They say time and tide weather the body's vessel, and they're not wrong. But, you can let it rot your lines in a safe harbour, or you can point your bow into it and let it fill your sails for an adventure.

We chose the latter. And if you're reading this, we have a feeling you would too. So a very warm welcome to you, whether you’re a new subscriber, a fellow horizon-chaser or a friend just along for the ride. Welcome to our adventure… but before we begin I am just trialing a voice reader as an option to the text... good or bad let me know what you think, Click Play me to listen or just carry on reading - let’s begin!

The Atlantic, they say, starts not in the water, but in the mind. It’s a dream some polish for years until one day, you find yourself in a Tangiers' customs shed, sweating over a drone you’ve decided doesn’t exist. The dream, at that moment, smelt of bureaucracy, diesel, and faint desperation.

We’d collected our crew in Gibraltar. Danny and Vikki. On paper, they were titanium-clad adventurers. Two Atlantic crossings in Tall Ships. Danny: ex-Army, ex-Fireman, a man who’d willingly dangled into the earth’s dark belly for fun and taught youngsters how to Kayak. Vikki: a sailor with a nurse’s calm. As this was my first time with crew, I assigned roles with the glee of a football manager signing star strikers. Danny, our fire and safety officer. Vikki, our medical guardian. Danny claimed he had recently completed his Yachtmaster Coastal qualification and because of this I started to consult with him as this story unfolds. Unbeknown to me, Danny, noting my frequent consultations, quietly and privately promoted himself to First Mate. We didn’t hold a ceremony. He just assumed the title, like a cat claiming the sunniest spot on the sofa.

Our plan was to sail majestically to Morocco and spend the evening there. We would then glide down the Moroccan coast, calling into ancient ports and immersing ourselves in a world of spice-scented heritage. But first, we had to cross a gauntlet.

The Strait of Gibraltar wasn't just water; it was a maritime motorway, a churning, deafening crossroads of continents. We would have to weave through a relentless parade of looming tankers and glittering, city-sized cruise ships, their wakes rolling us like dice. And beneath this chaotic surface traffic lurked a newer, more primal threat. In the last two years, the orcas, those magnificent, intelligent, and suddenly mischievous creatures, had turned from documentaries into demolition experts. They weren't hunting; they were playing, and their game of choice was rudder-chunking, leaving a trail of crippled boats and shattered Atlantic dreams in their wake.

So our focus was torn in a terrifying triangle: Ais screen, horizon, and the deep blue beneath us. Every shadow could be a keel or a killer. The tension was a constant, low-grade scream in the nerves; dodge the steel giants and pray to miss the black fins. Our grand cultural immersion depended entirely on the whims of a pod we hoped to never meet and steel hulls we wanted to avoid.  Then, the low haze resolved not into a ship's bow or a black fin, but into the dusty gold of the Tangier coastline. We hadn't sailed majestically; we'd crept, nervously, through a minefield, into a new continent, with our rudder and our dream intact.

Morocco was our brief, bizarre prologue. We checked into Tangiers. The customs agents, sorting paperwork and moving with the solemn lethargy of a state funeral, searched Sawasdeekat. “A drone?” they asked. We gazed back with the innocent; blank faces of people who think a drone is a male bee. Did we want to pay a fictional fee to have it held in a warehouse on the other side of the city? No, thank you. Our secret drone stayed secret. Their conversation circled back to the phantom drone four or five times, a bureaucratic ritual that became a test of our collective poker faces. Their searching of cupboards ceased, however, the moment they discovered we made YouTube videos and saw Pookie’s Instagram hovering near the 90,000-follower mark. Suddenly, smiles appeared and the conversation pivoted from potential contraventions to the perfect recipe for chermoula.

We discovered the Moroccan sailing rulebook is a peculiar document. You must check in and out of every marina. You may not anchor. Ever. Anywhere. And the many marinas on our chart had, according to the collective wisdom of the internet, melted back into the sand. Morocco it seems was happy to have you as a holiday maker, but a cruiser? No Thank You.

So our Moroccan madness lasted one night. We left the next morning, but not before another set of officials came aboard to confirm we were, indeed, the same people and the same boat they’d meticulously documented and searched twelve hours prior. The dream, for a moment, felt like a series of laboured rubber stamps so we opted to go directly to Lanzarotte. This would mean that our prior record of 235 miles (only made 3 months earlier) would be completely blown away by a 568 mammoth of a journey.

The sea that day showed its teeth quickly. Eighteen knots gusting twenty-four right on the nose, a chaotic chop that made the world a bucking, salty carousel. Pookie, my beautiful Buddhist rabbit-year wife, turned a delicate shade of jade. The TV chef who commands flavours is helpless before the inner ear’s rebellion. Vikki and Danny were unmoved. I, the ever-energetic Monkey, felt the old scuba diver’s equilibrium hold firm.

The next day the wind died. The world flattened into a plate of mercury under the sun.

We motored. And we fished. Here, our inexperience played out in tragicomedy. Three times we hooked magnificent tuna only to hear the ping of sadness as once again our lines snapped. A simple lesson - We had forgot to slow the boat! - and so three fabulous creatures won their freedom thanks to our idiocy. It was only on the fourth occasion did we catch anything, they became meals, their deep red flesh a sacrament of our learning.

The nights were mine. On watch, with the universe dialled up to maximum splendour, I played with Sawasdeekat’s wardrobe. Code Zero, Genoa, mainsail. We goose-winged downwind, a slow, stately waltz towards the Canaries. We also discovered a mysterious leak. A creeping damp in the bilge. Danny, our fireman-spelunker-first-mate, diagnosed it: a blocked sink drain, likely from coffee grounds poured down by Vikki (Sink holes in our boat are only 15mm, unlike the 38mm ones at home and therefore block easily). The irony was not lost. It was a small, whispering issue we’d fix later. Like a minor character coughing in the first act of a play.

Other dramas were less subtle. Midnight, a calm sea. A vessel, “Vibilus”, decided the entire empty Atlantic Ocean was insufficient and chose to cross 200 meters off our bow before turning to parallel us, slower. I leaned on the horn, a blast of sound that said what every sailor thinks but rarely shouts: “All this ocean, and you nearly hit us!” The dream, sometimes, has terrible neighbours.

Then, there was The Diet.

Ah, The Diet.

Now, at our first meeting in the UK, Danny had mentioned lactose and gluten. “Don’t worry,” he’d said, waving a dismissive hand. “I can take care of myself.” We, foolishly, thought this meant he’d bring a suitcase of specialist sustenance. It did not. It meant he saw our meticulously planned, storage-tetris’d pantry as his personal foraging ground. This was going to cause problems.

Also, by Lanzarote, his prohibitions had expanded like a kingdom. No root vegetables (except potatoes), no red meat. Vikki, perhaps not wanting to be left out, presented her list: no spices, selective seafoods, no red meat (a harmony there), no raw fish, no fried eggs.

Pookie, whose culinary genius is built on Thai heat and complex flavours, looked at her galley as if it had been colonised by a pair of gastronomic anarchists. So, once arrived, we embarked on a Grand Canarian Shop of epic and expensive proportions. The centrepiece: over sixty family-sized bags of gluten-free crisps for Danny. A crisp mountain. We placed a basket on the saloon table. “This,” I said, with the strained cheer of a gameshow host, “is your snack station. We will replenish it every day with fruit, nuts and crisps. Help yourself. Please. Just… from here.”

Gran Canaria was the gathering of the tribe. The Viking Explorers flotilla: 22 boats, a floating UN of dreamers, drifters, and seasoned salts. We were reunited with Jen and AJ from the superyacht world and they introduced us to Steve, Sue, Lena and Peter.  The air crackled with anticipation and good advice.

Oliver & Carlota (Viking Explorer Organisers) put on an official safety briefing where owners were invited to introduce themselves. As Pookie and I stepped forward, Danny, our self-appointed First Mate, stepped up as well. He stood shoulder-to-shoulder, beaming at the crowd. A silent statement that he was there. Other owners had come up alone. No other crew member had joined their skipper. It was a small, strange piece of theatre that raised eyebrows. Once this show and tell was over Vikki and Danny returned home and we spent the rest of our time in Las Palmas getting to know the other owners.

Some Vikings decided to remain on the boat over the Christmas break but we decided to return to see family and friends before January’s final push across the big pond. Upon our return and with New Year celebrations still ringing in our heads, Pookie started preparing and provisioning for the crossing.

Danny and Vikki returned and the hierarchy confusion deepened with the Captain’s Dinner. The invitation stipulated "The Captain and First Mate." But as every boat was owned and operated by a couple this was not taken literally. However Danny's assumption was now a conviction. I had, due to his Yacht master qualification, asked him to attend a technical weather briefing for skippers. In his mind, this delegation had formally anointed him as First Mate. Therefore, the dinner invitation was clearly for him.

I therefore had to navigate the awkward diplomacy of explaining the unwritten code. In this context, "First Mate" was not a technical rank but a term of endearment for the partner - the co-owner of the dream, the sharer of the mortgage, the person who would forgive you for a terrible passage over a glass of wine. My Pookie. The disappointment that clouded his face was not of a crew member missing a free meal, but of a perceived demotion. The thirty-euro fee for additional crew swiftly ended the debate. He and Vikki declined, and a small gap in what would become a void over time, had started to open. Pookie and I went, and we laughed and plotted with our new Viking tribe under the Canarian stars, the subtle complexities of boat politics already feeling like a distant, peculiar shore.

Las Palmas gave us the opportunity to buy last-minute things. Electric scooters in the January sales. Medications. A myriad of safety equipment. Sawasdeekat was as ready as we could make her. The vastness of the crossing now felt real, a third presence in every conversation.

We had a boat stocked with crisps, a mysterious leak, a crew with dietary lists longer than the ship’s manifest, and a hierarchical subtlety that seemed to be lost in translation. The Atlantic stretched ahead, a 2700-mile blank page. The deep blue was ahead and we were naïvely raring to go.

Please join us next week when we break all records and our boat and set sail.

Until then.