a vital part of the chain tensioning mechanism dropped into the marina.

I walked to the immigration office. It was an hour each way. So that was one reason for stopping in Dover – there’s a Brompton bicycle agent in Folkestone. Also, my friend Patrick could get down to Dover in his camper van for fifteen pints and a curry. According to Windy, I could still get to Plymouth before the north easterlies dissolved into a weekend of calm.

It was with only a small degree of anxiety that I approached Beachy Head 24 hours late, flying along goose-winged with a reef in the main, four rolls in the jib and 80metres of 14mm multiplait in a bight astern to keep us straight. I cooked dinner (kidney bean chipotle with root vegetables and rice), and it was only as I was washing up that I felt the need to pay attention to the Aries and stop us actually bumping into Beachy Head (although more of that later).

Then, I had to go and adjust it again – and I still hadn’t finished washing up.

Adjusting the Aries is a matter of releasing a length of 8mm chain from an attachment on the tiller and fastening it a link or two further along. But this didn’t seem right – the tiller was all the way over to starboard, and there was no weather helm.

It took me an awfully long time to realise that where the tiller was pointing bore no relation at all to where the rudder was pointing. One side of the massive bronze casting which holds the two together had simply snapped in half – and the other side was bent and threatening to give way too.

Essentially, I had lost my steering.

Fortunately, I happen to know all about this. I have rehearsed the “steering failure disaster”.

That is to say, I have rehearsed it in my head. I carry a contraption called a SeaBrake, an Australian device which claims to do everything from getting you over those notorious Queensland harbour bars without broaching – and then stopping the boat from rolling her gunwales under once you’re anchored inside.

It can even be used for emergency steering – just tow it behind the boat with a line to each quarter and pull in the side you want to turn to. You can cross an ocean with a SeaBrake when an Orca bites off your rudder. You can certainly get to Plymouth.

…although, not with 80m of octoplait dragging astern – and with it, as I noticed now that I came to look closely, a large orange fishing float. How did that get there? It appeared to be wrapped around the rope. Anyway, it was kicking up a bow wave fit for a destroyer.

It disappeared as soon as I released one end of the line – which came in laboriously hand over hand and filled the cockpit – also it meant that the boat, with no steering and no drag behind her, started wandering all over the English Channel. I hove to and set about extracting the SeaBrake from its stowage behind the bike in the fo’c’sle. The bike is stowed behind the dinghy (I could tidy up later).

The SeaBrake

The SeaBrake has its own lines (45m, non-stretch) and needs a length of 10mm chain to help it sink – also, a fender on the tail end so that you can get it out of the water backwards when the time comes (I told you I’d thought about this).

It was only after I shackled the chain to the wrong line and rooted around finding the right size cable tie to mouse the pin that I realised this would all be a lot easier without a cockpit full of rope. Believe me, it was a very, very careful old man who set about paying out the warp without getting it round his leg or the gear lever.

Only when the cockpit was clear did I notice the chain lying on the floor, accusingly – not attached to anything.

This meant everything had to come in again. It was while I was cutting another cable tie, finding another shackle – not that one, the pin wouldn’t fit through the links – that my head torch ran out of charge. That’s the thing about rechargeable LED lamps – you don’t get any warning: One minute, bright as day – the next, total darkness,

And silence.

Funny that. The Force 5 that had blown us all the way from Dover seemed to have dropped away completely. Looking for some explanation, the only thing to be seen in the pitch darkness was the glow of the instruments – particularly the depth recorder… showing 1.4m.

Looking ahead, there appeared only total blackness – not a glimmer of horizon. Just the impenetrable black you get from looking at a cliff in the middle of the night,

A cliff so close that you have to look right up in the air to find the top of it.

So, that was what had happened to the wind – it was blanketed completely by Beachy Head. When I hove to, I hadn’t given much thought to which tack I was on. I was three miles offshore and rigging emergency steering wasn’t going to take long, was it?

Well, now we were in 1.4m of water, and Samsara hits the bottom when the little screen says 1.3.

Make it snappy: engine on, reverse – and back out with not a thought for the indignity of the situation.

Beachy Head (by day)

Then back to the job in hand: I think Australians buying the SeaBrake must all have secondary cockpit winches. If you haven’t, how are you supposed to pull in the line on the side you want to turn to?

I was about to get out the handy billy when common sense tapped lightly on the subconscious with a polite suggestion: Would it not be a better idea just to put into Brighton? Maybe the broken tiller would get me that far if I could only find a way to brace it, somehow…

I took a closer look. It was off-centre, but that wouldn’t matter – if I could just strengthen the broken side with something solid – and there’s nothing more solid than the big adjustable spanner: half a kilo of Halfords’ finest (rusty) chrome vanadium. Nothing would bend that.

It was while I was tightening the lashing and tying off the reef knots with my teeth that I looked over the stern – and there, trailing behind the boat like an obedient dachshund, was the servo-rudder of the Aries still tied to its safety line. The sacrificial linkage had snapped.

That was odd. In five years, it had never been subjected to the kind of force to threaten the legendary Aries cast-aluminium strength. Indeed, when I had one on Largo in the 1980s, that never snapped, either.

Maybe the big lobster pot had something to do with it. Hitting that at seven knots would be enough to slam the tiller over pretty hard. It would certainly be enough to pop the servo-rudder.

It was not until two in the morning that everything was squared away, and the big spanner proved that it should always be the first choice in a steering emergency: It took us all the way past Brighton, past St Catherine’s Point, Anvil Point, past Portland Bill, all the way across Lyme Bay. If there was any justice, it should get us into Plymouth on Saturday night before the wind fell light…

Actually, no, it didn’t. Instead, I spent Saturday night anchored in Starehole Bay outside Salcombe, waiting for the “westerly 8kts” promised by the Windy app early on Sunday morning.

Lunchtime found me going backwards, fiddling with the new Super Zero sail in two knots of wind while the Radio 4 forecaster got all excited about this weather pattern being set for the week and 30C in places away from the coast.

Two miles off the coast, there was an “occasional fog bank” with me in the middle of it, listening to the Eddystone’s mournful honking and trying to work out whether I had enough fuel to get into Mayflower Marina without stopping and having to anchor just where HM Harbourmaster says “No Anchoring”.

That was how I came to spend the next night in Hope Cove (which West Country sailors will know is all of ten miles from Starehole Bay). Five thirty the following morning had me rowing ashore with the bike and the empty fuel cans to ride the pretty Devon lanes to the Co-Op filling station at Marlborough.

Oh, I got to Plymouth in the end. Mark at MP Welding found the last brazing rod in Devon, and the rudder and the tiller now agree on where they’re going.

It might make a good story for the other eccentrics in Jolly Jacks.

Or maybe not; I just met a man who sailed from Emden in a 27footer…

By the crew, I don’t mean a row of matching T-shirts on the rail – or complaints from the foredeck that the sun goes behind the sail every time I go about.

Singlehanders don’t have that kind of crew. What I mean is the autopilot and the windvane. The one was getting far more attention than it deserved, and the other, none at all.

When I bought Samsara, she came with a Raymarine tillerpilot of indeterminate age. The previous owner insisted it worked – and it did.

Until I left it out in the rain.

I don’t mean rain going sideways in a 72-hour Atlantic gale with breaking seas that fill the cockpit so that the tillerpilot goes floating off like a bath toy at the mercy of a two-year-old.

No, it just rained and the wretched thing stopped working.

“Water ingress” as the local Raymarine agent called it. Obviously, it was a lot older than I thought. I bought a new one.

Within a month, that was back at Raymarine under the guarantee: “water ingress”, the report came back.

The second time it went back, they said they’d send me a new unit.

They never did – just the old one back again – and some free advice: “Don’t leave it out when it’s not in use.”

But what happens if I need to use it in the rain?

I found out in the Cape Verde islands – water ingress … and then again in the Caribbean…

By Grenada, I had realised I was never going to remember to bring the thing in every time it rained. So, I got the local sailmaker to run up a little waterproof jacket for it with a Velcro fastening at the back and a window at the front so I could see to press the buttons. It was rather like dressing a favourite doll.

But it didn’t do any good.

By the time I got back to Falmouth, I had already placed my order as soon as the mobile signal popped up off the Scillies – and this time I would have a proper autopilot, with the compass and the circuit board hidden away below decks. This one arrived in an enormous cardboard box full of component parts and manuals – and advice about routing the cables and avoiding electrical interference…

I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I sent it back and ordered another tillerpilot – and three months later, it was still in perfect working order. I emphasised this when I sold it on eBay and got Dave Jones of AdvancedTech Marine to order up another box of component parts, manuals and what-not. Dave knows all about electrical interference.

It seems a lot of trouble to go to just to get in and out of harbour at the same time as dealing with the warps and fenders.

Because the real self-steering is the Aries windvane. This came with the boat. It’s the lift-up version like the one I had on Largo back in the 80s – the same model that Jon Sanders choose. If it’s good enough for someone who’s been round the world eleven times on his own…

Aries owners tend to be a bit evangelical about their self-steering, so it is only right that once in my lifetime, I should make the pilgrimage to a little lock-up industrial unit on the north side of Amsterdam. There an ex-plumber called Lean Nelis repairs and manufactures what he unashamedly calls “the beautiful mechanism”.

Headquarters of the Aries empire

Lean Nelis

I reckon my Aries is a 1990 version – which makes it thirty-three years old – and in all that time, I don’t think it’s had a proper service. I didn’t realise it needed one until Con Brosnan in Ireland showed me his (lying on the floor of his dining room like a piece of farm machinery in a barn).

His didn’t wobble. It didn’t clonk either. The whole thing seemed much more “solid” somehow. This was not surprising – as Lean was to discover, thirty years’ of wear on the main shaft had moved the stainless steel axis in ways that were never intended. In all, it took him 13 hours to put it all right what with all the wrecked bushes and bearings – and there were some extra hours devoted to sitting around the workbench surrounded by tooth vane carriages and pivot shaft spacers, drinking coffee and getting to know the neighbours.

This part of north Amsterdam used to be the artists’ quarter, and it’s still a rabbit warren of artisan workshops. For instance, next door there was Nico, who could talk for hours about rebuilding old bicycles.

Of course, there’s no money in old bikes – not in the Netherlands where everyone has an old bike – so the rest of the time, he repairs saxophones…

…saxophones? Did he do clarinets?

Sure, he could do clarinets.

The next day, I delivered mine. It hadn’t been serviced since before I took off for the Caribbean in 2021 – much against the advice of the last woodwind technician. The whole thing had begun to wobble, I told Nico.

He fixed it – replaced the cork, gave it new pads – and offered some free advice: Don’t let it dry out. Get a length of garden hose. Make some holes in it and push a damp sponge inside. Then insert the whole thing into the instrument when not in use.

Or, I suppose I could leave it out in the rain…

You can tell the age of a tree by counting the rings.

It’s the same with boats – except, with boats, you count cable ties.

I am well aware that Samsara is an old boat because any time I investigate the wiring, I discover that generations of previous owners have been most fastidious when adding new electrical gadgets – each one making sure to keep the wiring tidy by attaching the new cable to the existing network with cable ties – more cable ties.

This means that what started in 1973 as a single wire to the nav lights on the pulpit soon doubled up with the fo’c’sle reading lights … and then the blower to ventilate the wardrobe locker, a tape player, cool box, more lights for the fo’c’sle (why?) Then, we had all the stuff for the mast – lights, wind instrument and, in due course, a great fat information highway for the radar. And that was all before the owner before the owner before last added an electric windlass.

I was aware of all this, of course – and not unduly troubled. I just added a few more ties when I decided the perfect place for the fan was between the fridge and the heater (the theory was that it would draw cool air towards the one and then blow the warmed exhaust across the other – as I say, that was the theory).

And then, today, I set about installing the new “active” antenna for the Navtex. This meant routing it from the chart table back to the pushpit – although, of course, you do it the other way round because you’d never get the aerial through all the little holes.

Also, it meant taking out the old cable.

I believe I may be the first owner to think of this. Every time I look in a locker, I find redundant wiring – some of it already snipped off…some, indeed, still connected to 12volts at the other end…

Now I understand why. The old Navtex cable was secured at every opportunity – either to the cable for the stern light – which, like the port and starboard on the pulpit, had obviously claimed first mover’s rights. The stern light’s cable ties were screwed to the deckhead, the back of the navigator’s seat, the shelf above what might once have been a quarter berth. There was even a bit of conduit in there at one point.

And where the stern light cable went, so did the Navtex cable – and the autopilot cable – and a tiny and ancient bit of domestic two-core with a piece of plastic tape wrapped around it clearly stating “ply~??x”. I suspect that this must be some obscure translation of “compass light”. It was disconnected at both ends.

Meanwhile, how was I supposed to extricate it now that it had been joined by a GPS, a plotter, a wind charger and a water charger – each with its own collection of cable ties? I found five of them at one point – by which I mean five in the same place, literally on top of each other.

Like an enthusiastic gardener with a new set of secateurs, I set to work with the wire cutters.

This can be a problem. It’s not long since I snipped off the port forward cabin light. How was I to know someone had decided to route it through the front of the heads compartment and then back down the other side?

Gradually the pile of snipped-off cable ties grew – like dead-heads in July. A heap of ancient wire piled up alongside it. I could feel the boat getting lighter as I worked.

It would be interesting to know just how many redundant cable ties there were. It should be 50, of course – since the boat came out of her mould in 1973. But by the time I thought of counting them, I had already thrown them away.

Anyway, it would have been pretty pointless: I’ve been finding more all evening – under the table, under the tea towel, in my coffee cup (noticed that just in time) and – I knew there was something wrong – inside my shirt…

When you think about it, aeroplanes don’t go flying about with 50-year-old wings, do they?

The question came up while standing beside Tony Jones’s mobile rigging workshop with Samsara’s mast laid out horizontally. Tony was explaining how the sheave assembly at the bottom had dropped out in front of his eyes, the headsail furling gear had disintegrated in his hands and what really puzzled him was how I had managed to hoist the main – there being nothing left of the bearing at the top.

But a 50-year-old mast – built in the days when they were just starting on metal masts – would, he insisted, be good for another 50 years.

Particularly once we’d epoxied a steel plate in the place where there was currently a gaping hole.

Tony doesn’t believe in replacing stuff that doesn’t need replacing – as evidenced by his ”Mobile Rigging Service” – an ancient Mercedes van which hasn’t moved from its corner of Conwy Marina car park in living memory.

The rig was going to be another aspect of the Big Refit: A new Profurl system (Tony thought the new model Furlex looked a bit flimsy). Then there was new standing rigging, new halyards. He even talked me into a new VHF aerial combined with a Windex – “although we’ll have to move your little man”.

• Well, as long as you put him back facing to starboard. He has to face to starboard, or he doesn’t work.

The Lego Man is now leaning at a crazy angle. I can’t see why it should make him any less effective. If you want to know how a Lego figure dressed as a pirate and with the ship’s name across his chest comes to be at the top of the mast, you’ll have to read https://oldmansailing.com/lightning.

But there’s not much point in new rigging if it’s attached to old fastenings. I’d been carrying around the deadweight of the new deck bolts for a year – a fellow-member of the Rival Owners Association had been given a quote for fabricating new ones, and the owner of the machine shop explained: “Of course, they’d be cheaper if you had half a dozen sets all at once – or a hundred would be cheaper still…”

He never did get a hundred takers, but there must have been about a dozen of us who chipped in. But was it really necessary to go up from 10mm to 12? They’re massive.

Actually, this didn’t seem to be such a bad idea when I removed the old ones, and one of the nuts turned out to be cracked right across.

Then we got at the chainplates. If you know your Rivals you will recognise that these come in two parts – one each side the main bulkhead and they’re designed to be bolted together to squeeze the wood between them and it’s the friction as much as the bolts themselves which is supposed to stop them moving.

On each side, one of the plates has a flat top like the figure 7. This is to take the deck bolt.

Except some extra strain by some daft skipper holding on to too much sail for too long (not me – never me, of course) had caused the 3mm steel to bend so that the flat tops of the 7s were now angled awkwardly upwards.

We took them to Richie.

Richie Williams runs a metal workshop out of a cowshed in Glenadda. It hasn’t had much attention since the cows moved out, but Richie can do marvels with metal. He once replaced the bushes on my self-steering without having the slightest idea of what it was or how it was supposed to work.

The new chainplates are 5mm, and the flat tops are reinforced with what somebody decided to call “gussets”. I don’t think they’re likely to bend – although I mustn’t delete the picture of the old ones. Maybe it will help me see reason when I get over-enthusiastic about beating into a Force Seven – even if I do now have an extra layer of chopped strand mat on each side of the bulkhead.

And yes, the mast is up again – and it has taken me from North Wales to Amsterdam where, yesterday I painted over the epoxy rather in the manner of a crone applying make-up with a trowel.

Nobody at Sixhaven marina (a third of the price of St Katherine’s) has said anything. Indeed, I have even had some compliments – there’s no point in going to all this trouble if you don’t get compliments…