West of Preveza — The long way home

Preamble — Twenty Years in the Making

For us, this voyage did not truly begin in Greece, nor even in the autumn of 2025 when we first stepped aboard boats with any serious intention of buying one, but much earlier, in those quieter years when the idea of finding the right boat and bringing her home under our own command still belonged more to conversation than to action. For more than twenty years that ambition had remained present in one form or another, surfacing whenever life allowed space for imagining something larger, then receding again beneath work, family, responsibility, and all the sensible compromises that so often delay dreams without extinguishing them.

Long before there was any boat, any practical discussion of Greece, or any realistic expectation that we might one day bring a yacht home across half of Europe, there had already been the much longer and less predictable story of how Rachel and I had arrived at a point where undertaking something like this together felt neither reckless nor improbable, but simply another expression of something already long established between us.

We first met when we were very young, at an age when neither of us yet understood how certain people can settle quietly into memory long before life makes proper room for them. Rachel was fifteen, I was nineteen, and although such details invite more scrutiny now than they did then, at the time it sat within the ordinary tolerance of family and circumstance, with neither side regarding it as anything unusual enough to resist. Both of us were attached elsewhere, both still living inside lives not yet fully formed, and yet from the beginning there existed between us something that felt distinct from ordinary attraction. There was ease, humour, and an immediate familiarity, as though conversation between us required less effort than it did with almost anyone else.

Like many early relationships, ours was brief, interrupted less by conflict than by timing. My own girlfriend returned from travelling, Rachel soon left home, moved to the city, and began another chapter of her own life. We drifted apart not because anything had failed, but because life at that age often moves faster than understanding. Yet neither of us entirely disappeared from the other’s thoughts, and on the few occasions our paths crossed in the years that followed, the atmosphere retained something unmistakably unfinished, as though the space between those encounters carried far more than either of us was prepared to name aloud.

More than a decade later, chance returned her to me in circumstances that even now feel improbable enough to belong to someone else’s memory rather than my own. I saw Rachel again outside a nightclub, at precisely the moment I was being escorted rather firmly through the door by a bouncer. We spoke only briefly, but it was enough to leave no uncertainty in me that if life allowed it, I intended to find her again. This time, with neither of us tied elsewhere, we did not lose one another.

Rachel already had two children by then, whom I came in time to love as my own, and later together we had Jago. Like most relationships that endure honestly rather than effortlessly, ours has known periods of strain, stubbornness, and more than one season in which both of us had to learn that affection alone is not a sufficient structure unless accompanied by effort. We are both strong-minded, both capable of holding a position longer than diplomacy might advise, and in earlier years that often meant progress arrived noisily rather than gracefully. What has perhaps distinguished us is not an absence of difficulty, but a shared belief that difficulty itself never justifies surrender.

At the time of writing we are closer than we have ever been, not because time softens everything, but because shared years eventually teach where compromise matters and where loyalty matters more. In many ways the voyage aboard RaRa has asked of us nothing fundamentally new. It has simply placed into practical form the same principles that have carried everything else: trust, persistence, humour when plans fail, and a mutual refusal to abandon something simply because it becomes harder than expected. It is probably only in that context that buying a boat in Greece and deciding, with no proper precedent, to bring her home ourselves begins to appear less impulsive than it otherwise might.

Neither of us came to this voyage as sailors in the traditional sense. My own background lay largely in powerboats, navigation, and practical seamanship rather than long sailing passages under canvas, while Rachel arrived with something perhaps equally valuable: curiosity, courage, and a willingness to trust both the boat and the decisions that would increasingly have to be made aboard her. Between us there was confidence enough to begin, but also the clear understanding that much of what lay ahead would be learned in real time, often under conditions less forgiving than either of us might ideally have chosen.

The decision to buy in Greece had not initially presented itself as part of any grand strategy. Like many such decisions, it began simply enough: hours of searching listings, conversations that moved gradually from idle interest to practical arithmetic, and the dawning realisation that if we were ever going to do it, there would always be reasons not to. Boats in Britain offered familiarity but little value; boats in the Mediterranean offered sunlight, possibility, and a degree of optimism that perhaps concealed some of the bureaucracy waiting behind it. The Lagoon 39 that would become RaRa first appeared not as certainty, but as one possibility among many, viewed initially through photographs and cautious hope.

Only later, standing aboard her for the first time, did possibility begin to harden into something more difficult to dismiss. She was not perfect, nor expected to be, but she possessed something more persuasive than polish: a sense that beneath the ordinary wear of previous ownership there remained the shape of exactly what we had been searching for, even if neither of us had entirely known how to define it until then. What followed, as we would soon discover, was never going to be simply the purchase of a boat. It became instead a long procession of documents, inspections, delays, official stamps, unanswered emails, translations, registrations, surveys, permissions, and practical decisions, each one appearing at the time to be the final administrative hurdle before another emerged quietly behind it. Before we had sailed a single meaningful mile, the voyage had already begun in paperwork. And yet, even then, somewhere beneath the bureaucracy and uncertainty, the larger feeling remained unmistakable: after twenty years of talking about doing something like this, we had at last placed ourselves in a position where turning back would require more effort than continuing.

Chapter One — Leaving Greece

The first hours offshore did not feel like uncomplicated joy so much as a mixture of relief, disbelief, and caution. Even with Greece slipping slowly astern, it took time before we fully trusted that we were genuinely moving west and that nothing further would somehow intervene to stop us. But the sea has a way of simplifying thought, and before long the ordinary rhythm of passage-making asserted itself: watches, fuel checks, engine glances, weather reassessments, and long quiet stretches where practical concentration replaced whatever had occupied the mind ashore.

Our original plan had been modest. Crotone had been chosen as the first destination precisely because it represented a sensible opening leg, roughly twenty-four hours from Greece and enough to establish momentum without immediately committing to anything demanding. Offshore, however, forecasts began suggesting something more favourable than expected, and once that possibility appeared it became difficult to justify stopping so soon. After everything it had taken simply to leave Greece, momentum had acquired its own emotional force.

So instead of turning in for Crotone, we made the decision to continue. Riposto became the new objective, another full day beyond Crotone and roughly one hundred and forty nautical miles further west. At the time, the decision felt entirely reasonable. The forecasts supported it, the sea appeared cooperative enough, and there was something deeply satisfying in knowing that we were not merely moving but progressing properly.

One small concern stayed with us from early on: intermittent white smoke from one engine. It never became dramatic enough to force immediate intervention, but it remained present enough that every glance astern lasted slightly longer than normal, and fuel quickly became part of almost every conversation — consumption, balance, treatment, possibility. Offshore, even minor uncertainties occupy disproportionate space.

The first day passed in growing confidence, but by the second night that confidence had thinned considerably. Around seventy miles short of Strait of Messina, approaching the western edge of Calabria, the sea hardened sharply into twenty-four knots directly ahead, and the slamming became violent enough that each impact rose through the hulls with increasing force. For a while we persisted, partly because altering course always feels like an emotional concession before it becomes a rational one. Eventually, though, judgement overruled stubbornness, and we altered south of south east, accepting the extra miles almost immediately because the effect on the motion was so obvious. The slamming eased, the boat settled enough to breathe again, and what had felt punishing became merely difficult.

By morning the sea had softened enough to restore rhythm, and land returned ahead.

Chapter Two — Riposto, Relief and Recalculation

When Riposto finally appeared ahead of us on Sunday 15th March, almost exactly forty-eight hours after leaving Greece, the feeling was less one of triumph than of visible relief. Some arrivals carry excitement, but others arrive at precisely the point where stopping has become more valuable than destination itself, and this was unmistakably one of those. The first secure lines ashore seemed to quiet something in both of us immediately. After two days of movement, engine noise, interrupted rest, and constant attention to the boat, the simplest things became disproportionately satisfying: stepping onto still ground, standing upright without compensating for motion, a proper shower, food that required no preparation aboard, and the possibility of uninterrupted sleep.

The marina itself did not entirely release us from the sea. Even tied up, there was enough surge inside the berth to remind us that Sicily remained exposed to the same conditions we had just crossed, and the berth fee was high enough to register sharply after the practical economics of delivery sailing. But none of that really mattered because the stop had become necessary in ways that were not only physical.

The intermittent white smoke that had followed one engine across the first leg demanded attention straight away. Offshore it had never become dramatic enough to force immediate action, but it had occupied far more of our thinking than we had admitted aloud. Every engine check had carried the same quiet question: whether the problem would remain minor or become something that altered the voyage more seriously.

So in Riposto we treated the fuel, checked filters, and monitored both engines carefully before committing to departure again. The result was immediate enough to feel disproportionately reassuring. The smoke disappeared, and with it a tension we had both been carrying almost continuously since leaving Greece.

But Riposto offered little time for complete comfort because almost as soon as one technical concern resolved, weather took its place. Forecasts for the next leg refused to agree with each other in any satisfying way. PredictWind leaned toward caution, while Italian coastal models looked notably calmer, almost inviting by comparison. Larger models failed to provide certainty, leaving only the familiar offshore truth that forecasts eventually have to give way to what is actually outside the harbour wall.

The decision to leave again therefore felt less confident than deliberate. It was based not on certainty, but on accepting that certainty was not going to arrive.

Chapter Three — Hard Water and the Return of Sailing

Leaving Riposto on 17th March produced the hardest sea we had yet encountered on the voyage, and the contrast between the calm certainty of departure preparations and the violence outside the harbour was immediate enough to feel almost abrupt. The breakwater fell behind us, and within a very short time the sea built into something far more serious than either of us would willingly have chosen: five to six metre seas, gusts close to twenty-eight knots, and a motion violent enough in the opening hours that conversation quickly reduced itself to essentials.

There are moments offshore when language becomes secondary because everything narrows to movement, timing, and judgement. This became one of them. For a while there was very little space for anything except understanding what the sea was doing and deciding whether it remained within the limits of endurance or had crossed into something genuinely unwise.

What gradually emerged, however, was that despite its size, the sea remained organised. The wave period mattered far more than the height, and once that became clear, the motion changed in character. It was still severe, still physically demanding, but no longer random. There was order inside it, and order allows judgement to return.

By the time we approached Strait of Messina, that order had become more obvious. The Strait itself carries a reputation large enough to sharpen attention long before arrival — currents, ferry traffic, narrowness, and history all compressing into one stretch of water that feels important even before it is entered. Yet in reality, what we found there was not chaos but discipline. The sea organised itself further, the adverse current became readable rather than intimidating, and ferry traffic, though constant, moved with a predictability that quickly restored confidence.

Then came one of the clearest rewards of the voyage so far. Once clear of the Strait, the wind shifted just enough to offer something that had been absent for much of the passage west: the chance to sail properly.

We shut the engines down, and for seven hours RaRa settled into a beam reach at around seven knots, balanced and comfortable in a way that transformed the entire mood onboard. After days dominated by engines, mechanical awareness, and constant practical thought, the sudden quiet felt almost emotional in itself. The sound of water against the hulls replaced machinery, and movement ceased feeling imposed and instead became collaborative, as though for the first time the boat herself had fully entered the voyage.

Almost immediately afterwards, wildlife appeared, and the timing felt so perfectly placed that it seemed almost theatrical. Porpoises arrived first, precise and elegant in their movement, followed later by dolphins that stayed alongside long enough to feel less like sightings and more like brief companionship. Then, not long after, one final shape surfaced nearby — a heavier fin, slower, unmistakably different from everything else we had seen. It appeared only briefly before disappearing beneath the surface again, but the impression remained clear enough that both of us thought the same thing almost immediately: shark.

The sequence felt too perfectly composed to invent: hard sea, restored calm, proper sailing, dolphins, then predator.

Later, around seventy-four miles short of Palermo, the first real technical setback arrived. The radar began failing in stages: heading sensor errors first, then scanner alarms, then repeated loss of scanner detection. We tried resets, retried detection, and watched for signs of recovery, but the system never returned convincingly. By then darkness and distance made acceptance more sensible than frustration. Palermo would now be not only an arrival, but a place where another problem waited to be understood.

Chapter Four — Palermo, Work Above the Deck

By the time we arrived in Palermo, the city already felt tied to unfinished work, because the previous leg had ended not simply with landfall but with a technical uncertainty brought ashore with us. The radar had failed seventy-four miles out, and although there had been little value in frustration while still offshore, the unanswered question of what exactly had gone wrong remained waiting the moment the lines were secure.

The following day therefore belonged not to sightseeing but to understanding whether the problem was something we could solve ourselves or whether it would become another expensive delay in a voyage that had already taught us how quickly momentum can disappear.

Even reaching the radar required the sort of improvisation that had already become familiar by this point in the trip. A bosun’s chair large enough to use comfortably simply could not be found, which meant adapting an old climbing harness carefully enough to become safe and practical for the job. It was not an elegant solution, but by then elegance had ceased to matter much compared with simply finding workable answers.

There is always a brief pause before leaving deck level when confidence and doubt seem to occupy exactly the same thought, particularly when the task waiting above you matters enough that getting it wrong will cost more than inconvenience. But once above the spreaders, attention quickly narrows into the practical detail of what is in front of you.

From the mast, Palermo briefly appeared suspended between two entirely different worlds: below us the marina with its ropes, tools, and practical disorder, and beyond it the city itself, warm and expansive under Sicilian light, carrying the kind of beauty that only becomes fully noticeable once work begins to go well.

The radar dome came down without difficulty, and once opened the source of the failure became clear almost immediately. What had triggered alarms offshore and left us speculating across seventy-four miles of sea turned out to be nothing more dramatic than a broken drive belt, a fault simple enough to understand at a glance and reassuring precisely because it was mechanical rather than mysterious.

That discovery changed the mood of the whole day far more than the size of the fault itself might suggest. Had the unit gone back to Simrad for inspection, it would almost certainly have involved days, quite possibly weeks, of delay, together with a repair bill likely approaching seven hundred pounds before anything returned to us. Instead, by dismantling it ourselves and identifying the failure directly, the problem became something tangible, affordable, and already halfway resolved.

The satisfaction lay not simply in saving money, although that mattered, nor even in saving time, which mattered perhaps more, but in the fact that for the first time since the radar alarms had appeared offshore, the issue no longer belonged to uncertainty. It belonged to us again, and that shift felt disproportionately rewarding.

Meanwhile, while one of us worked above the mast, Rachel quietly handled the equally necessary practicalities ashore, arranging laundry collection and return so that ordinary life aboard continued while technical work unfolded overhead. It somehow captured the voyage perfectly: one person suspended above the boat solving what had failed mechanically, the other making sure the ordinary fabric of living aboard did not fray at the edges.

By the time the dome was safely down, the fault identified, and the next repair steps understood, the day had become more than simple maintenance. It felt like a genuine recovery of momentum, one of those modest but deeply satisfying moments when solving a problem yourself restores confidence far beyond the problem itself.

Chapter Five — Palermo by Night

By the time the radar had been lowered, opened, and understood, the day had already shifted in character. What had begun with practical focus and a degree of technical uncertainty had ended in something much more satisfying: not only had the fault revealed itself as manageable, but in solving it ourselves we had quietly reclaimed both time and confidence. That alone altered the mood enough that, by early evening, Palermo no longer felt like a place we had merely arrived in between problems, but somewhere we were finally free to enjoy.

There is a particular pleasure in stepping away from the boat after a day in which work has gone well, because the city beyond the marina immediately seems to offer itself differently. Tools have been put away, lines checked, the practical world aboard momentarily settled, and in that brief interval before evening fully takes hold there is often a sense that whatever happens next has already been earned.

We began at Roppolo, where the first cold pilsner tasted exactly as it should after a day spent aloft in harness and salt, simple enough not to require thought but satisfying enough to mark the clear transition from work into evening. It was one of those small pleasures that would mean very little in another context and yet, after the previous days, felt almost disproportionate in how welcome it was.

From there we drifted on to Mazzini 30, where the evening began to acquire its own character. I ordered a Negroni sharpened unexpectedly with mezcal, and the drink arrived carrying exactly the sort of slight surprise that makes a place memorable — familiar enough to recognise immediately, but altered just enough to feel particular to where we were. Smokier, stronger, and more layered than expected, it seemed somehow to suit Palermo itself, a city that never quite presents itself in a single clear line.

Dinner eventually drew us to Scjavúru, and there the evening found its real centre. I began with sardine meatballs before moving on to pasta alla Norma, a dish so rooted in Sicily that eating it there carried a quiet sense of arriving properly rather than merely passing through. Rachel chose a local platter of ham and cheese to begin, followed by buffalo pizza with ham and tomatoes, and by then the table had acquired that particular ease which only comes once hunger has been replaced by enjoyment and conversation no longer notices time passing.

Several glasses of Etna Bianco softened the pace of everything further. The wine suited the evening almost too well: local, bright, and effortless enough that each glass made the city feel warmer rather than slower. By the time cannoli arrived to finish the meal, there was already that shared certainty that the day had become memorable in a way no planning had required. It was not simply that the food was excellent, though it unquestionably was, but that the whole sequence of the day — mast in the morning, diagnosis by afternoon, Palermo by night — had produced a kind of balance that difficult journeys only occasionally offer.

Even the journey back to the marina seemed determined to remain part of the story rather than merely an ending to it. Buses were caught, then missed, then doubted entirely, routes half understood and then abandoned, with enough uncertainty over where exactly we were and whether the next stop was useful that laughter eventually became easier than trying to impose logic on Palermo’s evening transport system.

By the time we stepped back aboard RaRa, with bags half prepared for flying home briefly for our son’s birthday, the city still seemed to linger around us. Palermo had not simply provided shelter or a technical stop. It had offered something more valuable than that — the sense that after the strain of the previous days, the voyage had briefly given something generous back.

And perhaps that was the clearest feeling at the end of that evening: that difficult passages become bearable not only because they are overcome, but because now and then they lead somewhere unexpectedly worth remembering.

Chapter Six — Leaving RaRa Behind

There is something slightly unnatural about leaving a boat when the voyage itself still feels unfinished. Arriving somewhere and stopping carries its own logic when the next leg follows naturally, but locking the boat, packing a small bag, and turning your thoughts briefly toward airports and departure boards introduces a different kind of interruption, one that feels practical enough on paper yet emotionally harder to settle into once it is actually happening.

Palermo had already given us more than shelter. It had offered a technical victory at exactly the right moment, the reassurance of finding the radar fault ourselves, and an evening that reminded us why difficult passages often become most memorable not because of hardship alone, but because of what occasionally follows it. Yet even with that satisfaction still fresh, there remained the awareness that RaRa was not resting at the end of a journey, only paused somewhere in the middle of one.

The practical work of leaving her for a few days was straightforward enough: systems checked again, shore power confirmed, lines examined carefully, lockers secured, and the ordinary ritual of making a boat safe in your absence performed with more attention than usual because distance always sharpens the imagination. Every skipper knows that slight hesitation before stepping away for the last time — the instinctive glance back at shore lines, fenders, electrical connections, weather, and neighbouring boats, as though one final look might somehow reveal anything missed.

And yet beneath all the practical detail sat something quieter: the simple fact that after months of fighting merely to begin this voyage, leaving her behind, even briefly, carried a faint sense of reluctance.

Part of that reluctance came from how quickly RaRa had already begun to feel transformed. Only weeks earlier she had still carried the lingering identity of purchase, paperwork, and preparation. Now she had crossed open water, taken punishment, taught lessons, revealed faults, and rewarded patience. She had already begun to feel less like a recently bought boat and more like something understood through experience, which made walking away, even temporarily, feel unexpectedly personal.

But family has its own gravity, and this pause carried a reason that no weather window or passage plan could reasonably outweigh. We were flying home for our son Jago’s eighteenth birthday, and that fact gave the interruption a significance entirely beyond logistics. Eighteen is not simply another birthday quietly marked between journeys; it carries the unmistakable feeling of time moving in larger ways, of childhood properly giving way to adulthood, and of moments that deserve presence no matter what else may be unfolding elsewhere.

The contrast between worlds felt almost abrupt. Only hours earlier the conversation had been about drive belts, mast work, scanner alarms, and weather windows westward; now it shifted toward flights, timings, and the curious compression required when one life must briefly fold into another before reopening again days later.

Perhaps that is part of what long owner-led deliveries truly are: not clean expeditions separated neatly from life ashore, but a continual negotiation between the two. Boats move, but the rest of life continues moving too, and sometimes the voyage must make room for both.

Even so, as we prepared to leave Palermo, the unfinished route west remained present in thought almost constantly. The pause did not diminish it. If anything, stepping away sharpened it further. Ahead still lay the long western Mediterranean, the eventual turn toward Gibraltar, the Atlantic edge, Portugal, Biscay, France, and finally home waters that still felt very distant despite all that had already been covered.

For now, though, RaRa remained quietly in Palermo, secured, waiting, carrying within her both the work already done and the miles still ahead. And perhaps that was the strangest feeling of all: that although we were leaving her temporarily, part of the mind had already remained aboard.

Chapter Seven — Returning to RaRa

Time at home, though brief, quickly began to exert its usual quiet influence. Work that had been left waiting naturally reclaimed attention, domestic tasks that had seemed entirely irrelevant while offshore suddenly felt unavoidable again, and for a few days it became almost alarmingly easy to slip back into ordinary life. The contrast itself was striking: only days earlier we had been crossing open water under conflicting forecasts, measuring wave period against judgement, and now the calm routines of the New Forest seemed to suggest that perhaps the sea had already happened some time ago rather than only recently.

Yet that illusion did not last long. After four days both Rachel and I began to notice something neither of us had quite expected: a distinct sense of missing RaRa herself. It was not merely that the voyage remained unfinished, nor simply that Palermo still held practical work waiting to be done, but something more personal and slightly strange — the sense that we were absent from something that had already become emotionally familiar. It felt faintly ridiculous to admit aloud that we missed an inanimate object with such force, yet that was precisely how it seemed: less like leaving property and more like leaving behind a companion that had already acquired character through shared effort.

Flights were eventually booked for the 26th, and when we arrived into Palermo at 10:21 local time, the weather immediately reminded us that the Mediterranean rarely allows a return without fresh negotiation. Winds were already in excess of thirty-five knots, strong enough that a call to the marina requesting additional mooring lines felt prudent before we had even reached the boat, and to their credit the marina staff obliged without fuss.

The day had begun with practical intentions. We had imagined arriving early enough to regain momentum quickly, perhaps even recover some of the maintenance time already mentally allocated to the days ahead. Instead, modern borders imposed their own delay. Passport control swallowed nearly two hours, a strangely slow and impersonal process made more noticeable perhaps because recent years seem to have taught every country to look slightly more suspiciously at movement than before. Standing in queues under bright airport lighting, tired before even reaching the marina, it was difficult not to feel how sharply the world now carries its own uncertainty.

By the time we finally secured a taxi and reached the marina, the earlier energy had largely dissolved into simple fatigue. We were genuinely delighted to be back aboard — that first moment stepping onto the pontoon and seeing RaRa again carried an absurdly warm familiarity — yet the intended productivity of the day had already evaporated. Hunger, travel weariness, and that curious mental dullness that follows airports made practical work suddenly feel unrealistic.

So instead, rather sensibly at first, we decided to head into Palermo for food and something to drink.

The city, however, quickly reminded us that sensible intentions there often take on a life of their own. Two double espressos seemed a good idea at the time, until it became clear that evening chill, caffeine, and later alcohol were combining in ways that rendered even short bus journeys unexpectedly unreliable. More than once we found ourselves able to manage only a few stops before the need for a comfort break became unavoidable, a logistical weakness made faintly absurd by Palermo’s buses, which already appeared to operate according to principles known only to Palermo itself.

Dinner itself justified the effort entirely. Roman pizza and spaghetti con vongole arrived exactly when needed, restoring enough spirit that for a while the evening regained direction. Yet afterwards, standing once again at a bus stop, watching forty-five minutes pass while buses appeared only in theory, it gradually became obvious that the return would not happen as planned.

And so the evening dissolved into something unexpectedly comic: long walks broken by cafés, repeated stops for facilities, more beer than originally intended, and the growing realisation that Palermo had once again quietly decided our movements rather than us. By the time we finally reached RaRa again, we were shattered, faintly ridiculous, slightly over-caffeinated, mildly tipsy, and entirely without energy for anything beyond sleep. It felt, in its own way, like a perfect return.

Chapter Eight — Wind Against the Marina

The following morning announced itself long before dawn. At four in the morning the sound of heavy rain striking the cabin roof and gusts pressing through the rigging stirred us both awake, yet rather than feeling intrusive it carried something unexpectedly comforting about it. There is a particular intimacy to being aboard during weather when there is nowhere else you need to be — the enclosed warmth of the cabin, the muffled force outside, and the quiet knowledge that for once the sea is someone else’s concern beyond the breakwater.

For a while we simply stayed there, warm, listening, content in that half-sleeping stillness that rain aboard seems to encourage. It was one of those moments where no one feels any urgency to begin the day because the weather itself appears to justify postponement.

Of course, aboard, postponement rarely survives long. Rachel generally tolerates my reluctance to move for a certain amount of time, but there comes a point — often signalled less romantically by my increasingly unreliable early-morning digestion — when staying horizontal ceases to be realistic for either of us. It has quietly become one of those truths of boat life that never appears in sailing books: however beautiful the rain may sound on the cabin roof, domestic reality always arrives eventually, and rarely with elegance.

Once up, the usual ritual took over. Coffee for one of us, tea for the other, both taken quietly while minds moved ahead of conversation and began arranging the day’s work before a word had properly been spoken.

Friday belonged largely to sourcing what the boat still needed. The blower fault had already made clear that improvisation would only go so far, and much of the day disappeared between chandlers, electrical counters, and marine suppliers in search of the correct blower unit together with radar fittings, electrical ancillaries, AIS components, and the remaining pieces needed for the data hub installation. Sunday closures already sat in the mind, and there was a quiet determination not to discover one missing connector only after shops had shut.

By evening the blower had finally been secured, along with radar fixings and the handful of minor electrical items that looked insignificant in the bag but would later prove decisive once tools were out.

Dinner that evening at the marina felt entirely earned. Seafood platters arrived with glasses of Etna Bianco, and after a day spent walking suppliers rather than turning screws, an early night seemed less restraint than sensible preparation.

Saturday carried a completely different energy because now repair could begin properly.

Before much movement had begun around the marina, I set about making the replacement radar drive belt using a thermal weld, carefully forming by hand what only days earlier had existed as theory into something tangible enough to trust inside the dome itself. There is always a quiet hesitation when fabricating a critical component aboard rather than fitting something bought, because success offers no reassurance beyond your own judgement, yet once shaped correctly the belt settled into place with an immediate sense that it was likely to do exactly what was required.

Only after that came one of those smaller tasks whose emotional weight proved larger than expected. Using a latex rubbing wheel, we removed the final traces of the old Salty Dog decals, slowly lifting away the last visible remnants of her former identity until at last RaRa stood cleanly under her own name alone. It was cosmetic work, certainly, but names aboard matter more than most things ashore, and with those final marks gone she somehow appeared fully settled into her new life in a way paperwork alone had never quite achieved.

From there the day gathered momentum naturally. While Rachel turned her attention to the radar unit itself, patiently cleaning the internals and lifting away every trace of accumulated salt and grime before reassembly, I climbed into the engine well to fit the newly sourced blower. Like so many electrical jobs aboard, what appears simple from outside rarely remains simple once connectors, awkward access, and wiring begin asserting themselves, and fitting it properly demanded rather more patience than the blower itself perhaps deserved.

Yet when power was finally restored and the unit came immediately to life, the satisfaction was unmistakable, because another uncertainty quietly disappeared from the boat in a single moment.

The final task returned us aloft. My old climbing harness, which had once been painfully tight, now fitted again with reasonable comfort — an unexpected advantage of recent weight loss, though I suspect Palermo’s public transport system deserves at least partial credit for that, given how much of the previous evenings had ultimately involved walking considerable distances after buses that either failed to appear entirely or arrived according to rules known only to Palermo itself.

Once again Rachel took the strain below, steadily raising me aloft using halyard and winch with the calm reliability that such work quietly depends upon. By then the whole operation felt notably easier than before, perhaps because uncertainty had largely been replaced by familiarity.

With the radar dome lifted back into place, secured carefully, and all connections checked again, there followed that small pause every repair eventually demands: power applied, system waking, attention fixed entirely on whether effort will justify itself.

This time it did so immediately. The radar returned exactly as hoped, alive again without hesitation, and with it came the kind of relief that only matters properly when the fault itself has carried real weight in the mind. Offshore, malfunction is never merely inconvenience. It sits quietly beneath every later decision, touching confidence, safety, and peace of mind in ways often larger than the fault itself.

By evening, that sense of release had become something larger than satisfaction alone. Between the blower running properly, the radar restored, the old decals finally gone, and the boat feeling cleaner and sharper in every direction, it seemed obvious that the day had amounted to far more than maintenance.

Rachel and I had restored not simply individual systems aboard RaRa, but something of the ease with which the next sea could now be approached.

The weather, however, still refused cooperation. Palermo would hold us a little longer, though by now that no longer felt frustrating. The remaining days could still be used well: AIS installation, data hub integration, minor electrical finishing, cosmetic corrections, cleaning, polishing — all the quieter work that gradually turns a functioning boat into one genuinely prepared.

And beyond that waiting remained something larger still: the long westward crossing across the Tyrrhenian Sea toward Sardinia, now feeling less like uncertainty and more like something steadily approaching for which both boat and crew were increasingly ready.

Chapter Nine — The Sea Answers Quickly

Thursday 2nd April began not with departure but with waiting, which by then already felt suitably Mediterranean in character. We had moved from Marina di Villa Igiea into Palermo’s main harbour to take fuel, intending to leave directly afterwards, and what should have been a simple stop became our last obvious opportunity to fill the water tanks — one I declined, still preferring less weight in the bows with heavier conditions expected west of Palermo, a decision Rachel regarded immediately as one likely to prove inconvenient later. The attendant then disappeared into what the residents of Sicily seemed to regard not as lunch, but as a full three-hour interruption to ordinary momentum. By the time fuel was complete and lines slipped, it was already around 1600, late enough that departure carried a slight sense of compromise before the sea had yet offered its own opinion.

It answered quickly.

Almost immediately the motion became uncomfortable: twenty-seven knots, over three metres, cresting tops, and a sea unsettled enough to remove any temptation to pretend it was manageable simply because leaving remained emotionally attractive. There was very little discussion before turning back. Some decisions aboard require weighing competing views; others arrive so clearly that words become unnecessary. Within an hour we were re-entering Palermo.

There was no sense of defeat in it, only recognition. Later, using PredictWind’s forecast replay, we could see more clearly what had actually been there: roughly two metres of wind sea sitting over a larger south-westerly swell reaching four to five metres. It explained perfectly why the sea had felt so immediately wrong.

Part of the desire to leave, however carefully restrained, came from what waited further west. By the seventh we hoped to reach Alghero, where an old friend, Neil Durrant, was due to meet us — one of the small group with whom we had crossed the English Channel to Cherbourg and back by rigid inflatable, a feat of equal parts daring and camaraderie undertaken in boats of only five and a half to six metres and remembered ever since under the entirely self-awarded title of The Channel Buoys. Alongside Neil, that small fraternity also included Ryan Purdie, Ben Maguire, Jago, Rachel and myself, each of us carrying some shared maritime history that remained firmly earned in memory.

Yet if Palermo had taught us anything by then, it was that wanting to leave and being right to leave are rarely the same thing.

We were never trying to prove toughness; only trying to stay equal to the privilege of being there.

The following departure, on Good Friday, felt entirely different. Palermo released us under conditions that required attention but no argument, and within the first hours it became quietly obvious that turning back the previous day had been entirely correct.

By then much aboard felt subtly altered. The blower ran properly, the radar turned exactly as hoped, and even the simple sound of the boat under way carried a different quality now that so much recent uncertainty had been replaced by work completed with our own hands. Palermo had delayed us, certainly, but it had also changed the boat in ways difficult to measure and immediately obvious once offshore again.

Rachel and I had reached another small conclusion aboard: the sea nearly always wants its pound of flesh, but usually offers a bargain in how it takes it. Speed or comfort — one of them would sooner or later be surrendered, and recognising that often simplified decisions more honestly than forecasts ever did.

We had not bought a quarter-of-a-million-pound cruising catamaran in order to endure unnecessary discomfort simply for the satisfaction of arriving marginally sooner.

The first night remained lumpy while coastal influence still held us, though offshore the motion improved steadily as deeper water took control. Forecast error remained familiar, this time more in wind angle than strength. When the angle settled more favourably than predicted, we raised full main and bore west-south-west, taking eighteen knots apparent at roughly seventy to eighty degrees and allowing the boat to move far more freely than expected.

By night my stomach reminded me that improving seas do not always arrive before queasiness has already established itself. My own remedy remains scientifically questionable but personally reliable: one beer if necessary, two if conditions and responsibility allow.

It was shortly afterwards that I made what seemed at the time an excellent decision and in retrospect perhaps less so.

While Rachel went below, I placed the empty beer bottle loose on deck and hid myself in the unused starboard hull, convinced that the scene would suggest, briefly at least, that I had gone over the side.

When she emerged and found only the bottle moving, panic arrived exactly as intended, followed shortly afterwards by fury when she discovered me hidden and very pleased with myself. The fury lasted only seconds before collapsing into laughter so complete that neither of us could properly sustain indignation for long.

During the night we also finally resolved the tracking page properly, thanks to efficient email support from Marleen at PredictWind in New Zealand, calmly solving the issue from the opposite side of the world while we moved west through darkness. It reinforced something both of us had already accepted: PredictWind, the DataHub, and Starlink had become so central to how we now operated offshore that doing without them no longer felt like seamanship, merely unnecessary self-denial.

The following day brought small visitors aboard. Common chiffchaff arrived repeatedly, often in pairs, appearing from nowhere far offshore. One eventually landed on my shoulder as though the arrangement required no permission from either of us.

Overnight we settled into two-hour watches along southern Sardinia, staying twenty to thirty miles offshore in deeper water and clear of the live firing range off Capo Spartivento. Traffic near Cagliari kept both of us occupied, though channel 16 provided its own absurdity: hours of whistling, meowing, barking and what sounded remarkably like someone imitating a pig, behaviour that left me completely perplexed. By then Rachel’s earlier warning had become difficult to dismiss, because offshore the practical consequence of my careful trim management had arrived exactly as predicted: our washing water had run out completely.

It was during that same night, with dawn gathering, that I found myself thinking how much had quietly changed already. For some time, whenever anyone referred to me as skipper, I had carried a faint sense of impostor syndrome behind the title, as though the word properly belonged to people with heavier qualifications or longer histories than mine. Yet sea miles, repairs, restraint, mistakes, and repeated decisions honestly made under way had begun supplying a legitimacy certificates alone never quite explain.

That thought, arriving unexpectedly in the half-light, brought with it another: my father.

He had died on the tenth of November the previous year, and although many things had shaped the decision to return home when we did — family, unfinished obligations, the delay to the boat sale — his death had perhaps sharpened all of it more than I had admitted fully at the time. Offshore, however, thoughts arrive without much invitation, and there he was again with the morning.

The thought itself carried no heaviness. Quite the opposite. He had been one of our strongest supporters in all of this, deeply proud in the quiet way many fathers of his generation often are, communicating far more through interest and attention than through any need to declare it directly.

As the first light strengthened, I found myself thinking too about how many sunrises are granted before one notices they are not endless, and with that came a small private resolve to value more carefully those still left — especially the ones shared with Rachel, offshore, where dawn seems always to arrive with unusual clarity.

Morning coffee aboard tasted particularly good.

That peace was interrupted rather abruptly when Rachel woke me not gently for sunrise, but screaming like a banshee. I came on deck expecting catastrophe only to discover that the emergency amounted to the plotter still being in night mode and Rachel being unable to increase the screen brightness. My response, still fuelled by adrenaline, was briefly less patient than ideal.

Later, of course, we laughed. Rachel suggested this might simply be karma for both the earlier prank and my decision not to fill the water tanks.

By then we had rounded south-west Sardinia and passed Isola del Toro — Bull Island — where dolphins appeared briefly alongside. Beyond it the sea changed entirely: bright sunshine, flat water, and no meaningful wind. We unashamedly made no attempt to raise sail, accepting without debate that straight-line progress under engine suited both the conditions and our priorities far better than pretending otherwise.

Rather than waste such conditions, we abandoned Carloforte and altered instead into Cala Domestica to refuel under anchor.

Despite the name, there was nothing remotely domestic about it. Steep cliffs enclosed bright still water and the whole bay felt almost indecently beautiful for somewhere chosen largely for diesel.

We transferred fuel, swam, ate on deck, and for a while the voyage ceased entirely to resemble effort.

It was there that Rachel and I first properly admitted aloud that returning home to begin the charter business no longer felt quite as certain as it once had. Nothing had been decided, but Cala Domestica had a way of making practical plans seem less fixed than they had only days earlier.

We had loved the Mediterranean far more deeply than either of us had expected.

By the time Alghero received us, the first requirement ashore proved not celebration but plumbing. Having run the water supply completely dry, the pump had unsurprisingly lost prime, and what followed became a lengthy exercise in venting air from every tap aboard, coaxing pressure back into the system over nearly two hours, interrupted at one point by twenty litres of hot water directly over me before a decisive intervention with the winch handle finally persuaded the pump to cooperate. Even then the galley remained stubbornly reduced to a steady dribble — a result Rachel regarded as entirely consistent with the wisdom of my earlier decision.

The marina offered another familiar irony: once again, a berth but no functioning shower block, renovation having rendered the facilities unusable. So after days of rationing water because I had wanted the bows light, we both ended up showering on deck using the boat’s own shower instead.

Alghero itself felt ancient, imposing and quietly charming, a vast and welcome contrast to Palermo. Rachel and I were already planning what had become our now mandatory arrival ritual: a boozy lunch somewhere ashore, partly celebration, partly recovery, and partly an excuse to sit still long enough to decide what we really thought about wherever we had just arrived. This time, however, the conversation had acquired a different weight. Cala Domestica had unsettled something in both of us, and over food and wine we found ourselves speaking more seriously than before about whether returning home simply to begin the charter business was still the certainty it had once seemed, or whether what we now wanted was something closer to becoming full-time nautical nomads…

Chapter Ten — A Kind Sea of Turtles and Dolphins

Neil’s beaming smile arrived before he did, visible across the marina before he was close enough to step aboard, and Rachel and I were genuinely delighted to see him. A year earlier we had crossed the English Channel with him to Cherbourg, one of those adventures that acquires its own character almost immediately and then remains fixed in memory for reasons larger than distance alone. We had taken to him at once. Neil belongs unmistakably to that rare category of person who seems able to locate genuine jubilation in almost any circumstance. Even four cold and thoroughly wet hours in a force five on the return leg from Cherbourg had failed to dent his enthusiasm in the slightest. Naturally, we were pleased to have him aboard for the Sardinia to Balearics crossing: excellent company ashore, possessed of exactly the kind of indomitable good humour that long passages tend to reward.

By the time bags were aboard and the first greetings properly settled, the atmosphere on RaRa had altered immediately in the way boats always do when another familiar person arrives: new conversation, old stories resurfacing, and that subtle lift in mood that comes when a passage begins to feel shared in a slightly different way.

Neil was travel-weary by the time he had unpacked, and although we had left supper options open, it quickly became clear that eating aboard was both the least strenuous and most convivial choice. Conversation moved easily through memories of Cherbourg and Saint-Vaast before drifting, as it inevitably would, towards the crossing ahead and the Balearics waiting further west.

By then the wine was flowing and laughter steadily less restrained, and I found myself retelling an exchange from earlier that day, shortly before Neil’s arrival. It was Easter weekend in Sardinia, and throughout our time there the celebratory sound of local youths letting off bangers had echoed intermittently through the town. With Rachel’s birthday the following day, acquiring some of my own had seemed an entirely reasonable ambition, though if I was honest, birthday theatrics were not quite the only reason the idea appealed…

It was that ambition that had led me to stop and question a group of local boys who were enthusiastically setting them off themselves in one of Alghero’s side streets. Since they clearly possessed both supply and enthusiasm, they seemed the obvious people to ask. Their directions, delivered with complete confidence, pointed me towards a tobacconist where they assured me I could acquire some myself, accompanied by the helpful suggestion that I greet the proprietor with fancula — which they assured me meant peace, in the sense of a friendly greeting, though in reality translates rather more closely to an instruction to go forth and multiply. And in spite of that knowledge, I left them with numerous loud and enthusiastic renditions of fancula of my own, simply to enjoy the mischievous delight it so obviously brought them.

Rachel’s birthday arrived as Neil’s first — and, as it happened, only full day in Sardinia, and from the outset our ambition was simple enough: indulge Rachel’s every whim without resistance. That began rather earlier than Neil might ideally have chosen, when I woke him at 07:30 and we assembled for what could only be described as a deliberately restrained breakfast of tea, coffee and juice, restraint which lasted only until the Bloody Marys appeared and quietly established that the day would not be governed by moderation.

Conversation remained light and easy before we moved ashore again for brunch at Mirador Mare, chosen as much for its magnificent view as for any particular culinary ambition. Afterwards we returned briefly to the boat so that Neil and I could each submit ourselves to unavoidable work-related video calls, a faint intrusion of ordinary life into what otherwise felt increasingly detached from it.

By early afternoon we were walking again towards the port, where Rachel decided we should take the little tourist train — the Trenino Catalano — an excursion that delighted her largely because my own discomfort with overt tourism remains, for reasons I cannot entirely justify, almost theatrical. Eighteen minutes later we were deposited almost exactly where we had started, which only added to the absurdity and somehow made the whole exercise entirely worthwhile.

The old town itself, however, required no justification at all. Alghero in the afternoon sun felt both ancient and effortlessly alive, and we drifted through it without much urgency, stopping for slices of pizza, cold beers, and eventually gelato of sufficient quality to make further movement temporarily feel unnecessary.

By around four o’clock we were hot, pleasantly squiffy, and increasingly aware that the boat offered the only sensible refuge. On returning to RaRa, largely for Rachel’s amusement and to shed the accumulated heat from my body, I dived straight from the bows into the harbour water before all three of us surrendered to a late afternoon siesta.

When we woke again around 18:30, supper had already been decided: Nautilus, where seafood seemed the only acceptable direction and lobster quickly confirmed the wisdom of that decision, accompanied by an excellent local white wine that ensured the evening maintained exactly the tone the day had established.

Throughout the day another conversation had been running in parallel: a steadily increasing effort to persuade Grace — a friend of ours — that joining us in Palma and staying aboard until Ibiza or Alicante was not merely sensible, but by then increasingly inevitable. By dinner, helped perhaps by good food, wine, and collective optimism, she had agreed.

By the time we returned to the boat, pleasantly tired and still faintly buoyant from the day, attention had already begun shifting quietly towards the passage ahead.

Thursday 9th April began earlier than intended. Although alarms had been set later, all three of us were awake well before them, excitement proving more effective than any clock. Engine checks were completed, safety routines repeated, fuel taken, water replenished — a task I approached this time with appropriate humility. I had no intention of repeating the earlier lesson in offshore scarcity.

We left the fuel dock at around 10:00, almost an hour earlier than planned, which gifted us something departure rarely offers: time enough to enjoy where we were leaving rather than merely leave it. Rather than turn immediately west, we first edged north-west along the coast towards Capo Caccia, its vast cliff face rising sheer from the sea, crowned by the elevated lighthouse which seemed to stand almost improbably high above the water.

The conditions were balmy, the sea almost indulgent, and as we rounded the headland we passed Neptune’s Cave, where tourist boats threaded themselves into the cave entrance with impressive precision. Above, the steep stone staircase cut dramatically into the cliff face climbed towards the lighthouse, tourists moving slowly along it in full view against the rock. It was impossible not to pause and admire it. We congratulated one another quietly and took a moment simply to absorb the scale and beauty of the place before turning properly west and beginning the long line towards Palma.

05:15 that morning had already given warning enough. We had checked and then checked again the weather, and for the first time since planning the crossing every forecast appeared unusually aligned: light winds almost throughout, suggesting a largely motoring passage west. That agreement itself felt suspiciously generous of the sea.

Yet the generosity came with a condition. A mistral — the hard, cold north-westerly that descends through southern France into the western Mediterranean and often arrives with little patience for anyone still exposed — was building and due to reach the Balearics barely twelve hours after our planned mid-morning arrival in Palma on the eleventh.

It left very little room for indulgence. The sea, for once, seemed to be asking no immediate price, but only on condition that we accepted its timetable exactly.

Once offshore, the forecast proved entirely accurate. The wind remained so light that we made no attempt whatsoever to raise sail, accepting immediately that this would be a motoring passage, and for once that felt less like compromise than privilege.

Towards the onset of nautical twilight we were visited by a magnificent mature loggerhead turtle. The creature appeared almost as curious about us as we were about it, raising its head several times and seeming, unmistakably, to look directly at us. There are moments at sea when conversation simply stops because everyone aboard recognises instinctively that something rare is happening; this was one of them.

Spirits already high, Neil then began preparing what proved to be an exceptional ragù, made from fresh ingredients gathered in the markets of Alghero before departure. Food at sea has always seemed to carry an importance beyond ordinary appetite, perhaps because every proper meal offshore contains not only cooking, but planning, timing, balance, and effort that began long before the pan is ever lit.

We ate as darkness settled and for the first time adopted structured four-hour watches properly, a system that immediately felt civilised compared with the more improvised arrangements Rachel and I had relied upon previously.

As the moon climbed from the sea, green light began appearing along both hulls — long luminous trails streaming aft, with occasional brighter emerald bursts swirling in the prop wash. Bioluminescence had visited us before, but never with quite this clarity, and for long stretches it became almost hypnotic to watch.

As had already become habit, watch or no watch, dawn brought everyone back on deck. Friday morning’s sunrise arrived with such colour and intensity that words inevitably fail long before the sky does justice to itself. Rachel produced cheese toasties for all three of us, a small act of domestic brilliance that felt unexpectedly luxurious offshore.

By midday the warmth had turned properly hot, and for the first time since leaving Greece we found ourselves stretched in genuine comfort under sustained Mediterranean sun, no jackets, no layers, only light, warmth and a crew increasingly aware that this crossing was becoming something unusually kind.

By around four in the afternoon another loggerhead appeared, smaller this time but equally welcome. By then it had already become clear that this was one of those passages that kept offering more than expected. Three further turtles followed, then a family pod of Risso’s dolphins, and later numerous encounters with pods of striped dolphins whose energy bordered on theatrical, spending long spells playing in the bow wave before vanishing only to reappear again moments later.

Shortly before dusk we passed the thousand-mile mark of our voyage. One thousand nautical miles completed; roughly one third of the way home. It deserved recognition, and we gave it exactly that.

As evening deepened, land was called ahead: Menorca emerging low and faint in the distance. Around the same time I spotted small tuna feeding and breaking cleanly clear of the surface. Autopilot was disengaged immediately, course altered, and the Rapala put to work with fresh optimism. Yet again, nothing took. After a thousand miles of trying, I had begun half-seriously to suspect that the Mediterranean might simply contain fewer obliging fish than reputation suggests.

It had been Neil’s first proper offshore watch, and the lucky bugger had, through a wholly unnecessary but highly amusing appeal to artificial intelligence, been randomly awarded the first and undeniably best shift: eight until midnight. To avoid any suggestion of bias, Rachel and I entered ourselves under the absurd fishing nicknames we had been using for years, while Neil — newly inducted aboard in Sardinia — was promptly awarded one of his own. He became Captain Red Leg, after managing to burn one leg with extraordinary precision while sitting cross-legged in the full Sardinian sun outside an Alghero restaurant. Rachel entered as Captain Mackerel Minge, while I remained Captain Cod’s Cock. The result placed Neil first, myself second, and Rachel on what we had already begun calling the dawn patrol.

He had, it must be said, proved himself entirely equal to it. During the night, as I had asked, Neil had attempted to knock on my cabin door for reassurance over an AIS target moving north. I heard none of it, and rather than persist or wake the whole boat unnecessarily, he simply used his own judgement, reducing RaRa’s speed enough to open safe sea room and avoid any close passing situation. It was entirely the correct decision, taken calmly and confidently, and exactly the sort of independent judgement worth encouraging aboard. Neil had handled it well and, more importantly, had clearly gained confidence in doing so.

These commendable actions were only very slightly diminished by the fact that, earlier in the same watch, he had managed to struggle with his lifejacket sufficiently to pull the inflation toggle by mistake, frightening himself rather more than the situation warranted. When I came on watch and he delivered this news, I laughed so hard I nearly forgot to take over properly.

In the tiredness that the midnight-to-four watch inevitably brings, my mind drifted towards what was becoming an increasingly believable fantasy: that our brief tribute at Neptune’s Cave had in fact been rewarded.

It seemed faintly possible, in that hour when darkness begins loosening its grip but dawn has not yet fully declared itself, that the god of the sea himself had chosen to look kindly on this crossing — a quiet acknowledgement perhaps, for the respect we had paid earlier beneath those cliffs.

I found myself increasingly convinced that this would become remembered as one of our finest passages.

Rachel relieved my watch slightly later than agreed. I was not especially tired and had spent part of the final hour quietly recording our journal, so had deliberately allowed her an extra hour in bed. We completed the usual handover properly, and before disappearing below I pointed out something I had noticed earlier on the AIS target list that immediately lifted both our spirits again.

Our newly installed PredictWind DataHub records user-submitted cetacean sightings, and during my watch I had discovered that less than two hundred hours earlier four sightings of sperm whales had been logged in roughly the same waters we were now crossing. We were both instantly animated by it, asking each other with genuine hope whether this extraordinary passage might yet deliver one more gift. If the crossing so far was anything to judge by, it no longer felt remotely impossible.

First light arrived as we rounded the final headland, the lighthouse at Far des Cap Blanc standing clear ahead while Palma began slowly asserting itself across the bay, large enough at first to feel slightly unreal after two nights offshore. Lines were prepared early, fenders hung, boat hook laid ready, and the quiet offshore rhythm gave way once again to the practical business of arrival.

We entered Real Club Náutico de Palma under perfect conditions, the marina itself vast beyond anything we had yet encountered on the passage — a thousand berths, exceptional facilities, and certainly the largest marina I had entered in thirty years of boating. The marina team met us ahead of the berth and guided us in, making the final manoeuvre straightforward, helped further by the additional pair of hands Neil provided.

By 08:30 RaRa was tied securely alongside, engines silent, all three of us tired enough to feel suddenly weightless, and already holding cold beers before the sense of arrival had fully settled. Formalities were completed, more beer followed, then a brief siesta before we enthusiastically sought out a properly spicy meal, all three of us by then aware how much we had been missing heat in our food. That was not to diminish Mediterranean cooking, which had been exceptional throughout, only to recognise that since Palermo this was the first place where that particular craving felt properly possible. Sleep came early afterwards and heavily — easily the best night any of us had managed in three.

The following morning’s coffee was interrupted by the low pass of a helicopter, the sort of sound that immediately alters the mood of any marina. Curiosity drew me to look out, where a damaged yacht was being escorted slowly into harbour by both helicopter and coastguard launch, sails hanging in tatters and whatever confidence had existed aboard clearly gone.

Bar conversation later supplied the story in full. The crew had chartered the yacht for a regatta; for most of them it had been their first real sailing experience, and they had deliberately taken the boat out into a force eight mistral — the very same mistral we had watched, respected, and timed our own crossing carefully to avoid. Barely twenty-four hours after our arrival, it had already claimed its first casualty.

The three of us spoke quietly afterwards about how fortunate it was that nobody had been hurt, but also about the fear that had remained plainly visible on the faces of the returning crew, and the extraordinary irresponsibility of choosing to sail knowingly into conditions that offered no useful lesson beyond the obvious one: that the sea so rarely rewards bravado simply because it is intentional.

Chapter 11 — Westward at Last

Grace arrived the following day, and with her came the immediate shift in atmosphere that another familiar person always brings aboard. We collected her from the airport and returned directly to RaRa, where the boat once again became the natural centre of everything: bags stowed, first drinks poured, conversation resuming almost as though no travel had interrupted it.

Grace quickly established her value aboard by producing spicy margaritas of a quality far beyond anything marina life had any right to expect, made properly, with exceptional ingredients and Patrón tequila that left no doubt she had arrived prepared to contribute seriously to morale.

After the crossing, the days in Palma had already begun to soften into recovery, and that first evening followed naturally in the same spirit: drinks aboard, easy conversation, little urgency, and sleep arriving early once again, still borrowed in part from the fatigue of the passage.

The following day — Monday 13th April — we exchanged marina life for mountain roads, hiring a car and heading inland through Mallorca’s winding passes towards villages whose age and character fully justified their world heritage reputation.

The weather, however, had other ideas. My decision to pursue the scenic route on a windy and rain-swept day meant that for a good half hour the mountain road offered little beyond low cloud and occasional glimpses of stone walls appearing briefly before vanishing again. My confidence in the route naturally attracted scepticism, though conversation and laughter more than compensated for the absent views.

By the time the cloud finally lifted, the day had found its rhythm: shared paella, sangria, easy conversation, and the simple pleasure of discovering that even poor visibility had done little to diminish the outing itself.

By the third day the mistral had veered east of Mallorca, leaving behind the kind of hot, bright Mediterranean weather that makes movement ashore feel suddenly effortless again. Rachel and I drove to Carrefour to begin provisioning properly for the next leg west towards Ibiza, leaving Neil and Grace to rise late and enjoy the boat in their own time.

Provisioning always begins with restraint and ends, almost without fail, in mild excess. By the time we reached the checkout we had accumulated three full trolleys of food, drinks, and practical necessities, sufficiently committed by then that retreat was impossible. It was only there, while manoeuvring this entirely foreseeable abundance towards payment, that we noticed the sign quietly advertising a complimentary yacht provisioning delivery service. The timing of the discovery felt almost perfectly comic: only once the hard work had already been done did the convenience reveal itself. We laughed at the irony while pushing everything back towards the car.

When we returned to RaRa, however, the shopping quickly became secondary. Neil and Grace were stretched together on the trampoline in the late morning sun, relaxed in that easy closeness which required no announcement to explain itself. The sight filled both Rachel and me with quiet happiness, because long before the trip began we had privately hoped that shared time aboard might offer exactly the kind of space ordinary life so rarely permits. It seemed, without either of us needing to say so aloud, that perhaps it had.

Later that day I prepared my now familiar passage pizza: fresh dough, sauce, cheese and cured meats, all sourced in Italy and still carrying enough of that earlier coastline to feel faintly ceremonial each time it appeared aboard. The ship’s oven performed its usual trick of taking considerably longer than expected to brown the toppings than seemed reasonable, leaving the base ready long before appearances suggested confidence, but experience had already taught us not to wait for perfection where ovens afloat were concerned.

We ate more hurriedly than usual because by 17:00 we were back on the road to the airport, returning Neil and Grace to their flights and watching the brief little community aboard dissolve almost as quickly as it had formed.

Rachel and I returned afterwards to RaRa noticeably quieter, took a short siesta, and later once again took full advantage of Palma’s willingness to provide spice — curry, and remarkably little beer. The easy excess that having Neil and Grace aboard had encouraged seemed suddenly absent again, and with it both of us felt less inclined towards indulgence than we had in previous days.

Back aboard, and in the sudden absence of Neil and Grace, conversation turned almost immediately towards the next leg west. Ibiza now sat close enough to feel uncomplicated, and for the first time in some while neither of us felt any appetite for urgency about when exactly departure should happen — morning, afternoon, or simply whenever it felt right. Alongside that sat another feeling we both recognised easily but did not need much explanation for: after the warmth and noise of shared days, we were quietly looking forward again to the solitude the sea restores, where conversation simplifies and the boat once more becomes only ours.

Somewhere in that quieter conversation we both recognised that the pace of the voyage had altered. Deadlines had steadily loosened their hold, and we had consciously decided to let them go altogether where possible, choosing instead to value time afloat for what it had increasingly become: not merely movement between places, but often the best part of the places themselves.

We agreed that a slower passage west, with time among coves and anchorages around Ibiza, felt like exactly the right prelude to what now sat further ahead. The planned four-day passage from Ibiza directly to Gibraltar had begun to feel more than simple distance; it was becoming preparation for something increasingly obtainable — a proper rite of passage of our own, the confidence to one day cross Biscay cleanly rather than merely stepping north in cautious stages along a coast. Our confidence was growing, the weather improving, and for the first time the larger ocean beyond the Mediterranean no longer felt abstract.

On 15th April we rose early with that familiar departure energy which seems always to sharpen even the simplest tasks aboard. Weather first, as always: every model now showed less than ten knots for the coming week and more beyond, enough settled light weather to remove any immediate expectation of demanding sailing and, if I am honest, enough to leave me perfectly content not to sail much at all for a while.

Provisioning, however, immediately turned departure morning into something more hurried than planned. The hire car had to be returned, fishing tackle still needed buying in the increasingly optimistic hope that my fortunes might improve, and somewhere within all of that sat the entirely essential final purchases of ice and beer, both of which naturally acquired disproportionate urgency.

Back aboard, a brisk crosswind had developed by the time we were ready to leave, enough to make the berth departure awkward but not difficult, and once clear I ferry-guided RaRa across onto the fuel berth — a technique I had increasingly come to enjoy, sliding the boat laterally across the wind under controlled power rather than fighting unnecessarily against it. It felt, I thought privately, rather well executed.

The fuel berth offered a noticeably different atmosphere altogether. A ferry arriving nearby guided itself in with the kind of calm precision commercial crews make look almost dismissively simple, and there was something faintly reassuring in watching that level of confidence unfold so casually beside us. We fuelled the boat properly, and because fuel there remained comparatively cheap at €1.95 per litre, also filled nine twenty-litre jerry cans, building reserves that seemed sensible given what now lay west.

Eventually we left Palma with no fixed course laid beyond Ibiza itself, and for the first time on the voyage there was no particularly disciplined waypoint in mind beyond simply allowing the day to unfold westward.

We sailed through another spectacular sunset and into a quiet night, the sea holding that easy rhythm which encourages optimism without demanding much in return. Through the darkness we diverted repeatedly around seamounts and reefs wherever the chart suggested even a modest increase in fishable water, each slight alteration carrying renewed confidence that one of them must eventually produce something.

Nothing did.

Throughout my night watch I had been observing a twelve-metre fishing vessel working patiently on and around Oliva Bank, and its repeated movements there only increased my own confidence that the slight detour remained justified. If local fishermen were prepared to spend hours working that ground, then surely the sharp rise from nearly a thousand metres to roughly two hundred and sixty-six had to hold something worth our attention.

Morning arrived with that expectation still intact, but Oliva Bank itself offered nothing at all.

Instead, as often happens, reward came elsewhere. In the growing light striped dolphins appeared first, followed later by bottlenose dolphins as we approached our chosen anchorage at Cala Mastella. One bottlenose female moved unusually close with two calves beside her, close enough that her interest felt less like welcome and more like deliberate caution, and we altered slightly to give her more room. I suspected she was warning us away rather than greeting us, and respected the distinction.

We entered Cala Mastella at around eleven in the morning and searched carefully for sand among the sea grass before dropping anchor.

The place was stunning, and entirely empty.

A small quay sat quietly ashore beside the little restaurant famous locally for sardines, and later in the afternoon we watched what I took to be the owner return aboard an old working sardine boat, arriving just as the restaurant itself was closing. The whole thing felt pleasingly authentic, and I found myself imagining how good those sardines must taste after a night of long lines and morning catch.

We chose not to go ashore at all. Instead we stayed aboard, enjoying the unfamiliar pleasure of complete freedom that anchoring had begun to offer us after so much marina life. Rachel and I both remarked how satisfying it was simply not to perform another med mooring. By then we were perfectly competent at stern-to arrivals, but competence had not translated into affection, and neither of us pretended otherwise. Alongside remained simpler, cleaner, and faintly more civilised.

We ate and drank aboard while the anchorage turned golden around us, the sunset arriving with exactly the sort of stillness that makes an anchorage feel briefly perfect.

That peace ended for me in the very early hours.

A new form of anxiety arrived that night, one Rachel and I later named anchor anxiety. I woke to a distinct tapping against the hull and immediately realised that RaRa had swung fully through one hundred and eighty degrees, now lying back out towards open water. The tapping came from one of the local laid mooring floats, which had drifted close enough to touch but sat sufficiently far forward that I judged no serious entanglement had yet developed.

I set an anchor alarm on the PredictWind app, then laid compass-point reference waypoints on the plotter — north, east, south and west — all on a ten-metre radius around our anchored position so that any genuine movement would show itself immediately against known reference points.

Only then did I return reluctantly to bed.

Sleep became intermittent at best. Almost hourly I woke again to check alarms, bearings and distances, never fully trusting either electronics or my own tiredness until finally around six in the morning light returned and with it, disproportionately, my confidence.

That same morning domestic reality intervened almost immediately. Rachel’s phone, already cracked, finally appeared to fail altogether — black screen, entirely unresponsive despite still being powered on. Ordinarily that might have been irritating rather than significant, but Rachel handles almost all of our banking because, quite sensibly, she is trusted with financial precision in ways I am not. Even while on passage we were still managing our household in the UK, paying bills, transferring food money to Jago, and keeping our small business moving.

The phone therefore was not optional.

Necessity overruled preference, and so we agreed, reluctantly at first, to head for Ibiza Town, a place I had not visited in roughly thirty-three years and not without memorable consequences.

That earlier visit had involved three of us on an 18–30 holiday, youthful enthusiasm, arrest on arrival for behaviour on the aircraft that was judged unsuitable, Darren deliberately dropping from a second-storey apartment balcony while drunk and breaking his foot, later robbery after leaving our door open, and finally returning to the UK an entire week early.

I cannot claim enthusiasm at the prospect of returning.

On arrival, however, the old town proved far more beautiful than memory had preserved. We found a marina directly opposite, looking across the bay towards the old walls, and went immediately in search of a phone repair shop.

There we suffered a minor death of embarrassment.

The phone itself was entirely fine. The screen was not cracked at all, merely hidden beneath a screen protector that had finally failed so convincingly that neither of us had realised the actual screen beneath remained perfect. Once removed and reset, the phone returned entirely to life. We bought another protector immediately, the old one having clearly earned its replacement.

With banking restored, attention turned again to provisioning. This time the decision was made properly: if our scenic interruption had happened at all, then it should leave usefully. We provisioned heavily for a full twenty-four hours in Formentera and for the three-night passage to Gibraltar beyond.

Gibraltar had not originally been the plan, but settled weather and the growing sense that proper progress now mattered made the decision straightforward.

With shopping delivered aboard, phone fixed, and no further urgency remaining, we wandered the old town, drinks and snacks extending from one bar to another until Ibiza itself seemed to exert exactly the kind of old influence for which it remains famous. We enjoyed ourselves so thoroughly that by the time we returned to RaRa it was almost dawn.

Wearily I began preparing for departure while insisting Rachel sleep, knowing I would need my own rest later.

At around 09:30 on 18th April we cast off in glassy conditions and headed south towards Formentera. Along the way two tuna broke cleanly from the surface in pursuit of prey, followed later by a blue shark passing within feet of the boat, close enough to leave no doubt what it was. Wildlife and weather together restored energy that fatigue had almost removed entirely, and by the time we entered Playa S’Alga, on the northern tip of the island, both of us felt as though we had arrived somewhere unusually special.

It remains one of the most beautiful places either of us has ever seen.

For an entire day we swam, ate, slept, and did very little else. It was exactly what we required: restorative in a way that felt almost disproportionate after so little effort beyond simply stopping.

The following morning, 19th April, we woke rested, fed, and reluctant to leave. Breakfast delayed anchor-up longer than necessary simply because neither of us felt inclined to interrupt the calm too quickly.

Even so, eventually we raised anchor and left, both knowing already that Formentera would remain one of those places recalled long after much else had blurred.

We will cherish that day there forever.

Chapter 12 — Halfway

As we left Formentera, oddly and for the first time, both of us found ourselves looking back more than ahead. The island we had just left seemed to hold its beauty unusually well even with distance growing, the pale shoreline and impossible clarity of the water remaining visible long enough to make departure feel less automatic than it usually had. Until then most departures had carried little hesitation once lines were up or anchor raised; movement itself had generally held our attention more completely than whatever was receding behind us.

This felt slightly different, perhaps because Formentera had arrived so perfectly when it did, or perhaps because both of us understood that what now followed would be less about sheltered pauses and more about making proper westward ground again, and so we watched the island remain astern for longer than usual before gradually allowing attention to shift elsewhere, replaced soon enough by the quiet excitement of an empty horizon.

Ahead there was once again very little to interrupt the line where sea met sky, and with that came the particular satisfaction that longer passages always seem to restore — the feeling that for a while the world has been reduced to only what immediately matters aboard, with everything ashore temporarily suspended behind distance and weather.

The wind, at least initially, remained too light to justify much optimism, and so we settled into motor-sailing with the jib held just full enough to contribute something useful rather than merely decorative. It added perhaps half a knot when the angle held, which in such conditions felt sufficient to count as worthwhile cooperation rather than proper sailing. The main would almost certainly have added more, but once again we judged the likely gain against the familiar faff of hoisting, trimming, and later reducing it again if the wind faded, and decided the small advantage did not quite justify the effort.

Shortly after leaving Formentera the long and increasingly noted fish famine aboard finally broke in distinctly modest fashion when two sardines arrived almost together on the line. They were small enough to invite humour rather than triumph, but entirely sufficient to restore a sense that the sea had not abandoned us completely.

The empty water ahead also revived a familiar expectation that had become difficult to suppress whenever depth returned properly beneath us: the quiet hope that somewhere during the day a sperm whale might finally appear. The conditions felt plausible enough for it — long visibility, little sea clutter, steady progress, and enough time spent simply watching — yet as with so much wildlife offshore, plausibility once again proved no guarantee of reward.

Nothing came.

That absence, however, no longer carried disappointment in quite the same way it once had. By then we had already learned that the sea rarely responds to expectation simply because expectation feels reasonable. More reassuring was the weather itself. Every model we had studied before leaving continued, for once, to agree closely enough with reality that confidence aboard remained easy. The following day still held the prospect of enough wind to reduce engine hours properly and perhaps allow the boat to carry herself west for a while without assistance, which gave the passage ahead a quiet sense of progression rather than mere transit.

By evening the routine aboard had already settled into its usual offshore rhythm. Rachel took the first proper watch from eight until midnight, while I turned in early after dinner — pork chops and salad, simple enough to prepare without effort and exactly right for a calm evening underway. My own shift would begin at midnight, by which time the boat, the weather, and the horizon would once again belong to that entirely different part of passage-making that daylight never quite resembles.

I took over the watch at midnight on 20th April to find Rachel in something of a tizz, her own four hours having proved rather more eventful than the conditions first suggested. The wind had continued to fade while current increased as we rounded a seamount near the Alicante Canyon, and although the sea remained modest, the interaction between the two had produced enough overfalls to make our speed feel slightly excessive for comfort. Rachel had gone out to the helm and reduced the engine revolutions herself, judging correctly that there was little value in pressing on harder where both comfort and efficiency improved immediately by easing back.

The greater shock came moments later.

As she leaned forward to unclip her safety lanyard, the pull cord on her lifejacket somehow caught and deployed unexpectedly, inflating with enough violence and surprise to produce exactly the sort of alarm such things are designed never to create accidentally. It also marked the second entirely unplanned lifejacket inflation of the voyage so far, which by then was beginning to suggest either poor luck or a pattern none of us had intended to establish.

By the time I came up she was still half irritated, half amused, though mostly relieved to hand over the watch, make coffee, and retreat below. Traffic too had increased noticeably during her watch, the Mediterranean by then narrowing enough that distant lights were appearing more frequently across several bearings at once, each requiring more attention than the weather itself.

Once alone again, however, the night quickly returned to stillness. Bioluminescence had gathered once more along both hulls, bright enough that every small disturbance beneath the boat left brief green traces in the water, while above us the sky had cleared so completely that even the faintest stars seemed unusually present. Offshore darkness has a way of enlarging the sky beyond what land ever permits, and that night it felt almost excessive in its clarity, the darker horizon making even dim stars appear unexpectedly sharp.

With so little wind left, and the boat moving steadily enough under engine, I altered our waypoint slightly south in the hope of finding whatever breeze might still exist beyond our immediate track. Somewhere during those same quiet hours we passed another small numerical marker that nonetheless held enough meaning to occupy thought for a while: thirteen hundred nautical miles since leaving Greece.

The figure itself carried no ceremony aboard, yet offshore such numbers acquire weight simply because they represent accumulated decisions more than distance alone. Every anchorage chosen, every weather system judged, every delay accepted, every small repair, each awkward departure and unexpectedly good arrival — all of it sat quietly inside that total whether acknowledged or not.

A larger milestone still lay ahead.

By my own reckoning somewhere around fifteen hundred and fifty nautical miles would place us approximately halfway home, a figure that felt far more significant not because halfway changes anything physically, but because it is the first point at which the remaining distance begins, however slightly, to feel smaller than what has already been earned.

By 07:10 I was up again to relieve Rachel, coffee first, then the simple pleasure of standing in the morning sun long enough to feel warmth return properly through tiredness. The wind had done more or less as forecast, veering round onto the starboard quarter and offering at least the appearance of better cooperation ahead. For a moment I considered raising sail to assist the engines, but only briefly. Apparent wind was pulsing inconsistently between little more than half a knot and one and a half, and the idea of hoisting canvas single-handed, only just awake and with so little certainty of gain, felt difficult to justify, so the thought passed almost as quickly as it arrived.

We had also fallen into what Rachel and I had by then begun referring to as slow motion sea, that peculiar state where the wave train and surface ripples travel almost exactly with the boat, matching both speed and direction closely enough that forward progress begins to look strangely doubtful, as though we were barely moving at all despite the instruments insisting otherwise. There remained, however, enough confidence in the forecast to believe fuller wind would arrive later in the day, and with it perhaps a few proper hours of sailing within the next forty-eight. Even limited sailing now carried practical value beyond simple satisfaction, because every hour without engine use reduced what might otherwise become another awkward refuelling exercise at sea — hanging off the transoms with twenty-litre jerry cans in hand, passing fuel carefully aboard in conditions that always feel more manageable in theory than they do while actually doing them.

The wind did arrive eventually, though not quite with the strength the forecast had encouraged us to expect. Even so, there was enough to justify finally putting more canvas to work, and for a time we settled into a decent motor-sail, the boat carrying herself a little more willingly and the engines feeling less solely responsible for our progress. As the day went on, traffic steadily increased. The natural geology of the Strait funnelled every kind of vessel progressively closer together, compressing routes until ferries, commercial traffic, fishing vessels and pleasure craft all seemed to occupy variations of the same narrowing water. Watches now required rather more attention than the weather itself, with AIS targets multiplying steadily enough that the easy rhythm of the previous day gave way to something more alert.

The afternoon itself passed quietly until dusk, when the sea suddenly altered again in that brief golden light which so often seems to sharpen everything at once. A large pod of striped dolphins appeared off our side, moving with obvious purpose and speed, leaping repeatedly clear of the water as they hunted through shoals of sardines visible even from deck level, their prey scattering in all directions and often launching themselves fully clear of the surface in desperate attempts to escape. For several minutes the whole scene unfolded so close alongside that both Rachel and I found ourselves saying almost at the same moment that it felt distinctly Attenborough-esque — the sort of encounter that, properly filmed, would have looked entirely at home in one of his documentaries.

This time I had the presence of mind to break out the telephoto lens, and in the brief window the light allowed I managed some of the best images I had yet taken aboard, several dolphins caught fully airborne, three feet or more clear of the water. As ever with such moments, the conversation that followed returned quickly to the same quiet conclusion we had reached several times already on this voyage: how unusually fortunate we were to witness so much of it at all.

The mood changed again later, when over the following hours we came across three dead juvenile loggerhead turtles, each small enough that their stillness felt somehow more affecting than larger losses might have done. All three floated separately, and although certainty was impossible, heavy vessel traffic seemed the most likely explanation. The sight was difficult to shake, and for a while it dulled something of the earlier exhilaration, replacing it instead with the quieter sadness that the sea occasionally imposes without warning.

The evening itself passed without further incident. Through the night we kept a full main set, not because the wind had become strong, but because what little remained was at least sufficient to justify letting the sail assist the engines rather than leaving them entirely unaided once again.

By morning on 21st April we had already absorbed a tiring set of watches through the previous night, not because conditions had demanded anything physical, but because concentrated collision avoidance for hour after hour carries its own fatigue entirely. The sea itself remained manageable; it was simply the continual requirement to judge movement, bearings and intentions across multiple vessels that gradually wore concentration thin in a way no less real for lacking physical effort.

The forecast, however, continued to promise improvement, and in the sanity of full daylight we finally did what had seemed hardly worth attempting earlier: raised both full main and jib together. The reward, for a time at least, was immediate. Only for the second time since leaving Greece did RaRa carry herself properly without engine assistance, moving under sail alone with enough steadiness to remind us how different the boat feels when propulsion belongs entirely to wind rather than compromise. I had to admit that when planning the voyage I had imagined considerably more sailing and rather less motoring than reality had so far allowed. Even brief proper sailing therefore felt disproportionately satisfying.

Later, with landfall becoming increasingly practical rather than abstract, we began contacting marinas ahead. Gibraltar itself proved less straightforward than hoped: one marina was already full, while two others simply failed to respond at all. We then tried Algeciras on the Spanish side of the bay, and within minutes had secured a berth there instead, which felt, if anything, a happy accident. Quite apart from immediate availability, it also removed the need for me to climb onto the coachroof and change the courtesy flag before arrival, a small enough task in itself but one I found I was perfectly content to avoid if geography had already solved the matter.

The sailing held for around six hours before easing once more into motor-sailing, though not before the earlier fuel conversation returned and prompted action. During a calm spell we topped up both tanks, sixty litres each from the jerry cans, deciding that if it needed doing at all, this was by far the moment to do it. Later we were glad of the decision.

By evening even motor-sailing had become difficult to justify. With an eighteen-knot headwind forecast ahead and little realistic room to tack cleanly within increasingly compressed traffic, we brought the sails down altogether and accepted that engines would carry us the rest of the way.

We had intended to return to regular four-hour watches that evening, but the plan dissolved almost immediately once the plotter made clear that another milestone now sat only a few hours ahead. By my repeated calculations during the planning of the voyage, somewhere around fifteen hundred and fifty nautical miles would place us almost exactly halfway home, and by around half past ten that evening we were due to reach it. Neither of us felt inclined to sleep through that. Instead we stayed up together, watching the miles reduce with an excitement out of all proportion to the simple arithmetic involved, the plotter advancing slowly enough that each remaining decimal seemed to take far longer than seemed reasonable. When at 22:38 the figure finally turned over, we both knew at once that it mattered more than either of us had expected.

Halfway.

The moment carried two feelings at once. There was obvious satisfaction in knowing that real progress was being made now at a better pace, but also something quieter alongside it: the recognition that for the first time there was now less of the adventure ahead than behind us.

Traffic had meanwhile continued to intensify to a degree neither of us had experienced even in Messina or the Solent, vessels now appearing across so many bearings that concentration steadily replaced any sense of routine. Watchkeeping became less about timed shifts and more about endurance, and because the planned handovers had already been interrupted, we agreed instead that one of us would remain up until nearing exhaustion while the other slept properly.

Rachel took the first of those watches. She woke me at around half past three on 22nd April visibly frazzled, and one glance at the instruments explained why. In roughly five hours she had single-handedly managed more than fifty AIS targets within our thirty-mile radius, several of them passing as close as a quarter of a mile, each requiring judgement, patience and repeated small decisions with very little pause between them.

It was magnificent work!

I was immensely proud of her, and more grateful than I probably said at the time for the uninterrupted sleep she had protected for me while carrying that burden alone. What struck me most in that moment was not simply how well she had managed it, but how naturally she had done so, quietly absorbing five difficult hours because she knew I needed rest. Even writing it now, I find myself returning less to the traffic itself than to the simple fact that none of this voyage, or indeed my life, would feel remotely the same without her beside me.

By 06:09 twilight was beginning to return, and with it came the first sense that the thickest concentration of traffic now lay behind us. At 07:01 six bells rang out on our watch alarm. Ahead, the Rock of Gibraltar stood in silhouette against the pre-dawn light, imposing and unmistakable, its shape carrying enough presence even at distance to restore that familiar excitement which proper landfall still seems able to produce however many times it happens. I considered waking Rachel, but did not. She had earned that sleep more than most others.

We arrived into Alcaidesa Marina, just on the Spanish side of the border, welcomed fittingly by two pods of dolphins moving across the harbour entrance as though the sea had decided landfall deserved one final flourish.

Berthing, however, quickly became less graceful. What followed remains, without exaggeration, the least helpful marina reception we had encountered anywhere so far. Numerous calls on the radio went unanswered despite our berth already being booked, when all we required was the berth number itself. Rachel eventually reached the office by phone, only to be told that before being shown to our berth we were required to come alongside the fuel quay and physically report to reception first.

Why this could not have been managed in reverse remained entirely unclear, and with a brisk wind already pushing RaRa off the quay the instruction immediately felt unnecessarily awkward. Short-handed, we worked for some time to hold the boat alongside while a member of the marina staff watched nearby, cigarette in hand, with an indifference so complete that not once did he appear tempted to take a line and make the whole process effortless.

Eventually secured, we completed the mandatory paperwork — the usual slow procession of forms and passport details that always feels longer when tired — before continuing at last to our berth. The reward came immediately afterwards: finger berths rather than another stern-to Mediterranean arrival, and after so many weeks of med mooring simply coming alongside again with quick lines and little theatre felt almost luxurious. Rachel and I settled quickly, went ashore for our now customary landfall drink, and surrendered without argument to an early night, both of us aware that sleep now mattered more than celebration.

The following day brought an unexpected pleasure in the form of a message from one of my oldest and dearest friends, Nick Dearden, announcing that he was on his way to help crew the next leg north. We had originally expected to leave before he arrived, but with a Levante beginning to appear increasingly unpleasant on the weather models, the timing suddenly looked useful. I asked him instead to take an early flight from Heathrow on Sunday and join us immediately, hoping we might still leave the same day before conditions worsened further.

The intervening days passed easily enough, Rachel and I moving back and forth between Spain and Gibraltar, doing precisely the sort of tourist things one feels almost obliged to do there: the macaques on the Rock, the wartime tunnels, drinks ashore, and the simple pleasure of time on land with no immediate urgency pressing from the boat.

Since planning the voyage I had remained quietly aware that sooner or later we would pass through waters where Iberian orcas had developed their now well-documented habit of targeting yacht rudders — behaviour widely believed to be playful rather than predatory, yet serious enough to have rendered vessels unsailable and in some cases sunk them entirely.

It is difficult not to admire intelligence of that order while at the same time recognising the practical seriousness it creates for anyone crossing those waters in a comparatively vulnerable yacht.

There are several schools of thought as to why the behaviour exists. My own instinct has always remained firmly with those who see it as play, or perhaps social learning, because intelligent life so often develops in exactly that way: repeated experimentation, curiosity, and behaviours copied because another individual first discovered some form of satisfaction in them.

Admiration, however, removes none of the responsibility.

As skipper, and under the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, I carry both a legal and practical duty to ensure the safety of vessel and crew under my command. That obligation remains no less absolute simply because what may threaten you belongs to the natural world rather than another vessel or poor weather.

Rachel and I had already taken what felt like the most sensible first step by purchasing acoustic pingers designed to deter cetaceans, widely used in fisheries and waiting further west for us in Gibraltar. Their effectiveness, however, remained uncertain enough that I found myself reluctant to rely entirely upon them should the situation become less theoretical than either of us preferred.

Bangers, according to numerous yacht reports, remained the only deterrent consistently described as effective once contact had already begun.

The contradiction in that is obvious. Deliberately harming an orca would be unthinkable to me, morally as much as legally. I have no desire to injure any wild creature, least of all one so extraordinary. But there is also a point at which principle must recognise hierarchy.

If an orca chooses to play in a way that places a vessel, and therefore human life, in immediate danger, then the obligation to preserve those aboard necessarily takes precedence.

Nature itself rarely hesitates over such hierarchy. A humpback defending her calf does not pause to consider whether killing an attacking predator offends some larger principle; she strikes because protection is immediate, instinctive, and justified entirely by what is under threat.

Whether explained by Darwin or simply understood through seamanship, the governing truth remains much the same: force eventually invites response.

I hoped none of it would prove necessary. Far preferable, I thought, to pass unnoticed, pingers quietly doing their work beneath us while the orcas remained only distant shadows in blue water.

But if safety demanded otherwise, sentiment would end exactly where duty began.

By Sunday morning Nick had arrived, provisions were complete, fuel topped up, and departure once again felt close enough to concentrate the mind. The weather at first glance remained manageable rather than inviting: twenty knots downwind, gusting perhaps twenty-six, enough to justify a first reef from the outset and a preventer rigged on the main for the deep angle we expected to hold westbound out of the Strait.

What followed was neither forecast, nor welcome, nor comfortable by any reasonable measure.

Chapter 13 — The Straits of Gibraltar: Hard Lessons

We left with more confidence than caution. Nick was aboard, lines slipped cleanly, and the Strait opened ahead of us in what at first appeared entirely manageable conditions. The forecast had suggested a brisk but workable downwind run, something in the low twenties with higher gusts, enough to justify a reef and a preventer, but nothing that felt outside our growing experience.

For a time, that appeared to hold. Then the Levante arrived properly. What had been expected as a manageable following wind quickly established itself at a steady twenty-six knots, gusting to 46 knots as we entered the Strait. The familiar acceleration zones amplified everything just enough to remove any margin for complacency, the sea building quickly into short, steep waves under the compression of land on either side.

We were already reefed and running deep, the preventer prepared but still in hand rather than fully set, and the boat under control until, very suddenly, it wasn’t. The jibe came without warning, not a gentle rounding up but a sharp, violent snap as the wind shifted just enough and the boat followed it before we could intervene. With no preventer yet taking load the main came across hard, unloading with a force that immediately told us something had given. The first reef, which should have contained the sail, also failed under the load, leaving the lower section uncontrolled at exactly the moment it was needed most. The lazy bag then took the force it was never designed to carry. Pulleys failed, lines snapped, and in seconds the system that should have contained the sail became part of the problem. What followed was not panic, but it was not far from it either, just a rapid sequence of decisions to get the sail under control, reduce further damage, and regain something approaching stability.

We managed it, but the main was effectively lost to us for the remainder of the passage. With conditions still gusting into the forties and no reliable way to control the sail, we had already attempted to bring the main down in open water, but could not hold the boat steady enough against the wind to do so safely. That, more than anything, drove the decision that followed. We shaped course towards Tarifa deliberately, not for comfort but for control, knowing that within the harbour we would at least be able to hold position long enough to deal with the sail properly.

We entered the harbour, but the refuge we had hoped for did not materialise. Berthing was refused, and with no option to come alongside we were forced instead to hold the boat against the wind, working engines and helm together to keep position in conditions that were still far from forgiving. It was there, under that control rather than shelter, that we finally managed to bring the main down. The process was awkward and far from controlled, but it was necessary, and once secured the boat immediately became simpler to manage.

There was no longer any reason to remain. We exited as we had entered, but this time under engine alone.

The Levante, though easing from its earlier peak, was not finished with us. It followed us north through the remainder of the night, holding in the low thirties, the sea still short and unsettled, and the boat working steadily on. With the main now secured and no appetite for further complication, we committed fully to the simplest configuration available to us, removing variables and letting control take precedence over anything else.

There is a particular kind of acceptance that follows that sort of moment. Not dramatic, not even especially emotional, just the quiet recognition that the plan has changed and that the only useful thing left to do is manage what comes next as well as possible. We settled into it, the miles passing steadily beneath us as the intensity gradually softened.

By dawn the change was immediate and welcome. The wind eased, the sea settled, and for the first time since the jibe the boat felt once again as though it was moving through water rather than fighting it. Confidence, which had taken a quiet but noticeable knock during the night, returned just as naturally as it had left, and for a while it felt as though we had come through it.

That sense of recovery carried us as far as the second evening, when we chose not to press on through another full night but instead dropped anchor off Farol Island. It was a decision that felt immediately right. After the previous twenty-four hours, stillness had a value far beyond convenience. We went ashore and found ourselves, somewhat unexpectedly, enjoying one of the best meals of the trip — simple seafood, perfectly done, and an octopus dish that all three of us agreed was the best we had ever eaten.

Morning came easily enough. Nick and I took the dinghy ashore for supplies, leaving Rachel aboard, and for a short while everything felt comfortably routine again. That ended with the phone call. The tide had turned, the anchor had begun to slip, and Rachel’s voice carried just enough urgency to remove any doubt that we needed to return immediately.

Back aboard, we raised anchor quickly, but the process revealed another problem. The chain jammed in the gypsy, the damage from earlier strain now making itself properly known. The last length had to be hauled by hand, awkward and slow, but manageable enough once we accepted that it would simply take time.

We pressed on towards Portimão, intending to secure a berth and deal properly with the mounting list of small failures that were beginning to accumulate. The marina, however, had other ideas. Full, and offering little alternative. That left us with one immediate priority: ensuring the anchor system would function properly when we needed it next. En route, with little ceremony, I worked the jammed chain free, resetting the system as best I could so that we would at least have confidence in it again.

We arrived in Portimão and anchored instead. That evening we went ashore, found good food, and drank rather more than was sensible given the previous days. The following morning arrived less welcome than usual, and neither of us felt particularly inclined, or perhaps entirely able, to continue. We stayed a second night at anchor, letting rest catch up with us properly, before leaving early the next day for the run north to Cascais.

By then the passage had settled again into something closer to routine. The earlier violence had passed, the boat was moving well, and for a time it felt as though the difficult part of the leg lay behind us.

At around four in the morning, approaching Cascais, we felt it. A sudden, unmistakable contact beneath the starboard hull, followed immediately by a hollow, irregular rattling that travelled through the structure of the boat with a clarity that left little doubt something had been picked up.

We had picked up a fishing buoy.

We slowed and assessed as best we could in the darkness. The marker buoy was visible and still attached, confirming the problem, and cutting it free was straightforward enough. For a moment it felt as though we might have resolved it quickly. We had not. The pickup buoy remained trapped somewhere beneath the starboard hull, moving just enough to produce a persistent, unsettling noise that followed us mile after mile. It was not violent, not immediately dangerous, but it was constant, and more importantly it was unseen.

In daylight it might have been manageable. In darkness it became something else entirely. We made the decision to continue. Stopping offshore in those conditions would have achieved little, and attempting to resolve it blind carried its own risks, so we pressed on, the sound accompanying us for close to twenty miles, each repetition a reminder that something remained where it should not be.

By the time we reached the approaches to Cascais daylight had returned, the wind had eased further, and the problem had reduced from unknown threat to something that could be dealt with directly. We anchored briefly outside the marina, and there was no hesitation by that point. Mask, snorkel, knife, and over the side. The buoy revealed itself quickly once in the water, lodged exactly where the sound had suggested, caught but not yet causing any damage beyond the noise it had produced. Cutting it free took only a few moments, and with it gone the boat returned immediately to silence.

We checked everything we could see. No damage.

Only then did the tension properly release, replaced by the simple, familiar relief that comes from discovering that something which had felt serious had, in fact, remained contained. We lifted anchor, entered the marina, and secured alongside without further complication.

Since the fishing buoy, we found ourselves more willing to encounter orcas offshore than fishing tackle inshore, and that would quietly become our strategy from that point on — keeping offshore at night and only running inshore in daylight. It helped that, with every mile north, the perceived risk of orca encounters felt to be diminishing, their recent activity concentrated largely around the Strait rather than further along the Portuguese coast.

We spent longer in Cascais than we had intended. Nick left us there, his time aboard coming to an end just as the boat and, if I am honest, both of us needed a pause more than progress. He flew on to Madeira for some well-earned rest of his own, and it felt right that he did so having given exactly what we had needed of him. He had arrived at a point where the passage was beginning to ask more of us, not less, and his presence, steady and willing, had allowed Rachel and me to manage the watch system properly for only the second time on the voyage. Neil had helped us achieve that earlier, and Nick had done the same when it mattered again, giving us the space to rest when we needed it and to keep the boat moving with a clarity that would have been harder to find alone. We were both genuinely grateful for that.

We remained with the less glamorous task of putting RaRa, and ourselves, properly back together. The previous days had taken more out of us than we had perhaps recognised at the time, and with the main damaged, the reef compromised, and even the toilets now demanding attention, it became obvious that pressing on would serve little purpose, so we stayed.

Four days became six, time that in planning would have felt excessive, but in reality proved necessary. The lazy bag was repaired properly, the first reef re-secured, and the smaller domestic systems that quietly underpin life aboard were brought back into order. None of it felt dramatic, but all of it mattered. What changed more noticeably, however, was our attitude. Where earlier we had been content to work with the weather, now we found ourselves studying it more carefully, questioning it more, and perhaps respecting it in a slightly different way. Confidence had not disappeared, but it had been adjusted, sharpened by experience into something less casual and more considered.

By the third evening, after a good meal ashore and with the boat finally feeling once again as though it was properly ready, we saw what we had been waiting for: an opening. A clean run north towards Porto. Relief came first, followed closely by a quieter return of confidence, not the easy confidence of departure from Gibraltar, but something more measured, grounded in what we had just come through rather than what we had expected before it. We set an early departure for the 7th of May, and six nights in Cascais, probably three more than we had ever intended, felt less like delay and more like preparation.

This time, we would leave properly ready.

Chapter 14 — Confidence Restored

It seemed Portugal was reluctant to release us. What we had originally envisaged as perhaps eight days to A Coruña now looked more likely to stretch to fourteen or sixteen before even reaching Baiona. Porto, however, sat first in that sequence, and it mattered more than the miles suggested. It would be our first proper return to offshore sailing since Gibraltar, and with it an opportunity to regain something that had been quietly unsettled — confidence, and with it, control.

Thursday 7th May we left Cascais and, for once, it appeared the forecast had held. Lines were slipped at 07:00 and we made a clean departure from the marina, settling quickly back into the familiar rhythm of offshore movement. Conditions through most of the day were lighter than expected, though the persistent northerly still produced a short, uncomfortable chop that found its way beneath the hulls despite only moderate wind speeds.

None of it seemed to matter very much.

What I remember more clearly was the atmosphere aboard. Rachel and I found ourselves grinning and laughing for no particular reason beyond the simple fact that we were finally at sea again and, more importantly, enjoying it. Confidence in the boat, in my forecasting ability, and in the repairs we had carried out in Cascais all began quietly restoring themselves. There was no single dramatic moment where that happened, only the gradual return of familiarity and trust as the miles slipped beneath us.

More importantly still, we had managed to raise a full main for the first time since the repairs in Cascais. With around thirteen knots of true wind the boat settled beautifully and, for nearly five hours, RaRa carried full sail without complaint. We watched the rig carefully at first, half expecting some overlooked damage from the Gibraltar gybe to reveal itself once load came back onto the system, but nothing did. Everything held exactly as it should. The Atlantic, whilst certainly wilder than the Mediterranean we had left behind, also seemed strangely generous at times, and we found ourselves quietly ecstatic at discovering the damage had not extended further than we had feared.

We were sailing again.

We rounded Peniche in the early evening and, as had now become our habit, lowered the main before nightfall rather than carry full sail into darkness. The lessons of Gibraltar still sat close enough behind us that simplicity overnight increasingly felt preferable to outright speed. We then gradually worked further offshore, aiming for roughly twelve miles off the coast to avoid the fishing gear that had become, in our minds at least, a far more immediate concern than anything larger waiting further offshore.

It was around 19:30 when I went below after a decent meal of Portuguese cheeses, charcuterie, and a glass or two of an excellent rosé I had picked up in Cascais. For the first time in what felt like quite a while, the boat felt calm, organised and easy beneath us, the sort of evening where sleep arrives quickly once you finally allow yourself to stop moving.

My slumber, however, did not begin.

Lying in bed, I had noticed a halyard flapping intermittently in the wind above the cabin hatch and texted Rachel asking if she would secure it. A few moments later I saw the movement stop and, midway through replying “perfect”, I heard a shriek.

Not a relaxed call for assistance, nor even the startled shout that life afloat occasionally produces, but something far sharper. A scream carrying genuine terror.

I was on deck within seconds. Rachel met me there literally white as a sheet and visibly trembling. She was trying to speak, words arriving broken and incoherent through shock, but one word came through clearly enough.

“Orca.”

I was up at the helm within seconds, disengaging the autopilot almost instinctively to protect it from what I was now convinced would become an onslaught of impacts until one of the rudders finally gave way. Rachel was still visibly shaking as I instructed her to ready the bangers should things deteriorate further and we need to actively deter the animals. The acoustic pingers were already being towed astern beneath each hull, though whether they truly offered protection or merely reassurance I still could not honestly say.

But nothing came. Nothing at all.

For perhaps fifteen minutes we remained at high alert, engines steady, scanning the water around us waiting for the first strike that, in our minds at least, now felt inevitable. Gradually, however, the silence itself began to alter the mood aboard. What if this had simply been a passing, curious visitation rather than the beginning of something more aggressive?

Then, perhaps a quarter of a mile astern, I saw it: two hard bursts of spray illuminated briefly against the fading light. They were still there. The orcas had not disappeared entirely, merely disengaged from us.

Whether it would remain that way neither of us could know, and unsurprisingly very little sleep followed that night. Only after perhaps an hour, once the immediate adrenaline had eased slightly, did Rachel finally manage to explain properly what she had seen.

Somewhere directly above the Nazaré Canyon, with nearly 750 metres of water beneath our hulls and dusk beginning to settle around the boat, Rachel described watching the shape emerge quietly beside RaRa. From the size and profile she was certain it had been a large male. He surfaced calmly alongside her watch position and, for a few suspended seconds, simply held station beside the boat while they looked directly at one another before he slipped silently back beneath the Atlantic surface.

As she recounted it, there had been no aggression in the encounter at all, no charging wake or sudden movement towards the rudders, only the enormous dark shape appearing unexpectedly beside the hull before disappearing again almost immediately. The recent reports along this stretch of coast had mostly involved non-contact sightings, and that thought helped steady the imagination somewhat. We logged the encounter with GT Orcas and carried on as planned: clipped on, watchful, but continuing north.

Still, there was something deeply affecting in the image of Rachel alone on watch, briefly meeting the eye of a wild orca far from land before both continued on through the evening sea.

We hardly slept at all through the remainder of the night, instead falling into an unspoken rhythm where one of us would rest for an hour or so on the saloon sofa while the other remained on watch, neither wanting to stray particularly far from the other after what had happened. Yet as the hours passed and the immediate tension slowly faded, we found ourselves increasingly able to laugh about it all, especially Rachel’s initial terror, which by then had transformed almost entirely into excitement and disbelief that she had experienced the encounter at all.

From the very beginning I had always found it slightly perverse that Rachel genuinely wanted to see an Iberian orca during the voyage.

Well now she had, for certain!

Later, somewhere in the early hours as the boat continued steadily north, we found ourselves discussing the anxieties we had carried before setting off: storms, fishing gear, and orcas. Gradually the absurdity of it dawned on us and we both collapsed into laughter at the realisation that we had somehow managed to complete a full hat trick of all three.

More importantly though, we also recognised something else. The very things we had worried about most had not defeated us. If anything, they had steadily made us more capable, more adaptable, and less inclined to fear the countless variables offshore sailing inevitably places beyond your control. Confidence was no longer coming from the comforting belief that nothing difficult would happen, but from the growing understanding that, together, we were increasingly capable of dealing with whatever did.

Morning was particularly welcome that day. We had come through the night entirely unscathed, our only injuries really no more than tiredness and frayed nerves. The weather remained brisk but manageable and, with the main still down, the jib alone drove us steadily north at around 6.5 knots on a broad reach in eighteen knots of wind. After the previous weeks, even that felt faintly miraculous.

We were flying towards Porto and, for a brief period during the morning, we even considered continuing onward all the way to Baiona. The forecast appeared manageable enough and confidence aboard had undeniably returned. The idea disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived however once I calculated our likely arrival time. Darkness, fatigue and an unfamiliar coast felt like a poor combination after the previous night, and neither of us had much appetite left for unnecessary heroics.

Instead we altered gradually back towards shore around 05:00, waiting for first light before approaching the coast itself. We were glad we did. Once daylight fully arrived the sheer number of fishing pots became immediately obvious, spread so densely across sections of the coastline that attempting blind transit overnight would have been not merely difficult but genuinely irresponsible.

As Porto finally began to appear ahead of us a short but unpleasant squall moved through, sharp enough to remind us once again how quickly conditions could deteriorate offshore. This time though we had seen it developing properly on the horizon and had the jib down with plenty of time to spare.

Lessons learned, I remember thinking quietly to myself.

We arrived into the marina tired but content, securing ourselves comfortably on the hammerhead while waiting for the office to open properly at 14:00. Several well-earned glasses of rosé followed shortly afterwards. Later that day came the first major revelation. A weather window, previously absent from every forecast we had studied, had suddenly materialised for Tuesday around the infamous Cape Finisterre.

The problem was what it now demanded of us. To take advantage of it we would need to leave again quickly and make fast progress north towards Baiona on Sunday, and that forecast looked far less inviting. I checked and rechecked the models repeatedly, comparing wind angles, sea state and gust forecasts across every source we trusted. Eventually Rachel and I reached the same conclusion. If the forecasts held, we would be setting off into what would likely become our most energetic sail since Gibraltar.

Twenty-four knots sustained with gusts perhaps touching the low thirties for much of the passage.

Yet the more we analysed it, the less reckless it appeared. The wind direction suited us almost perfectly, largely downwind with a settled two-to-three metre following sea, conditions that both RaRa and her crew seemed, somewhat unexpectedly, to enjoy. More importantly, we retained a sensible bailout option almost halfway at Viana do Castelo should conditions deteriorate beyond what had been forecast.

That finally settled it. We would go for it. The reward, if successful, would be enormous: a clean rounding of Finisterre. We had slipped almost without noticing into something closer to full delivery mode now, the focus aboard sharpening accordingly, and strangely the pressure of it felt energising rather than draining.

Only after making that decision did we walk back into town through steady rain, undertaking the now familiar ritual of reprovisioning and carrying absurd quantities of bottled water several miles back towards the marina. It was hard work, particularly loaded down with supplies, but somewhere since leaving Greece the routine itself had quietly become our form of exercise, replacing ordinary life ashore with something altogether simpler and more practical.

We had also both grown strangely fond of shopping the old-fashioned way. Rather than supermarkets, we increasingly found ourselves seeking out the small specialist shops that still seemed to survive throughout southern Europe: the greengrocer, the baker, and, always my personal favourite, the butcher. There was something deeply satisfying in it, perhaps because life aboard had reduced decisions back towards essentials in a way modern life rarely does.

That evening, as what felt likely to become our final proper meal before some demanding sailing ahead, we settled on roast beef. Somehow it felt entirely appropriate. Outside the weather had turned unmistakably British — cold rain, grey skies and damp pavements — and for the first time in months the atmosphere ashore felt curiously closer to home than anywhere we had visited since leaving it.

Over dinner we checked the weather again, probably for the fourth time that day, and it was then that I noticed the second revelation. Not only had Cape Finisterre finally unlocked, but for the first time since we had begun seriously approaching it, so too had the Bay of Biscay itself.

At first it seemed too good to trust. Every model now showed the same remarkable feature: a vast area of stable high pressure sitting squarely over central France, calming what is normally spoken of in sailing circles with a kind of cautious reverence. Biscay, infamous for violence and unpredictability, suddenly appeared almost tame, and not merely briefly, but for what looked like three whole days.

Rachel and I sat eating roast beef in a rainy Portuguese marina grinning at one another in near disbelief at our luck, both quietly hoping the forecasts would continue holding together long enough for us to reach it.

The beef was particularly good and, for the first time since we had started the voyage, I found myself genuinely missing home and all the things that make it feel that way. I missed Dad, God rest him. I missed my sons and daughter. I missed Mum, my brother, and the small handful of good friends whose absence only really becomes visible once you are far enough away to properly feel it.

I think it was the perception of getting closer that brought on the sudden nostalgia. Until then the voyage had still somehow felt detached from ordinary life, almost suspended outside it, but with Biscay now beginning to look possible and the miles home reducing steadily beneath us, thoughts of what waited beyond the sea started quietly returning.

The feeling faded gradually as exhaustion and roast beef induced sleep finally arrived together.

For the first time in quite a while, I slept deeply.

Tomorrow would be a big day.

Chapter 15 – A Date with Finisterre

I had barely closed my eyes when the wind began to howl through the mast and spreaders, so fiercely it was loud enough to wake me.

I instinctively reached for the iPad beside me on the bedside table. PredictWind confirmed my fears almost immediately. What had already looked like a sporty sail to Baiona now appeared likely to become something considerably less comfortable, and for the first time since leaving Cascais I felt the faint but unmistakable concern that perhaps our newly restored confidence — and my own indomitable optimism — might be nudging us back towards the kind of mistake Gibraltar had already taught us once before.

Rachel was still awake beside me reading, and it did not take us long to arrive at the only sensible conclusion.

We do not go.

The decision itself felt almost disappointingly easy, which perhaps said something encouraging about how much both of us had changed since Greece. Earlier in the voyage we might well have convinced ourselves that uncomfortable and unsafe were merely different points on the same spectrum, but Gibraltar had cured us of some of that optimism.

The difficulty now was not whether to leave, but what to do instead. Finisterre still mattered. The forecasts suggested the cape itself would be entirely manageable by Tuesday and beyond that, more importantly still, Biscay remained open in a way that felt increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. So the question quickly became whether there was still a way to make the window without forcing ourselves unnecessarily into the very conditions we had only just decided were unwise.

To both our surprise and relief there was. Originally Baiona had been settled on because it offered meaningful miles progressed in daylight, giving us the ability to sail inshore in the lee of the land and still dodge the myriad of fishing buoys. The solution was Portosin, a well provisioned marina near our original second day target of Muros, which had been discounted for day one as too far to reach in daylight. It was a little over one hundred nautical miles away, but in brisk downwind conditions on Monday we could do it and our date with Finisterre maintained.

I woke at 05:30 and immediately felt a sense of regret about choosing not to leave that morning. Conditions initially appeared perfect for sailing and for a short while I even considered waking Rachel to ready the boat for onward passage. The idea proved short lived. By 06:00 conditions had worsened enough that pivoting RaRa off the dock would already have become difficult, and by 06:40 probably impossible without assistance, twenty-six knots of wind now pinning us firmly against the dockside even inside the harbour itself.

Rachel woke shortly afterwards and commented on how quickly Atlantic conditions seemed capable of escalating beyond comfort before there was even time properly to compensate for them. Together we quietly agreed that going forwards we would always allow a meaningful buffer of comfort, ensuring that a brisk sail never again drifted too far from spicy into something simply too hot to handle — rather like the difference between a madras and a vindaloo. I always seem to regret ordering vindaloo eventually, not at the time of course, but usually somewhere shortly afterwards.

Within barely an hour the previous night’s planning had first been regretted and then completely reaffirmed as correct, and I felt that this might make the shape of things to come and quietly accepted that we would certainly need to adapt to and harmonise with the ever changing Atlantic Ocean.

We climbed back into bed and cuddled up with tea and biscuits, not defeated but thoroughly accepting, and quietly looking forward to a Sunday duvet day where the complete embrace of inactivity somehow only enhanced its restorative power.

We could not rest for long and I hate to miss an opportunity to explore. Today Porto was on the menu and I had a hankering for port, the fortified wine of its namesake. We left the marina, walked down toward the bridge over the Rio Leça and onwards into Porto itself. A quick metro ride later and we arrived in the old town on the north side of Ribeira. It was busy. A cruise ship had clearly just landed and the whole town seemed completely full of rather brash Americans. I have no hatred for any nationality, but I do find some Americans obscenely loud and unnecessarily optimistic.

We walked along the waterfront trying to find somewhere for a drink, but at almost every stop we were politely informed that cards were not accepted. We voted with our feet and continued onwards until I spotted an old set of stone steps disappearing upwards between the buildings. Curiosity got the better of me and we began climbing to see where they led. This proved not to be one of my better decisions. As it turned out, and much to Rachel’s immediate disgust, I had unknowingly led us up the steep and seemingly endless stairways surrounding Porto’s old fortifications and cathedral. Twenty minutes later we emerged exhausted, breathless and desperately thirsty, eventually deciding that not only was a beer required, but that no further progress would occur until one had been consumed.

We headed towards the Dom Luís I Bridge and stopped at the first bar we encountered. Once again we discovered that cards were unwelcome, but by then fatigue had defeated principle and Rachel disappeared in search of cash while I ordered. Two swift pints later morale had recovered considerably and we continued onwards. Crossing the bridge, we boarded the cable car descending into Porto’s famous port lodge district. The ride provided not only spectacular views across the river and city, but considerable entertainment given Rachel’s complete hatred of heights.

We eventually arrived at Fonseca, which to my mind at least sounded considerably more Portuguese than some of the larger and more internationally familiar port houses nearby. By then hunger, fatigue and alcohol had combined into a state where optimism once again seemed entirely reasonable, so we ordered the most extravagant tasting flight on the menu alongside both a cheese board and a cured ham platter. I must admit the 1997 Fonseca Tawny was magnificent. The food, however, proved considerably less impressive. For thirty-six euros we received approximately six tiny triangles of cheese and what appeared to be six equally microscopic slices of prosciutto, or something attempting a reasonably convincing impersonation of it. Rachel and I stared at the boards in genuine disbelief, briefly wondering whether perhaps additional food was still due to arrive. It was not.

Still starving, we slowly finished the ports while Rachel increasingly rehearsed the speech she was clearly preparing to deliver. When the bill arrived she paid it with the sort of restrained indignation only genuinely disappointing food can produce, before politely but firmly informing the staff of her outrage at the almost comically small portions. By then there remained only one sensible course of action. We returned up the hill in the cable car, back across the bridge, onto the metro and directly towards the nearest Indian restaurant to our stop. Hunger had by now evolved beyond inconvenience into something approaching strategic urgency and this time I decided I would absolutely be ordering vindaloo with precisely zero regrets whatsoever.

Monday the 11th was a sailing day and my child-at-Christmas-like enthusiasm had me awake by 03:30 waiting for the big day. Because we had lost a day in Porto we were now determined to maintain progress towards Cape Finisterre and ultimately A Coruña for Biscay. Both weather windows still existed and we intended to work hard to capitalise on them. Portosin was now our target destination and we would need to make excellent downwind progress to arrive before darkness fell.

Portosin sat roughly one hundred and four nautical miles to the north and we would need to average somewhere around seven and a half knots to achieve it comfortably in daylight. As had by now become routine, I studied the forecasts carefully before departure. Everything appeared entirely in order and for once the conditions looked almost perfectly designed for sailing.

Or so we thought.

We slipped lines and exited the harbour at exactly 07:00 as planned, raised the mainsail and settled onto our course northwards. We still retained Baiona and the Galician islands as potential bolt holes if conditions deteriorated unexpectedly, but in truth both of us felt quietly confident that they would not be required. That confidence, however, proved surprisingly short lived.

The forecast wind angle in reality turned out to be considerably further aft than expected. In fact it sat almost perfectly dead downwind. Whilst RaRa could comfortably carry the main at around one hundred and fifty degrees apparent, the wind now hovered irritatingly close to a full one hundred and eighty. Even with the main preventered the sail handling quickly became awkward and unsettled. After our fourth gybe I realised the constant zig-zagging across the wind was costing us dearly in both distance and time. Within barely five hours we had effectively added almost two additional hours onto our ETA, pushing arrival well beyond darkness and increasingly towards midnight.

The main eventually had to come down altogether. Under jib alone and motorsailing, RaRa settled beautifully at around seven and a half knots, but even that proved insufficient to recover enough time for a daylight arrival.

Determined not to lose our date with Finisterre, we reluctantly accepted our fate: a dark arrival into an unfamiliar marina somewhere on the Galician coast.

We deliberately swanned straight past Baiona, doing our best to ignore the rest and shelter it would undoubtedly have provided, and then onwards past the Galician islands themselves, a part of the world so naturally beautiful that once again I find myself almost entirely without words powerful enough to describe them properly. Rachel and I both sat completely awestruck by the scenery unfolding around us.

As luck would have it we maintained progress just well enough that we turned into the Ría de Muros y Noya at almost exactly 22:30, arriving at that strange and fleeting moment where daylight had technically faded but enough twilight still remained to reveal the menacing outlines of lurking fishing tackle buoys scattered across the entrance. We still had nearly two hours remaining to destination and for a while the dark rain clouds hanging overhead made the approach feel distinctly uncomfortable. Then gradually the cloud began to break and the remaining light reflecting from the land illuminated the ria just enough that rogue buoys could still be identified and avoided before the darkness fully settled around us.

Inside the ria the sea finally fell calm. By then both of us were thoroughly exhausted, yet the final twelve nautical miles into Portosin possessed an unmistakable tranquillity and even arriving at night we could already sense that we had reached somewhere rather special.

The night docking in the marina proved considerably less complicated than we had imagined, albeit with one rather aggressive last-minute swerve around the breakwater whose illuminated marker, rather unhelpfully, appeared to be positioned some twenty metres back from the structure it was supposedly identifying. Even so, given our exhaustion, we docked remarkably well. By then we had been awake approaching something close to twenty hours and had likely spent sixteen of them at sea.

Dock lines secured and engines finally silenced at 00:30, we wasted very little time crawling directly into bed. Unusually for us there were absolutely no amorous feelings whatsoever from either party that morning, only the overwhelming mutual understanding that unconsciousness now represented the single greatest luxury available anywhere in Galicia.

Sleep was brief but nourishing. We woke with an enthusiasm that felt almost limitless. It was Cape Finisterre day and the weather was finally about to do us proud. There would be no glorious sunshine, but the winds were light enough that both of us felt entirely confident in making the next of our strategic targets, Muxia, located around thirty nautical miles north east of the cape itself.

Lines off that morning were quick and efficient and after barely two hours the notorious cape itself had appeared on the horizon ahead of us. Both Rachel and I felt a growing cocktail of adrenaline, pride and anticipation building steadily aboard. We were about to reach what in ancient times had once been considered the very end of the world and, perhaps more importantly still, one of sailing’s genuine rites of passage.

As we closed on Cabo Finisterra, as the Galicians call it, both Rachel and I found ourselves almost completely dumbstruck by a mixture of pride, relief and happiness. So much planning, ambition and hope had quietly rested upon this singular and rather poignant moment that actually arriving there felt strangely difficult to process properly.

We broke out the telephoto lens and despite the overcast conditions still managed to capture some magnificent photographs of the infamous Finisterre lighthouse standing watch over the Atlantic beyond. Then slowly, almost anticlimactically after all the years of dreaming and months of effort, we rounded the cape itself and altered course east of north east towards Muxia.

The final three hours drifted by, aided and abetted by both the overwhelming sense of achievement aboard and the pleasant, though not entirely flat, conditions now escorting us onwards. As Muxia gradually revealed itself through the offshore haze we once again found ourselves completely floored by the rugged beauty of the Galician coastline surrounding it.

Muxia itself did not disappoint either. It was a stunning fishing village clinging dramatically to the Galician coastline, somehow resembling a curious blend of Norway, Cornwall and the Scottish west coast all at once. Simply amazing.

On arrival the dockmaster was already waiting to take our lines, albeit not quite where I had initially expected him to be. Assuming the hammerhead berth ahead was intended for us, I had already begun setting RaRa up accordingly before suddenly being redirected towards a considerably tighter berth further inside the marina. A sharp and deliberate alteration followed and under the watchful eyes of several touring yacht crews from what appeared to be a French sailing club flotilla, we somehow absolutely nailed the docking manoeuvre. In fact, I found myself so disproportionately pleased with it afterwards that I may even have briefly congratulated ourselves out loud.

Great seafood, Albariño white wine and an early night followed. We may have conquered Finisterre, but the bigger and decidedly badder Biscay still lay waiting for us further north. We slept soundly and allowed ourselves something approaching a lie in by RaRa standards. Eventually we rose at 07:00, drank tea, ate marmite on toast and slipped lines by 10:00.

Conditions that day were forecast to begin directly on the nose with several hours of uncomfortable motoring before easing later into brisk but sailable eighteen-knot conditions. Both predictions materialised almost exactly as forecast. As the day progressed the sea state steadily steepened to the point moving around onboard became awkward and occasionally exhausting, though still nowhere near comparable to some of the conditions we had already endured further south.

Progress nevertheless remained excellent and as we rounded the final headland before turning in towards A Coruña we finally gained the apparent wind angle we had been waiting for, somewhere around sixty degrees. Main and jib were raised once again and RaRa immediately settled into a fast and comfortable rhythm for the final three hours before landfall.

A Coruña took us somewhat by surprise. On the horizon two distinct headlands gradually became visible and initially we had both assumed the furthest marked our destination. Only after a rather deeper inspection of the charts did we realise that A Coruña itself already sat visible beyond them on the horizon.

Then the city surprised us again, purely through its sheer scale. A Coruña was not the sleepy fishing town my imagination had quietly prepared me for, but a true sea city, far larger and more imposing than either of us had expected.

Whilst still underway I had arranged berthing at Marina Coruña and had also thought it prudent to enquire whether engine servicing might be possible during the two full days we expected to remain there before Biscay. To my amazement the marina responded almost immediately. Yes, both engines could be serviced and yes, they could do it tomorrow morning at 09:00. Even more surprisingly still, the quotation itself proved remarkably reasonable.

And so, like many mariners before us no doubt, A Coruña seemed to offer something genuinely generous precisely when it was most needed. Food. Shelter. Rest. Technical servicing. All perfectly positioned immediately before something larger waiting beyond the horizon.

Biscay.

We now had two full days to prepare ourselves properly and, more importantly still, the weather window continued stubbornly to insist that departure across Biscay to Camaret-sur-Mer at 02:00 on Saturday the 16th remained entirely possible.

Chapter 16 — A Coruña: The Gift That Kept on Giving

A Coruña was the gift that kept on giving. A vast marina full of transiting yachtsmen from every corner of Europe, all seemingly either preparing for Biscay or recovering from it. Rachel and I wasted very little time in strictly adhering to what had by now become our compulsory tradition upon arrival somewhere new: getting pleasantly drunk somewhere in the old town.

The central square itself was stunning and we wasted even less time finding the seafood restaurant most densely packed with locals, reasoning that they probably knew considerably more than we did. We ordered goose barnacles, a Galician delicacy, and I can now confirm that whilst they may well be amongst the messiest things I have ever eaten, they are also absolutely delicious. So messy in fact that the waiter thoughtfully produced protective bibs for us, though to my mind they more closely resembled aprons. The exploding crustaceans inside were entirely worth the chaos and spectacle.

The following morning we allowed ourselves a rare lie in. The cumulative effect of the entire voyage, combined with the added fatigue of pushing hard to maintain our Biscay weather window, had finally begun catching up with both of us.

Then at exactly 09:00 came one of the most unexpectedly impressive moments of professionalism we had encountered anywhere on the voyage.

Not one, not two, but three engineers from the marina arrived simultaneously carrying spanners, filters, oils and spare parts for both engine services. It was efficiency in motion. One engineer disappeared into each engine bay whilst a third remained topside acting almost like a pit crew coordinator, ensuring the two below had every tool, filter and part they required before they even had time to ask for it. Less than three hours later both Yanmars had received full two-hundred-hour services, my confidence in them entirely restored precisely when we needed it most and all for roughly half of what the same work would likely have cost back home in the UK.

Having accidentally missed breakfast entirely, we headed into town for lunch and this time could not bring ourselves to walk past Burger King. Throughout the passage we had maintained a strict rule wherever possible to eat local food and experience the places we travelled through properly.

Not this time.

By now a hunger bordering on addiction had developed in both of us and we unashamedly inhaled two of the largest burger meals I think either of us had consumed in years.

Neil arrived as planned late on the evening of the 14th and we settled immediately into our usual ritual of charcuterie, cheese and conversation aboard. In Neil’s own words:

“Meats and cheeses always pleases.”

The conversation quickly turned towards weather and the kind of Biscay we might realistically encounter. From the outset it had always been my intention that major weather decisions would be made together, both as individuals and as a crew. This was not to be my decision alone.

So, rather seriously, we convened what could only really be described as a ship’s meeting. The three of us sat gathered around the laptop aboard RaRa studying model after model in increasingly forensic detail. PredictWind, ECMWF, GFS, wave heights, swell periods, fetch, wind angles, escape options and timings were all scrutinised carefully as we each quietly absorbed what Biscay might realistically choose to offer us.

Eventually a consensus began to emerge and by the end of the evening we had collectively agreed that Sunday the 16th at 02:00 was a go. In a little over twenty-four hours we would take on Biscay.

The following morning was dedicated to provisioning, a process so onerous on foot that we had deliberately delayed it until Neil arrived with his additional pair of hands. What we had not accounted for was managing to pass Breen’s Tavern in the square, the local haunt for visiting yachtsmen.

One of us, though I genuinely cannot remember who, suggested stopping for a quick beer or two before tackling the supermarket. Unsurprisingly there were absolutely no objections whatsoever and before long we found ourselves several plates deep into tapas and considerably deeper still into Estrella Galicia. What had begun as a convivial pre-shopping drink had by now evolved into a fully fledged afternoon session and somewhere during it all the particularly elegant Estrella mugs we were drinking from became impossible not to liberate.

All three of us mutually concluded they would look exceptionally grand in RaRa’s galley.

Quite how it happened remains slightly unclear, but before long all three mugs had somehow found their way into one of our rucksacks. We paid the bill, gathered ourselves with all the composure three mildly drunk sailors could realistically muster and wandered onwards towards the supermarket giggling like idiots and feeling absurdly pleased with both ourselves and the “added value” that final drink had apparently provided.

The supermarket itself brought no less comedy. The three of us wandered the aisles enthusiastically selecting either entirely useless items or things so catastrophically unhealthy they would probably have horrified any qualified nutritionist unfortunate enough to witness it. Eventually an Uber arrived and still rather intoxicated ourselves we were whisked back towards the marina, the return made considerably more difficult by the spring low tide which had transformed the pontoon ramp into something resembling an alpine climbing route.

Back aboard RaRa, Rachel began stowing our newly acquired bounty and very quickly realised that despite spending a small fortune we had somehow only managed to purchase perhaps half the items actually written on our carefully prepared provisioning list whilst simultaneously acquiring vast quantities of things that had never appeared on it whatsoever.

The original intention had been a very early night ahead of our planned departure, but one final check of the weather revealed something potentially valuable. By delaying departure slightly until 06:00 on the 16th the sea state appeared likely to ease marginally, offering us a more comfortable start to Biscay. The jeopardy, however, was obvious to all of us. A huge Atlantic system was building somewhere to the west and would leave absolutely no room whatsoever for dawdling once we committed ourselves northwards.

We all cracked one final beer and excitedly yarned late into the afternoon about our hopes for Biscay. I remember feeling particularly confident that we had selected an excellent weather window, yet despite that confidence the huge Atlantic system building somewhere to the west lingered heavily in the back of my mind. It produced the sort of quiet uneasiness that, left unchecked long enough, can begin almost imperceptibly eroding one’s sanity.

Neil went below to get his head down whilst Rachel and I remained in the cockpit watching the marina quietly settle into evening. As one of our neighbouring yachtsmen wandered past we struck up conversation and, naturally enough, I invited him aboard for a beer.

Talk very quickly turned towards orcas.

Marcus, as was his name, explained that he himself was heading south towards Greece and directly into the area where the Iberian orcas had recently been most active and destructive. My heart immediately sank for him and Rachel began recounting our own close encounter further south. Even now the memory still carried enough weight that neither of us struggled to imagine exactly how he must have been feeling.

Rachel and I exchanged a discreet glance and almost instantly a silent decision passed between us.

We insisted Marcus take our pingers.

By now we were almost certainly far enough north to be clear of any genuine danger ourselves and he clearly needed them considerably more than we did. For good measure I also threw in a full box of bangers and the relief on his face became immediately tangible. In truth it made Rachel and I feel unexpectedly wonderful, not merely because we might genuinely help someone else, but because for the first time it felt as though we properly belonged within this strange, generous and quietly supportive yachting community we had slowly found ourselves becoming part of.

What happened next somehow made the whole thing even better, Marcus himself insisting that once safely clear of danger he too would pass the pingers onwards to another yacht continuing south, repaying the generosity forwards. The idea stayed with me long afterwards. Our little set of pingers now potentially being handed from one yachtsman to another indefinitely in perpetual protection of rudders and perhaps, occasionally, something considerably more valuable than that too.

Soon we were joined by Ian and Colin, Marcus’s crew. They were English lads and before long the music was on and the atmosphere aboard had become considerably more lively. Rachel, fully embracing both the mood and perhaps the Estrella, began enthusiastically inviting virtually every passing yachtsman and woman aboard for a drink until somehow we found ourselves hosting more than a dozen of A Coruña’s finest transient sailors from seemingly every corner of the globe.

The Biscay party had begun almost entirely through chance and we embraced it wholeheartedly. At some stage the atmosphere aboard had become lively enough that we were eventually forced to wake Neil, partly because the music was now echoing enthusiastically across the marina and partly because it seemed deeply unfair for him to sleep through what had unexpectedly become one of the best evenings of the entire voyage.

Soon the cockpit and saloon were overflowing with people. We danced, drank, swapped stories and listened to anecdotes from distant oceans, strange anchorages and remarkable lives.

Some tales were hilarious, others quietly moving and several perhaps only loosely attached to reality after enough beer, but none of that mattered in the slightest. Surrounded by fascinating people united only by the sea and the strange urge to keep moving across it, Rachel and I found ourselves loving every minute of it.

At some stage we realised that forty-eight bottles of our beer and nearly two litres of rum had somehow completely vanished, not to mention the numerous additional offerings now being enthusiastically contributed by other yachts. The crowd aboard gradually began to thin as one crew after another finally staggered back towards their own boats and eventually the RaRa crew found ourselves alone together once more in the cockpit amongst empty bottles, abandoned glasses and the lingering warmth of one of those rare evenings that somehow becomes unforgettable almost whilst it is still happening.

Then one of us glanced at the time.

“Shit… we need to get some sleep.”

Chapter 17 — The Biscay

05:00 came around considerably quicker than anybody aboard RaRa would have ideally liked. Heads sore, mouths dry and bodies still carrying the unmistakable consequences of what had accidentally become a full-scale Biscay eve celebration, we nevertheless dragged ourselves into action.

Fortunately A Coruña was a proper twenty-four-hour marina and after a quick call on Channel 9 the attendant was already waiting for us at the fuel berth as though this sort of thing happened every morning. We filled both tanks and every remaining jerry can completely to the brim, knowing full well that once we committed ourselves northwards there would be no convenient opportunities to reconsider either our fuel reserves or our decisions.

Eventually, lines slipped once again and with a mixture of exhaustion, excitement and quiet apprehension hanging heavily aboard, we slowly and thoughtfully made our way towards the harbour entrance and the Biscay that lay waiting beyond it.

It was only just becoming light as we headed out. The iconic Tower of Hercules standing guard over A Coruña loomed tall above the harbour behind us, almost as though it were personally waving us off towards whatever Biscay had decided to offer.

There was trepidation and excitement aboard in almost equal measure as we finally escaped the confines of the outer harbour and emerged once more into the open Atlantic beyond.

We knew a storm had only just passed through ahead of us and that the sea state would likely still sit around three metres for at least the first twelve hours of the crossing. As we pushed further out towards the continental shelf the motion quickly became rolly and uncomfortable, but importantly never genuinely frightening.

It was on.

And if this proved to be the worst Biscay intended to offer us then, quite honestly, bring it on.

As the morning progressed and the sun at least attempted to show itself through the lingering cloud, we began properly to appreciate the sheer potential power of Biscay. In little more than fourteen knots of wind the residual swell still felt deeply powerful beneath us and more than once we quietly remarked that we certainly would not have wanted to see the bay any angrier than this.

We experienced a mixed bag of weather that day with both sails already aloft, though not quite producing the five point eight knots we needed to maintain on average if we were to stay comfortably ahead of the Atlantic system building somewhere to the west of us and reach the relative safety of Camaret before it arrived.

And then, perhaps sixteen hours into the crossing, we quietly reached the practical point of no return, the point where retreat ceased to offer any genuine safety at all.

If the storm came for us now it would punish us whichever direction we chose to flee, our little catamaran no longer realistically capable of outrunning it either north or south.

Our eyes were never truly off the weather. Starlink meant we could receive real-time forecast updates almost continuously as they happened and I have never not regretted a purchase as much as I did then. The ability to both forecast and communicate properly at sea is profoundly confidence inspiring, particularly when crossing somewhere with the reputation and scale of Biscay.

Yet the huge system somewhere to the west never entirely left our minds either. Every update became something quietly analysed for hidden menace, every slight shift in timing or pressure scrutinised perhaps more intensely than was entirely healthy.

Evening arrived and with it came both a drop in wind and a subtle shift in angle. But there would be no catching us out this time, not here, not in Biscay.

The mainsail was already reefed and firmly preventered. The jib remained slightly furled too, just in case something more sinister decided to emerge from the darkness.

Earlier that day we had also realised something quietly comforting: we were not the only boats making the Biscay crossing from A Coruña that morning.

Clearly visible on AIS were Frodo, the German yacht whose crew almost certainly carried hangovers obtained aboard RaRa, Hera, a Dutch boat, and Foxy Lady, also German. The four of us broadly maintained both course and speed within perhaps a thirty-mile radius of one another as though instinctively travelling together across the bay.

My relief at seeing them was genuinely palpable. I’m not the only idiot out here. Surely not all of us have got this wrong.

We fell into the watch rhythm easily, Neil having already done this with us before. The miles steadily disappeared beneath the hulls and gradually the sea state eased a little too as the wave periods lengthened and the secondary swell diminished, transforming the previously confused sea into something more predictable, though still far from comfortable.

I had the 04:00 to 08:00 watch on the second day and by then I had arrived at an important conclusion. This crossing was going to be a test of endurance rather than bravery as I had perhaps initially feared. It is true that the forty-two-knot Levante in Gibraltar had been considerably more heart pounding, but it had not been anywhere near as physically uncomfortable or relentlessly tiring as the sea we now found ourselves battling across in Biscay.

We had sailed through the night, both main and jib quietly assisting the engines in maintaining the essential five point eight knots required if we were to avoid being engulfed by the Atlantic system building somewhere to the west. The good news, however, was that we were now expecting a lull with winds potentially dropping to six knots and the sea state easing to perhaps one to two metres. And it came, as did the sun.

At almost the exact moment conditions finally softened we found ourselves suddenly joined by hundreds of common dolphins, all seemingly queuing enthusiastically to surf and weave through our bow waves. They remained with us for hours and I found myself sitting alone in the pulpit chair on the bows simply content to share occasional but deliberate eye contact with an intelligent species that was not Homo sapiens.

At some point later in the afternoon, when I finally found a little headspace, the realisation struck me that we were indeed crossing the mythical Biscay and that perhaps instead of focusing solely on that fact I should begin thinking beyond it. I headed to the chart plotter intending to review the PredictWind routing from Camaret-sur-Mer to Guernsey.

It was then my heart sank.

The C-MAP charts I had bought from eBay, purchased entirely so they would safely see us back into UK waters, alarmingly stopped a little over halfway across Biscay, a point we were now rapidly approaching.

I was furious.

Not because we would suddenly become blind navigators. We had quadruple redundancy aboard by then: C-MAP on the plotter, OpenCPN on the laptop, Navionics on both the chart table tablet and our phones, and if the absolute worst happened we still carried full paper charts for the entire passage all the way from the UK.

No, I was furious with myself for blindly trusting that we had the correct chart coverage and secondly with the unscrupulous prick who had sold them to me.

It was time, yet again, to adapt the plan. Camaret, whilst considerably more scenic than Brest, was nowhere close to Brest in terms of a technical stop. I wanted charts and I knew with certainty I could get them in Brest. I consulted the crew and, as we had become very well practised at by now, we pivoted without much fuss.

Brest it was.

The evening arrived calmly, perhaps almost too calmly. The sea state had eased to only one to two metres and for the first time since leaving Spain the swell had shifted slightly off our beam and more towards the stern quarter. For a few brief hours life aboard became genuinely pleasant again.

We did not waste the opportunity either.

Neil produced a fantastic chicken, prosciutto and mushroom pasta, music played quietly through the cockpit speakers and those of us off watch even allowed ourselves a couple of beers. For the first time since entering Biscay something approaching normality had returned aboard RaRa.

But we all knew it was temporary.

Soon we would cross back over the steeply rising continental shelf and worse still towards the Raz de Sein with the Atlantic system still chasing us eastwards. Things would deteriorate again and every one of us aboard knew it.

Night watches complete and daylight once again upon us, exactly as predicted the Atlantic swell had rebuilt itself to around three metres with the occasional four to five metre wave rolling through and sending RaRa surfing at exhilarating speeds. We checked the weather once more in the faint hope that somehow we had been gifted a better scenario overnight. We had not.

What had paid dividends however was our discipline around maintaining VGM. The earlier brisk downwind conditions combined with our completely unashamed use of the engines to support the sails had gradually pushed us slightly ahead of schedule. Our original ETA into Brest had been around 19:00, a timing that would almost certainly have seen us beginning to feel the advancing effects of the Atlantic system closing behind us. We now expected to arrive closer to 18:00, or so we thought, right up until we approached the Raz de Sein and hit the tide.

Our speed over ground collapsed to barely three knots and suddenly there was a very real possibility that we might still receive an unpleasant welcome into Brest after all. Eventually though, exactly as hoped, the tide turned in our favour and before long it was hurling us down the deeper western side of the Raz and onwards towards Brest at nearly nine knots. Earlier losses rapidly recovered and a cautious but unmistakably celebratory mood settled across the boat.

Soon the Raz itself emerged properly from the haze. Jagged, hostile and intimidatingly raw. Rocks stretched far out into the sea surrounded by overfalls that would likely trouble vessels considerably larger than ours.

I found it utterly captivating.

There was something profoundly beautiful about the sheer violence of the place.

Finally the confused seas and violent overfalls of the Raz began to diminish as we progressed into Le Goulet, the narrow channel guarding the entrance to Brest. We were flying along now at nearly ten knots, boosted by both a stiff breeze from astern and probably four knots of favourable tide. It was then we knew we had done it. We had crossed Biscay.

Beers followed, along with plenty of back slapping and hugging. It was an extraordinary feeling for people who only a couple of months earlier would quite honestly have described themselves as mere novices. We had successfully negotiated what is probably the most notorious stretch of sea in Europe and it was then something quietly profound dawned on me: we were no longer novices at all, but genuinely capable offshore sailors with the experience, judgement and hard-earned confidence to match.

Brest was now in sight and three tired and battered sailors were about to celebrate the greatest achievement of their lives to date, because against the odds, against the weather and despite our own relative inexperience, we had crossed Biscay.

Chapter 18 – This One’s For You Dad

21st May 2026 is La Jument Day.

Lines off at 07:00 and away, back through Le Goulet and out through the Raz with a decent punching tide propelling us. The weather on our arrival had been pretty bleak with a huge Atlantic front chasing us in. Today was entirely different and we were able to truly appreciate the beauty of the Brittany coastline. Several lonely lighthouses sat on outlying rocks completely separated from the mainland, albeit by beautiful stone-built causeways. As we eased west the Île d’Ouessant came into view. Rocky and rugged with intermittent sandy beaches, it began to feel more Channel Islands than France and that’s where we were headed, well indirectly headed.

The 30nm, five-hour detour was now about fifty percent complete as we continued west towards our destination. There were dozens of lighthouses but mine lay just a little further. Within the last ten nautical miles Neil went down for a sleep at the exact moment La Jument came into view.

I was gone – I completely broke down at the sight of it.

All the emotions surrounding Dad’s passing came flooding back at once. I sobbed like I hadn’t since I was a child. Rachel comforted me and suggested that perhaps I hadn’t allowed myself to grieve sufficiently and of course she was, as ever, right. With passage planning and dealing with Dad’s affairs it suddenly dawned on me that I had never really given myself the chance to mourn properly. On that realisation I decided there could be no better place to let go than here and now.

We sat there weeping as we approached closer, Rachel crying in sympathy for me as much as grieving Dad herself. But as we drew nearer my thoughts gradually turned to happier memories. Dad fishing for tuna out of Falmouth, bass fishing off the back of the Needles and countless days spent on the water together. A sense of comfort slowly replaced the sadness.

Order restored and Neil back from his slumber, I briefed the crew that I would make as close a pass of La Jument as was safely possible. Obligingly both Rachel and Neil captured some stunning photographs of the old lighthouse as I navigated the treacherous and jagged waters it had guarded for generations.

Eventually we turned away, watching over our shoulders as La Jument slowly faded into the haze. It was perfect and a tribute that I am immensely proud to have been able to pay Dad.

It was late afternoon by now and all that lay between us and Guernsey was a particularly favourable wind, a helping tide and one of the most beautiful sailing days of the entire voyage. I thanked Poseidon for our fortune and cracked open a beer, accompanied by happy memories and stunning scenery.

Overnight was equally kind to us. A full main and jib were easily maintained, the tide still helping as dawn approached and our old friend Guernsey appeared in the morning sun. No chart plotter was required today; we knew these waters well. As we rounded the south-east coast of Guernsey, Herm and Sark came into view standing guard to the east of St Peter Port.

Rachel called up the harbour authority and we were granted a berth. St Peter Port operates on a first-come, first-served basis and it was no accident that we arrived around 08:30 on the Friday ahead of the potential marina chaos of a Bank Holiday weekend.

Immediately the beers began to flow and I knew exactly where to have lunch. The Taj Indian restaurant had served us well once before when my spice craving had dictated that curry for lunch, not dinner, was the only acceptable option. We were not disappointed, all three of us tucking into poppadoms, chutneys and curries of every variety. After lunch, now completely satisfied and more drunk than we had been at any point during the passage, an immediate nano-nap was required.

We woke in the early evening and did venture ashore, although certainly not with our usual vigour due to our overindulgence at lunch. A few beers on the quayside followed before we retired to RaRa where we regaled stories of the passage until sundown.

The following day we were up and at them. Today would be devoted largely to provisioning ahead of our arrival back in the UK. As the messages continued to arrive it became apparent that an ever-increasing fleet of RIBs intended to welcome us home. We quickly realised that we would require considerably more beer and food than originally anticipated.

We headed for Marks & Spencer to buy our provisions. There was also an excellent wine merchant on the front and a fish market that had agreed the previous day to sell us twenty-five kilograms of flaked ice for the Igloo.

Neil had not yet shared his plan, but it became apparent the moment we reached the checkout. Instead of unloading the shopping from the trolley, he simply pushed the entire thing straight out through the front door.

We were in hysterics, as were many of the people sitting outside the bars and restaurants watching three rather weary sailors pushing their apparently stolen trolley up the high street.

This was not the limit of Neil’s audacious plan either.

The trolley next visited the off-licence, where it acquired a considerable quantity of beer and wine, before continuing to the fish market where twenty-five kilograms of flaked ice were piled precariously on top. By now the thing was dangerously overloaded, but somehow still mobile.

The laughter of onlookers continued as we took turns pushing our haul back towards RaRa. Remarkably, we even managed to get it down the gangplank and onto the quayside alongside her.

What a triumph, we thought.

Our celebration lasted only a few moments before we began drawing lots to determine who would be responsible for returning the stolen goods to Marks & Spencer.

As it turned out, the following day was equally hysterical, though for entirely different reasons. We woke on our second day in St Peter Port and decided to dedicate it almost entirely to enjoyment. A handful of minor maintenance jobs were completed aboard first thing, just enough to satisfy our consciences, before we spent the rest of the day wandering the town and enjoying the atmosphere.

By late afternoon Rachel was positively craving a Chinese takeaway and, having received several enthusiastic recommendations for one in particular, we agreed that dinner had effectively chosen itself. Before eating, however, we found ourselves at the Ship & Crown enjoying a few aperitifs while watching the harbour life drift by. At some point Neil and I decided to go in search of a tobacconist.

The search took an unexpected turn.

We soon found ourselves standing inside what appeared at first glance to be a spiritual hippy emporium, complete with incense, crystals, cauldrons and an impressive display of bongs. While we were still trying to determine exactly what sort of establishment we had wandered into, a young lady entered and purchased a packet of edibles over the counter.

Assuming these were simply CBD products marketed for relaxation, we asked a few questions and were surprised by the answer. Guernsey, it transpired, had adopted a considerably more progressive approach than either of us had expected. Whether one agreed with the policy or not, it certainly wasn’t what either of us had anticipated discovering whilst supposedly looking for a packet of tobacco.

Needless to say, neither of us left empty handed. Returning to the Ship & Crown, we rejoined Rachel, who by this point seemed considerably more interested in finding her Chinese takeaway than hearing about our latest discovery.

The Chinese was wonderful, although its name now escapes me. By this stage of the voyage we had become exceptionally good at celebrating milestones and equally poor at remembering the finer details the following day.

Back aboard RaRa we settled onto the aft deck for a few sundowners, enjoying another perfect evening in St Peter Port. With the Biscay behind us, La Jument visited and home now less than ninety nautical miles away, the mood aboard was understandably buoyant.

Perhaps it was relief. Perhaps it was fatigue. Perhaps it was simply the realisation that our adventure was almost over.

Whatever the reason, before long all three of us were in absolute hysterics. Every conversation descended into laughter and every attempt to regain our composure only seemed to make matters worse.

Unfortunately, this coincided with an unsuspecting French yacht rafting alongside us. Under normal circumstances this would have been entirely unremarkable. The problem was that we intended to leave at 05:00 the following morning and day sail the final leg back to the UK rather than overnight it. Asking a complete stranger to interrupt their sleep at such an ungodly hour seemed rather inconsiderate.

As my French was marginally better than Rachel’s and Neil’s, I was unanimously volunteered to handle the negotiations.

The French couple were wonderfully friendly and, despite being halfway through supper when I approached them, were entirely understanding of our predicament. They assured us that a 05:00 departure would not inconvenience them in the slightest and wished us luck for the final leg home.

Relieved that the matter had been settled, we returned to the cockpit where the laughter continued well into the evening. Every conversation seemed to descend into fresh hysterics and by this point none of us could quite remember what had started it all.

Eventually, sometime well after sensible sailors should have been asleep, we retired to our cabins.

At 04:45 alarms began sounding throughout RaRa. True to their word, our French neighbours were already awake and cheerfully helping us slip our lines. Within minutes we were easing quietly out of St Peter Port and into the pre-dawn darkness.

Home was now less than ninety nautical miles away.