Porky & Beluga cook at sea

Time to reflect... balcony view from my apartment, just 400m from the marina I've made some new friends here in Martinique and I have been busy looking for another boat to join. But I'll evaluate each opportunity before I jump into anything new, including when it's right or even possible for me to return home. I have already decided not to sail on two boats because things didn't seem quite right. I was hoping to sail to St Martin with Zag on a lovely catamaran but the owner has decided to sell the boat after spending January aboard it with his wife. So it's likely to be back here in Martinique before February and then to be sold. The owner has paid Zag to fly out here from Corsica and work for him, to demonstrate the cat to potential buyers and maintain it. If I haven't found anything else in the meantime, I may join Zag for some cruising on it in February, we'll see... I've never sailed before on a cruising cat and I'd love to experience the smoothe...

  Atlantic Crossing - Part 3 Light winds and our underperformance Can you believe we are actually mid-Atlantic in this pic? We only averaged 5.8kts over the duration of our 3,131 mile passage. After the first 48 hours, we'd averaged a speed of 8.5kts, so you can tell that latterly, the wind strength had dropped off. I had estimated on 21 days but it actually took 22 days, largely because we almost completely lost our wind in the initial part of the final week so had to we motor at just 5kts, just 1,200 rpm to conserve fuel. Our chart plotter displaying some stats just prior to our arrival in Martinique  Did the slow pace really matter to me? If I'm honest, yes it did. We were only using our foresail for most of our westerly passage and that was reefed from 74 square meters to about 65. Why? Because the genoa was pretty knackered and the skipper was trying to ensure it didn't get damaged any more. So why didn't we use our mainsail? When you're sailing downwind, that ...

Atlantic Crossing - Part 2 Problems at Sea On our second night, during the stronger winds, the top of the main sheet came away from the mast and was flapping and likely to tear. So the mainsail was lowered until daybreak. The uppermost traveller that slides up and down the mast had broken and needed new roller bearings. Tomasz had spare nylon bearings and was able to fix it within an hour, so we had our mainsail back again... skipper replacing the nylon bearings in the uppermost mainsail traveller Then after a couple of days of brisk sailing the wind died and we had to motor intermittently . On one such occasion, the engine was started and it immediately jumped into gear with a very loud clunk and stopped. There was a modest amount of cursing from our skipper but we later discovered that the linkage mechanism had broken, not the actual gearbox. So we had to engage gear and neutral from the side of the gearbox through a hatch in my bloody cabin. Starting and stopping the engine for the ...

Atlantic Crossing - Part 1 Henry during our first full day at sea, cruising nicely at 8+kts Departure day... I arrived at the marina in Arrecife at noon after a short taxi ride from the airport through the town centre. I sat for half an hour outside a cafe opposite the yacht Piligrim and observed the comings and goings of the assembled five man crew. They'd had a delivery of groceries from a local supermarket and I watched all of them loading the provisions aboard. There was an organised calmness to their activities which struck me as a real plus point. After my breakfast sandwich, I savoured my last beer in the cafe for probably three weeks and went down to introduce myself to Tomasz, the skipper, and the others before stowing my kit onto Piligrim.  Our mission is to sail south to pick up the trade winds that blow from the east between the latitudes of 20 and 8 degrees North, from the west African coast across to the Caribbean.  Using these trade winds, sailing ships have cro...