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?)

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gpl150ze4o

The BBC reports that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get treatment on the NHS for adult ADHD. Whether you believe this mental condition is a narcissistic affectation or a genuine handicap for 5% of the world’s population, there is no hiding the overwhelming demand for professional help.

I was lucky; I contacted the ADHD Foundation back in 2017 – I doubt they are so free with their consultations now. They told me mine was in the 1% of the most severe cases (finally, I had excelled at something!)

But I did not go to a psychiatrist. There was no way I would take psychotic drugs in the hope of a “cure”.

Instead, I came to terms with the condition. Indeed, I learned to embrace it – which, I would suggest, is a much better solution.

The story is told in my book Faster, Louder, Riskier, Sexier: A wonderful life with ADHD.

I had to rewrite it six times before I learned to appreciate the central character. Now people tell me it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Certainly, I am intensely proud of it.

If it helps anyone else, then that is a bonus.

https://amzn.eu/d/bbM5CS3

The stopover in Torquay was supposed to be a relaxing few days of light provisioning interspersed with a couple of good meals in company.

Instead, it started off with a godawful thrash round to Dartmouth, motorsailing into a Force6 to get the autopilot fixed. No fewer than three electronics engineers had fiddled with this, but it took Devon Marine Electronics to sort it (but only if you can get here today!)

The other major item on the maintenance list would have to wait until the Canaries. You might consider this to deserve a bit more importance than I was giving it (the alternator had packed up) but I had a new one wedged in the spares locker under the starboard berth and I reckoned that I wouldn’t need to charge the batteries – not now I have a Watt&Sea  hydrogenerator as well as 900W of solar panels and a Rutland 1200 wind charger. The boat is a floating power station.

And I certainly shouldn’t be needing the autopilot anyway, not now I’ve got a Hydrovane.

The Hydrovane, I must tell you, is quite the best thing I’ve added in years – possibly forever (and here I’m going to upset the Aries fraternity).

Yes, I was an Aries afficionado for decades – ever since I got my first Lift-Up gear in 1987. Samsara came with the same model – which made it almost 40 years old. It’s sad end off the Grand Banks and at the hands of DHL and Dutch customs, I have described elsewhere. This was the first real test of the Hydrovane.

In no time at all, the “crew that never sleeps, never needs feeding, is never seasick” was upgraded to “shipmate”, so fondly did I think of it. The difference has been simply astonishing. For the first time, the cockpit is not divided by tiller lines. In fact, in anything but the heaviest weather, I have taken to lifting the tiller vertically to get it out of the way – after all, I’m no longer using the ship’s main rudder – that just trails along behind the keel, hardly moving.

Nor are there “reins” xxx for adjusting the course to get caught up in the winches – the new “snaffle lines” being routed neatly round the guardrails.

I have made a list of nine distinct advantages of the Hydrovane over the Aries and only one on the other account (the Aries is easier to lift out of the water).

All of which meant the device acquired human characteristics and deserved a name. So, he has become Hawkins as in Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, now a strapping 19-year-old standing at the helm in a T-shirt in all weathers…

He was going to have his first real test as we passed Finisterre. I like to do this at a range of at least 100 because of the Orcas. This time, there was another reason. Readers in the UK might not have heard of her, but Storm Gabrielle was a major event of late September in the Atlantic. She started as a tropical storm east of Bermuda xxx and thoroughly roughed-up the Azores before arriving off the Iberian peninsula with predicted winds up 60kts.

Last time I came this way, I would have been steamrollered completely. Now, with Starlink and the Windy app, I could lay my plans. These involved edging over to the west so that I would just slide above her in easterly Force7s and then turn south as they backed to the north.

And so it worked out – at least to begin with…

I laid out my 80m of 14mm multiplait in a bight astern, I returned the tiller to its proper place and set up Hawkins with some weather helm from the new telescopic tube which fits into the Autohelm socket – and off we went. Like a rocket.

With no main and a headsail that got smaller and smaller as the windspeed climbed higher and higher, the boat was ploughing along at seven and eight knots in a welter of spray with me battened down inside, shining a torch through the new companionway window to see the vane wandering lazily this way and that as if it was a run down to Osborne Bay for lunch.

The trouble was, I had miscalculated Gabrielle’s progress just slightly. Instead of skirting the “red wind” and staying in the sub-30kt orange zone, I was a bit startled to discover we had skipped right through the red bit into the blue part. The “blue part” is 40-50kts.

And so it was – at least in the gusts. I measured one gust at 49kts (you can see it on the YouTube video below) and don’t forget we were doing 8kts downwind at the time which, even if you allow for keeping the waves 30° on the quarter, must still amount to 56kts of true wind.

And that, if you were wondering, works out at just over the border into “Severe Storm Force11” country.

The worst of it was that this was a gust, and if I set up the weather helm to cope with it, once the blast returned to its usual 40kts, the ship’s rudder would try and push the stern into the waves.

The answer, it came to me, as I peered through the window at the mayhem outside, was to replace the telescopic rod with the autopilot and set it to steer by the wind.

The autopilot (the newly replaced and repaired) autopilot is one of the “intelligent” breed that can assess weather helm. It proved itself on the last Atlantic crossing, so well that it earned its own personality (“Eric” is in his 50’s with an earring and many a yarn about crewing Shamrock for Sir Thomas Lipton in the 1860s xxx).

Anyway, the two of them talked the same language – the language of the wind – and it was fascinating to see how they worked together, neither one of them raising a sweat.

We rode like that for 48 hours clocking up day’s runs of 119 and 112 miles. It would have been more but by the end of the second day, the headsail was down to the merest scrap of reinforced Vectran around the clew. Really, I reckon there was no more than a metre between sheet and stay, which means the actual area can have been no more than half a square metre – and we were still surfing at up to ten knots.

I daresay the Rival Owners Association will be relieved to hear this. It was only afterwards that I discovered someone had raised concerns that my GPS plot on one of the marine traffic apps had suddenly stopped. Well, it would have done, wouldn’t it? They only work when you’re in mobile phone range, are within reach of a ship with the upgraded equipment, or you’ve paid an annual subscription to tell people where you are.

If you want to know where I am, it’s easy (and free). Just search for me on Polarsteps. Not only do you get a position every five minutes, but a commentary and pictures as well. Just be aware that when I’m offshore, it only gets synchronized when I’m online.

After that, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. Gabrielle wandered off to trouble xxx cities in Portugal and left behind a lovely northerly airflow to carry me the rest of the way.

I spent a good deal of it luxuriating in the previously out-of-bounds aft corner of the cockpit with a couple of kapok cushions, a cold beer and Tom Cunliffe’s splendid venture into the thriller market, his novel Hurricane Force.

Apparently, he wrote it years ago and left it sitting in a drawer. Roz found it and said: “You know, this is rather good.”

Clearly, the hallmark of something extra special.

… and here’s that video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7ivDfaweTgY

It was half an hour before the boat was due to be hauled out. The new engine was due to arrive tomorrow. It was all going to be very expensive.

And then a woman I had never met before knocked on the coachroof: “I’ve been reading your blog. Your overheating trouble: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow? That’s what it was for us – just thought I’d mention it…”

I wish I knew her name. I’d like to thank her.

As readers who have been paying attention will know, Samsara’s venerable Nanni 21hp has been running hotter and hotter over the past several years. By the time I arrived in the Isle of Man, I had to sail into the harbour and then get a tow into the marina.

A succession of engineers pored over it at various times. All of them sucked their teeth and shook their heads. They examined the impeller; they suspected the heat exchanger. Nothing they did made the slightest difference.

I tried muriatic acid. I tried citric acid. I kidded myself there was a slight improvement.

I waited six days for the charmingly encouraging Pat Ryan to get one of his lads to have a look. In the end, I phoned Rab McCluskey in Douglas, who had been so keen on the heat exchanger. We came to the mutual conclusion that it was a 20-year-old engine. Maybe the time had come… it had given good service… every machine has a finite life…

The new one was going to cost just over £5,000.

I winced, but what could I do? I emptied the savings account.

Nobody had mentioned the exhaust elbow. Actually, I had never heard of the exhaust elbow.

And yet I heard about it a second time half an hour later. Scott Nelson, the Boatworks yard manager, hadn’t even got Samsara onto the slip when he said: “Before you go to all the trouble and expense of a new engine, I just wondered: Have you looked at your exhaust elbow?”

So we did. Bob the engineer took it off. It really is an elbow – a little right-angled piece of rubber hose, except it seemed to have lost its flexibility – hardly surprising when you considered that it was completely choked with carbon.

Honestly, you couldn’t see daylight through it. The tiny hole in the picture is only there because Scott poked it with a pencil.

“Can you cancel the new engine?” he said.

Actually, that was remarkably easy. It wasn’t about to arrive tomorrow. It was still in Holland.

Now I’m in Torquay, looking at YouTube videos about how to change your alternator and with a new mantra to remember: Diesel engines need to be run hard from time to time…

The exhaust elbow (or if it has another name, I don’t know it). The little hole wasn’t there when we first took it off.

The Aries never had a name.

I did try to call my windvane self-steering “Arnold” for a while, but somehow that didn’t stick. Instead, I called the rat that joined me in Santa Marta “Arnold”. It seemed entirely appropriate. Mind you, he never answered to it, and then I electrocuted him anyway – which made me wonder why I bothered to give him a name in the first place.

But names for self-steering gears are traditional. After all, anything that relieves you of the tedium of sitting at the helm staring at the compass for hours on end is bound to acquire a personality – if only out of gratitude.

The Raymarine Evolution tillerpilot, which brought us home from the Grand Banks to the Isle of Man (and finally packed up four hours out of Falmouth), was a good friend and shipmate whom I called “Eric”. I imagined him standing at the rail with his arms folded, staring out to sea, a sour expression on his face because I was late in reefing.

But the Aries remained “the Aries”.

And then it broke.

Actually, I broke it, we have now established, backing out of the slipway at Varadero in Aruba. It’s just that it kept on working until the servo-paddle hit something (ice?) 300 miles southeast of Newfoundland.

I intended to get it fixed. I sent it to Lean Nelis, who manufactures and repairs Aries vane gears in Amsterdam. But DHL didn’t tell me I needed to describe it as a “temporal import”, so the Dutch customs demanded duty and when it wasn’t paid, they sent it back.

To the Isle of Man.

I was in Ireland.

Don’t ask. It was a nightmare – partly because Lean went off sailing for six weeks (why shouldn’t he?)

Long story short, I cut my losses and bought a Hydrovane.

What a revelation! So much easier to use. So much less clutter in the cockpit – and you can have a Watt&Sea hydrogenator because there’s no servo-paddle to clobber it (or get knocked off by any passing debris).

I was looking at this latest addition, all brand new and impossibly tall, and the name came to me like a flash of inspiration: “Hawkins”.

Hawkins the Hydrovane.

This is Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island. Only now he’s grown up – 17 or 18 at least. He’s done his RYA competent crew, a big strong lad with curly brown hair blowing in the wind, standing up there in a T-shirt in all weathers, volunteering to stand my watch if I want to get my head down (or finish When Harry Met Sally on the iPad).

A bit of me feels bad for having abandoned the Aries fraternity – I had one on Largo in the 1980s. It’s a bit like changing religion – or worse, moving to a new anchor.

Getting rid of the remaining bits of the Aries hasn’t been so easy. I did give three vanes, a bag of spares, and some other bits to a Dutchman in Guernsey, but his version wasn’t the Lift-Up. Somebody in Queensland is having the con-rod assembly for £50, which he described as “very generous”. I just want to get shot of it all, yet it seems like sacrilege to throw it in the marina skip.

So, if you’re looking for a base plate and the transom fastenings, or the tiller clamp – even half a metre of stainless steel chain, let me know…

Hawkins, the Hydrovane

The Aries: (just “The Aries”)