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