The “Voyage” books have become something of a success. People like the “stream-of-consciousness” style. They say it is like going along for the trip (without the discomfort and worries about running out of beer).

So, it occurred to me that when I made a passage of more than a couple of days, I might log them here in the same style. Let me know what you think.

 

Depart Crosshaven 1100hrs Sunday July 6^th 2025

 

It’s Ireland. It’s different.

Everything takes a little longer. You mustn’t worry about this – which is why the passage from Crosshaven to Killybegs is going to take as long as it takes.

I was in Crosshaven for ten days. I shouldn’t worry about that because I was planning to be there for at least six weeks while Samsara came out of the water for the engine inlet seacock and the outboard bracket and the anchor plate and… oh, a whole list of things.

But the one thing I hadn’t checked was whether I could stay aboard while it was all going on.

Sorry, that would invalidate the yard’s insurance policy.

And Kinsale Boatyard’s… and the one at New Ross. It was the same at Old Court and Hegarties. Sligo didn’t have a boatyard at all (but an amazing music scene, apparently). The few who would allow me to sleep aboard, like Carlingford, apologised that their tradesmen were booked solid through to the end of August.

So, I’m going to Mooney’s at Killybegs. You really can’t get more Irish than a name like “Mooney’s” – and wouldn’t anybody sail around the whole island just to arrive in a place called “Killybegs”?

It turns out that Mooney Boats is the biggest boatyard in Ireland with absolutely the best chandlery. Fishing boats come from all over the country for a refit at Mooney’s – even from France.

And Mooney’s will let me stay aboard.

So yesterday I caught the bus into Cork to collect my bike, which was supposed to be ready on Tuesday (yesterday was Saturday, but the mechanic hadn’t come in to work on Monday, or Tuesday… or, come to that, at all.)

I was very philosophical about this (these things happen).

I was philosophical about the autopilot packing up just outside the harbour, too.

Regular readers will recall that it packed up just off the Scillies on the way here, and I steered the rest of the way with a Heath-Robinson storm jib and sheet-to-tiller arrangement. You will be pleased to hear this is now much more sophisticated, involving no fewer than three blocks (and works better than ever).

I did, while I was skittering about the decks rigging it, wonder about Eoin the electrical engineer who had spent two hours (at €80 an hour) remaking all the connections into one totally waterproof lump that bypassed the plug-and-socket arrangement that really doesn’t have a place in a small boat cockpit.

After I spent another half hour, hove-to off Roberts’ Head, undoing all his good work and replacing it with my own, the screen still announced “Low Battery”, so I suspect there’s more to it than just a duff connection. Something else for Mooney’s…

I’m not complaining. I don’t want to have to turn north until the “orange wind” on the Windy App has moved off in the direction of Cornwall.

In fact, all the way down the east coast and along the southeast coast, I didn’t even bother with the storm jib system. We were hard on the wind and so I just let the tiller swing free and Samsara plodded on in her own sweet way at four knots, never quite getting into irons and never falling off the wind. Good sailing boats, Rivals.

I was in bed by ten o’clock and slept in 20 minute stints (it would take half an hour at five knots to hit anything). Then, as we drew further off the land, the kitchen timer counted down from 30 minutes and finally, just as I was going into the (empty) Fastnet Traffic Separation Scheme – a whole hour! What Luxury!

 

Day 1. Monday June 7^th. Off Baltimore.

And so, out into the Atlantic. The wind’s in the northwest, and I’m tracking just south of west. The wind is due to turn into the west (Windy says on Tuesday night.)

Tamsin called off Mizen Head. She’s making arrangements for the family’s Irish Weekend. It’s morphed from a City Break in Dublin to a Walking Weekend in Kinsale at the end of August. Will I stay on the boat or in the Air BnB? (with everyone else in the AirBnB, of course).

Tried the autopilot again. The ram goes in and out, which is better than before, but it won’t hold a course. I did think of cutting more off the unit’s end of the cable and joining it up again. I must say I’m surprised Raymarine don’t use tinned cables for something that’s going to be sitting out in the cockpit in all weathers – and this one certainly did for the last half of the Atlantic crossing.

 

All day, I headed offshore. At some stage, the wind is going round to the west but not for another day – or half a day, depending on which forecasting model you believe. By six o’clock, I decided 40 miles was enough. I could always put another tack in – although, writing this after tacking the self-steering, I’m not in such a hurry to do it again. Just imagine it:

First you furl the headsail (and discover the furling line has got itself round the midships cleat because you didn’t tie it off).

Then all the blocks have to be moved from one side to the other, while the storm jib flaps like a mad thing. This turns the sheet into an offensive weapon.

Then there’s the inevitable mistake.

In this case, the mistake is in thinking that, if you ease the storm jib halyard a bit, you will be able to transfer the tack from one bow cleat to the other.

Not in a healthy Force 4. Instead, what happens is that the sail seeks to lift you off the deck and dump you in the water – at least, it pulled me right across the foredeck before I had to let go and watch it flying out to leeward on the end of its halyard and very long sheet (really, the spinnaker pole downhaul/preventer line).

Naturally, I ended up doing what I should have done in the first place and dropped it on deck (without first dropping it in the water – I was rather pleased).

After that, it was all fairly straightforward – re-reeving the sheet through all four sheaves, gybing round (despite what the storm jib wanted to do) and finally getting down to a lot of tweaking and adjusting to get the needle on the wind indicator up to 40°.

…only to have to do it all again because I decided I had too much sail for 19kts and reefed the main. This was better than winding in the headsail because the storm jib is blanketing much of that anyway.

Still, we’re making quite a respectable course – with a bit of luck, we might clear Slea Head. The wind must change by then, surely. Slea Head is on the end of the Dingle peninsular. That’s 55 miles away.

All I have to do is get used to the sound of the flapping. You’d think I’d have acclimatised by now – that my subconscious would have learned to shrug and say: “Bloody storm jib flapping itself to bits”.

It is too. A new storm jib is one of the jobs on the sailmaker’s list. I only hope this one lasts to Killybegs. I wouldn’t like to have the staysail flapping in its place.

 

It’s 2.30 in the morning, and I’ve just sat down to a flask of tea with an unintentionally large slug of rum in it (the boat lurched).

I was going to write about the correct way to tack the sheet-to-tiller steering, but:

1. The soft shackle holding the forward sheet block came undone – amazingly, both shackle and block managed to stay on deck. I’ve got a snap shackle on there now.
2. Letting the sheet flap while I move the storm jib across means I get knots in it, which jam in the sheaves.
3. I’ve forgotten what the third thing was. But I did forget to shake out the coil of the reefing pennant on the main – which then tied itself into a fist that I had the devil’s own job to untangle.

All that effort, and we’re almost sailing back along the same track we came up. I didn’t want to carry on sailing towards the coast in the hope that this supposed wind shift to the west would lift us round the Skelligs. What if it doesn’t? Anyway, I shouldn’t sleep very well waiting for the crash.

Now I wish I’d stuck to my course and stayed up all night reading Maeve
Binchy and watching Netflix. It’s not as if I needed the rest – I slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and then had another hour before all this became an issue.

At least we’re close enough to connect to Starlink and pick up messages. It was particularly gratifying to find a couple of enquiries about the health supplement – nothing unusual about that, only this time the link opens up the new page with the BalanceOil. I must say, I’m rather excited about that. Is “Game-Changer” the buzzword?

Mind you, I did forget to take it this morning – blame the different breakfast routine at sea. This meant I had to knock it back with nothing to take the taste away… although, it’s not particularly the taste (I think I have the lemon and mint flavour). It’s more that there’s no getting away from the fact that it is, as it says, oil. I believe that if I can’t get used to it, I can take in tablet form.

 

For the rest of the night, I woke up periodically (for some reason every 50 minutes on the dot) and grabbed the phone to see how we were progressing towards the point at which I judged we could tack again (for the last time) and then have a clear run into Donegal Bay. Then, very late, somewhere around seven o’clock, I had a dream.

The dreams usually kick in after about a week and, as readers of The Voyage books will be aware, the singlehander’s dreams can be spectacularly weird. For a long time I couldn’t have told you what they were about because – famously, the brain is designed to forget them within two minutes of waking up. But I have a secret formula: I grab my phone, stab the “Voice Recorder” app – and then record five minutes of “um’s” and “aah’s” and yawns and grunts.

With luck, sometime later when I’m sitting on the leeward berth with the laptop on my knees, I will replay it and write down something like this:

All my best newspaper articles were going to be published in an enormous book – and I do mean “enormous”. It measured about a metre from top to bottom, like one of those illuminated manuscripts copied by generations of monks.

Except in the case of my book, the illustrations were by Quentin Blake, who did the drawings for the Roald Dahl books. The trouble was that the only copy had been lost at sea for many years and had now been brought up from the sea bed for me to clean up.

It was a dreadful mess – covered in seaweed and encrusted with barnacles. I set out to clean it in a small kitchen area beside the book department of Harrods. I had a hose and a scraper and had set the thing up on a wooden stool and was hosing away merrily. All the slime and encrustation washing off and onto the floor.

That was when the head of the book department walked in – a distinguished grey-haired gentleman in a tail coat and wing collar. You could tell before he opened his mouth that he knew his Goethe from his Gresham. However, what he said was: “What on earth are you doing?”

So, I had to explain, and he said: “Oh, we don’t need any of that. We’ve got our own copy.”

And he was quite right. He took me off to show me. But the problem was that in his copy, all the pages were mixed up. Teams of nurses in starched white uniforms with little starched white caps were trying to make sense of hundreds and hundreds of enormous pages, none of which were numbered. The nurses were getting flustered. I went to the head nurse and explained that all this was completely unnecessary because I had a complete edition. The head nurse insisted that hers was a special edition – it may have been the Manchester edition or the Birmingham edition or something. Anyway, it was special, and I should stop trying to clean up mine and help her get hers sorted out.

Well, this didn’t make any sense to me, so I just shrugged and went back to washing mine down and making an awful mess, which ran out of the kitchen door and onto the sales floor. That was when the head of the book department came back and said: “Really, this won’t do,” all over again.

This time, the problem was that Harrods had Jewish customers and I was hosing shellfish all over the floor.

I protested that nobody was asking the customers to eat the shellfish. In fact, once the book was cleaned up, nobody would be any the wiser. But the head of the book department just flapped his arms about – which made him look even more like a big black crow. In the end, I walked off the job.

 

After that, it really was time to get up. I was now 30 miles offshore, and the angle to clear the islets of Slea Head was plenty good enough, so time to tack again – but remembering last time, I had breakfast first.

And just as well I did too. This time, I set the stopwatch function to time myself. This time it was going to be done right!

It started to go wrong within five minutes for reasons I can’t be bothered to remember. I know that when the stopwatch had reached 14 minutes, I had to start all over again.

By the time I was finished and we were sailing again, the stopwatch showed 37 minutes. But you have to add the 14 to that…

 

Day 2 Tuesday 8^th July. Off Bantry Bay

 

The wind has fallen light.

Not seriously light. If I had the super zero, we would be romping along. If I had some proper self-steering, we’d be doing three knots in the right direction. But with this concoction of string and blocks and shock cord and an old sail flying free, we were all over the place.

I tried everything I could think of, but in the end, the only thing to do seemed to be to motorsail. Actually, it did the trick. With just enough apparent wind to fill the storm jib, we are now heading for a compromise of going close enough to pick up the Starlink signal while still keeping off the rocks.

 

One of the best things about this sort of life is that you can give in to your whims. I was standing at the companionway looking out and saw the port solar panel had flipped up – the line holding the outside edge down had come undone, and the wind had got a hold of it. So I just abandoned what I was doing and spent the best part of an hour reorganising both panels.

The idea of just hanging them on the guardrails instead of clamping them to expensive custom-made rigid stainless steel tube is something I picked up from a Dutch boat in Colombia. But that boat had a jam cleat setup. It looks messy and, as far as I can see, just complicates the issue. As soon as I get to Killybegs, I’m going to install a couple of little cleats on the deck – nobody walks there anyway. Meanwhile, it was fun to have a diversion.

 

I think I’m going to enjoy this evening. First, I put on long trousers, socks and a fleece – and here is the really exciting part: I turned on the heating.

Really! I have a little fan heater for use when I’m hooked up to the mains in marinas. Except this evening, there was a definite chill in the air (see “trousers”), and after a sunny day with a steady wind, the batteries were up to 100%, so I thought: “Why not?”

And bingo! In ten minutes, I was as warm as toast. Mind you, it did consume more than 100A, and pretty soon the batteries were down to 96%. But this is such a small space, I just turned it off.

Until I felt that chill again – and switched it back on for five minutes. Meanwhile, the wind charger is going all the time and producing 100W (I don’t pretend to know the correlation between Amps and Watts. Well, I know the theory. But what good did knowing the theory ever do anyone?)

 

Windy suggests the wind is going round to the south early tomorrow, and the sheet to tiller arrangement is only good down to a broad reach. Beyond that, I have to switch to a sheet-to-pole-to-tiller system. I can’t believe how well the current setup is working. Honestly, I think it has called for less adjustment than the Aries.

 

All night we sailed quietly up the west coast, past Dingle Bay and Ballybunion. Past Tralee. At times, it was so quiet, I thought we were becalmed, but then I would look at the Navionics app on my phone and see we were doing five knots with the little red line flicking unerringly around the waypoint off Blacksod Bay. The alarm went off at one-hour intervals just so I could check that we were still going in the right direction. Most times, I didn’t even bother to get out of bed. There didn’t seem to be any traffic out here. Anyway, anything I did meet would have AIS, and I seemed to have become attuned to the somewhat apologetic beep of the alarm.

I finished Maeve Binchy’s Nights of Rain and Stars, which ended as happily and hopefully as any Maeve Binchy will (but with just a frisson of uncertainty because that’s life…)

Next is The Wide Wide Sea, the story of Captain Cook’s last and fateful voyage. It’s a bestseller, although I had never heard of it. I think it was a Kindle Daily Deal. Between that and Kindle Unlimited, I get a lot of cheap reading.

 

Day 3 Wednesday July 9^th.  Off Tralee

 

How about this? The last alarm went at 7.30 in the morning. I looked at the screen, and we were still on course, sliding over a flat sea at five knots. I reached down and switched on the heater. I didn’t get up until the cabin was a reasonable temperature. Why on earth didn’t I do this when I was freezing south of Greenland with a water temperature of 0.5°C ?

I know the answer. At that time, the heater was buried under the forward berth, which was screwed down against a capsize.

As the morning progressed and we passed the Arran Islands, the wind kept dying, and Samsara would wander off in the direction of Canada. I found that motoring slowly produced just enough apparent wind to keep her on track – and then, a quarter of an hour later, the wind would come back and I could switch off. We must have done this half a dozen times as the arrival time at the waypoint shifted from 2300hrs tonight to eight o’clock tomorrow morning.

 

As forecast, the wind did go round more and more to the south, until eventually the storm jib steering couldn’t cope. Time for the poled-out storm jib steering. The book had called for the sail to be hanked to the forestay. For one thing, I don’t have a forestay – just a furling extrusion. I could hoist it on the inner forestay, but that’s quite a long way back. In the end, I decided to keep it flying free from the cleat and see what happened.

Actually, it blew back under the crosstrees because without any self-steering, we had come round into the wind. Also, I got the halyard the wrong side of the pole uphaul – and then the tack line the wrong side of the guy. And then, once it was all up and trimmed, I realised the guy was wrapped around the sheet. This doesn’t look so bad when viewed at a distance from the cockpit, but once the wind gets up, it introduces a twisting force and bends the piston. When I first had the boat and a whisker pole, I was forever taking it to metal shops to that fixed.

Eventually, I got everything where it should be and the boat running nicely. She did better with the headsail furled, making four knots under mainsail alone. It did occur to me that I could hand the main and fly twin headsails with each sheet running through a block to the tiller. Wanderer III went all the way across the Atlantic like that a good 15 years before Nick Franklin began experimenting with what was to become the Aries. But, it would mean replacing the headsail sheet with 8mm because I don’t have any spare 10mm blocks. Anyway, if the twins aren’t the same size, would it work?

Besides, it’s going to be a busy night. The prediction now is that we will arrive off Black Rock somewhere in the small hours. This is the lighthouse to seaward of Blacksod (and it still has more rocks to the west). It would be nice to get there on port tack so that if the wind does back at the wrong moment, I won’t be driven onto anything unpleasant.

It does mean I’ll be gybing in the dark. I might just carry on with a northerly course until it gets light – which is pretty early after all.

Then it’s just 65 miles to Killybegs. I should be in mid-afternoon.

Which leaves all of Friday for getting the work organised.

 

Now I’ll tell you how soft I’ve become. Because of the busy night ahead, I got in three hours of sleep in the afternoon. Then another two after the gybe. So, at about half-past six, when I was just lying there thinking that I do seem to have a habit of getting ropes round each other. It’s like when I was talking to Tony Jones, the rigger, and he kept saying: “You can’t do this, it’ll foul that.” And: “You don’t want to have that like this – see how it’s putting all the pressure on the other?”

How is it that other people see these things and I don’t?

But a bit of judicious time in bed isn’t the really good part. The really good part is that when I did get up, it was early evening, and with the wind blowing straight in the companionway, there was a chill in the cabin. So, I put the washboard in and got dressed in front of the fan heater.

Well, the battery was showing 81% and it would only take a minute.

It was lovely – like I remember winter mornings in London before I got central heating. I would stand in front of the gas fire and burn my shins.

When I went to look at the battery state afterwards, it was only down to 80%. I’m wondering whether I should get rid of the charcoal heater. It’s only sitting there going rusty…

 

Day Four.

Donegal Bay

 

At some stage, I was going to have to gybe. I hadn’t wanted to get trapped close to the coast by a wind shift. Instead, I spent the night edging further and further out into the Atlantic. Then it was dark and I didn’t want to gybe everything in the dark. Then I really needed to gybe, but I didn’t want to get out of bed – and then I thought the course we were steering wasn’t so very dreadful after all…

So, it was not until about six o’clock and full daylight that I roused myself and attempted, this time, to get it done without cocking something up.

To begin with, it went rather well. I looked to see where ropes were going, peered up the mast to see where they went up there, followed them under the storm jib once it was lying all over the foredeck.

None of this helped at all. When I hoisted it – and hoisting a free-flying sail in 18knots it not really the sort of thing you want to do before breakfast – I discovered that I had indeed got the halyard the wrong side of the pole hoist (or was it the sheet the wrong side of halyard?) and when that was sorted out – which may or may not have involved dropping the sail (that is, dropping it in the sea this time) there was something else – I think it may have had to do with the sheet, or possibly the guy. I really can’t remember…

I went and had breakfast. I think I’ve got the hang of the BalanceOil – hold a spoonful of Gulf Stream Breakfast within an inch of the mouth as you knock it back (with your eyes shut). It’s a good job, it’s going to keep me alive until I’m 130…

And on we sailed – somewhat erratically – up Donegal Bay. It’s surprising how big some of these West Coast bays can be. When I passed Erris Head, I still had 57 miles to go.

I sailed every one of them, I can tell you. For some reason, the marvellous storm-jib-sheet-to-tiller system didn’t work so well any more. Either we were heading for the shore or we gybed – and if you’ve got the tiller trussed up with double shock cord on one side and four sheaves on the other, avoiding a gybe is a matter of paranormal anticipation.

Somewhere around mid-morning, the wind had veered so much that there was nothing for it; I had to go from storm-jib-sheet-to-tiller steering to storm-jib-sheet-to-pole-to-tiller steering.

This time, I was more determined than ever to get it right. I think I even looked at the time before I left the cockpit, with some misplaced intention of getting it all done and snugged down inside five minutes.

It would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the pole. The pole got the wrong side of the halyard and the pole uphaul (even the pole downhaul, which seemed a needless detail). Even when I’d got the whole thing up and pulling, I just happened to notice the sheet wrapped round the pole-end (again).

Of course, the forecasters at Windy weren’t going to let all this go by without sticking an oar in (get real, there are no forecasters at Windy – unless you count an AI bot with a beard). Anyway, whatever it was, it predicted calms for the evening. I wouldn’t be getting in until after midnight. Andrew Evans and his Thoughts, Tips, Techniques & Tactics for Singlehanded Sailing only offered advice for when the wind is blowing. Sails don’t work in a calm. I could see I would end up motoring the last 15 miles. Motoring and steering.

There is nothing more boring than motoring and steering. I just can’t do it – not for longer than it takes to get from the harbour mouth to the mooring. What I needed was the electronic autopilot; the one that had been fixed at such great expense in Crosshaven – and had lived in the cockpit locker for the last 347 miles while I congratulated myself on doing things the old way…

Is it possible that, now it had had a good rest, it might deign to steer us the last 15 miles? I got it out. It buzzed, which was a good sign. Then it steered us straight into a gybe – not so good.

I switched it off and on again. I rebooted it back to Factory Settings. I pressed its little buttons – first one way, then the other.

That was odd: If I pressed the “up” button for the ram to push out, it went in. If I pushed the “down” button for it to go in, it came out. I remember this. This happened 25 years ago – the year of the millennium, when I set out to become the first person to sail singlehanded and non-stop around the British Isles (and came to a very sticky end).

Equally memorable were the interminable sea trials I undertook before setting out, mainly because I had to motor eight miles down the River Deben every time (and then eight miles back up afterwards). The main purpose was to calibrate the autopilot – an Autohelm, before they were bought out by Raymarine. It took me an absurdly long time to realise I’d reversed the polarity. When it should have been pulling, it was pushing and when… well, you get the picture…

This was the same. No wonder we kept gybing. I was loath to experiment by switching the wires but if I didn’t, I had three hours of steering through a flat calm to look forward to – and it didn’t do the unit any harm back in 2000.

And guess what? It did the trick. The thing was as good as new. I dismantled the storm jib-to-sheet-to-whatever construction. I set the headsail goose-winged without getting anything round anything – I’ve had enough practice at that. I opened a beer (and when I have finished describing the resulting triumph, I shall open another.)

The autopilot lasted through the two beers. It lasted almost all the way through dinner. But eventually, sure enough, there would be a beep-beep-beep and the screen would announce “Low Battery”, which was plainly absurd.

I hand-steered the last however many miles it was.

But we got there in the end. Arriving at 4.30 in the morning, just as it was getting light enough to see to anchor in Walker Bay and save the cost of a weekend in the marina.

And thereby hangs a sorry, sorry tale.

But that’s enough of this. I’ll be back with that next time…

 

*

 

And I’ve just realised that I haven’t explained about the BalanceOil I mentioned there. This is rather interesting. For years, I had been taking Omega-3 fish oil – and then a vegan version (which didn’t smell of rotting fish) but it seems that was all a waste of money because the process to remove the Mercury also strips out the polyphenols, which enable the body to absorb the nutrient.

This BalanceOil is different and you can take a test to find out whether you need it. It’s all terribly scientific. If you send me an email to john@oldmansailing.com, I’ll send you everything you need to know.