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.