I don’t feel as old as 57 sounds. All I am very well aware of is the constant beeping my NAS drive is making whilst typing this blog. It appears updating ones hard drive capacity by copying and swapping out hard drives whilst bobbing around in what amounts to a large Tupperware container on the sea, is not necessarily conducive to a successful outcome… more on this another time….

If the dream in Morocco smelled of bureaucracy, the dream in the run-up to Christmas smelled of panic, polyester, and mulled wine. We landed in the UK with ten days to spare. Ten days to perform the annual high-speed ritual of gift procurement, familial diplomacy, and explaining to friends that yes, we were genuinely about to sail across an ocean, and no, we hadn’t finally lost all our marbles. Most of them, perhaps, but not all.

The Viking Explorer Group, our pragmatic overlords, had issued a decree: acquire an Iridium Go! satellite communicator. Elon Musk’s Starlink was a dazzling prospect, but they argued its service could be as fickle as a cat in a bath, potentially vanishing on a corporate whim. We needed a lifeline that didn’t rely on the mood of a billionaire. By the time I’d wrestled the blinking gadget into submission, Santa was landing his sleigh on our roof for the annual family spectacle. We made our requests known. I asked for consistent trade winds, I suspect he ignored me.

New Year’s Eve was spent in a blur of my daughter’s singing voice and midnight fireworks that felt less like a celebration and more like a starting pistol. Indeed two days later and we were back in Gran Canaria, amidst the final, frantic provisioning. The pre-departure skippers’ party buzzed with a nervous, excited energy. Vikki and Danny, however, declined to attend. The pattern, subtly set over the dinner-invitation diplomacy, was beginning to crystallise.

We see ourselves as happy-go-lucky. With the experience of having managed over 150 people I know the importance of trying to build a team. We’d bought them sailing mugs and matching crew t-shirts, a sartorial offer of unity. Their response was to treat the boat less like a shared adventure and more like a mildly inconvenient bed-and-breakfast with a strict, self-imposed room-service policy. They became spectral presences. They’d slip back aboard after a day out without a word, retreating to their cabin for hours of crisp-based solitude. We’d only know they were home by the faint, sad rustle of gluten-free packets from behind the door. Other boats’ crews were bonding over sundowners; ours were staging a quiet, two-person sit-in - my fault perhaps from insisting that a "Skippers Dinner and First Mate" really did mean the owner and their partner.

We persisted. For their wedding anniversary, we gifted them a couples Thai massage experience. They accepted with the enthusiasm of someone receiving a dental appointment. Group photos required a formal summons, issued twice. Their sole contribution to the communal larder was a nice bottle of wine from a specialist maker in Switzerland I beleive. We very gratefully accepted it and stowed it away to take it home with us for our "memories" collection. It was like trying to befriend two very polite, very private hedgehogs…. with complicated dietary needs.

Logistics provided a welcome distraction from the social frost. Our life raft, sent for service in November, hadn’t been touched. The day before departure, a recently serviced replacement was hurled at us. It wasn’t ours, but it would float. We decided to take that as a win.

The grand exit from Las Palmas was a cinematic affair. Photographers buzzed on ribs, drones hummed overhead, and horns blared as one by one our flotilla departed. We, in our matching t-shirts, motored out in a glorious, sun-drenched parade. Destination: Mindelo, Cape Verde. A mere 954 miles. Almost double our longest passage to date (made only three weeks earlier). The Atlantic was no longer a concept; it was the next left turn.

The beginning was a gentle deceiver. Light winds, calm seas. We motored, nearly adding “unmarked fish farm” to the boat’s bow as a souvenir. Our first attempt at reefing the mainsail was a clumsy ballet of tangled lines and confusion. A humble start.

By day two, the ocean remembered its character. We lost a pin from a critical shackle, fashioning a makeshift fix. And Danny, our stalwart ex-fireman and spelunker, who had been granite on the rougher leg from Gibraltar, turned a profound and miserable shade of green. The Atlantic, it seemed, had issued a personal challenge he hadn’t expected.

Day three brought a strategic blunder. We drifted off course, and a gybe back to the median line took eight hours of painfully slow progress. We watched our flotilla ranking slide from 4th to 8th. Danny, now medicated with anti-seasickness patches, was a reduced figure, reading less, eating little. Vikki remained in stoically upbeat and in good spirits. Pookie, fighting off a lingering cold, was tired. The mysterious leak in the port cupboard, which we now referred to as “Danny’s Drip” in honour of its suspected coffee-ground origin, made a cameo. Danny applied a temporary fix with the solemnity of a battlefield surgeon.

The following days settled into a rhythm of wind, waves, and watch-keeping. We saw dolphins stitching silver lines alongside us and a large, weary bird that tried to claim the aft cockpit. Danny, in a moment of interspecies diplomacy, persuaded it to leave. I saw whales, dark, monumental shapes in the deep that made my heart stall. But a new pattern emerged at the helm. When Danny steered, we had a curious tendency to drift ever eastward, as if pulled by a magnetic attraction to simply go to the nearest land. Gentle reminders about our southerly ambitions seemed to evaporate in the salt air. It was as if he was navigating by mood, not by plotter.

There were triumphs. We caught fish! Vikki, to her immense credit, grabbed a knife and practised her filleting on the rolling deck. Danny wanted nothing to do with it, viewing the process, perhaps, was altogether too visceral for a man who snacks on crisps in the dark.

Then came the night shift, and with it, a strange new maritime protocol: the Flying Fish Insurgency. I’d never seen one before, but this stretch of the Atlantic was evidently their airborne training ground. And for reasons known only to their tiny, piscine brains, be it the siren call of our deck lights, the hallucination that our white hull was a breaking wave, or a simple, spectacular navigational error, they developed a collective kamikaze death wish.

Night after night, we’d be jolted awake by a faint, fleshy thwap on the deck. It wasn't one or two curious explorers; it was a squadron. Between five and ten would launch themselves aboard, their sleek, silver bodies becoming tragic, flapping landfalls. I imagine their final, gasping thought was one of profound regret, a piscine "Oh, this was not the plan."

Each morning therefore began not just with coffee, but with a solemn fish-round. We’d patrol the decks, collecting the little fallen aviators with a sigh, and commit them back to the deep with a gentle toss. Even Pookie, our ever-resourceful first mate, would survey the offerings with disdain. Not even she could conjure a galley miracle from a cargo of slightly salted, deck-dried flying fish. It was less like sailing and more like running a remarkably inefficient, and somewhat tragic, ferry service for suicides.

Well, after six days, Cape Verde rose from the sea: a stark, beautiful, and slightly chaotic promise of land. The marina pontoons bucked and rolled like mechanical bulls, making sleep an athletic event. But Cape Verde, in its chaotic generosity, offered more than just social puzzles. It delivered water, in entirely unwanted places. “Danny’s Drip” in the port cupboard had already been resolved but then, within a day of setting sail from Gran Canaria, a new aquatic anomaly presented itself.

A persistent pool began to gather on the passageway floor, directly outside Vikki and Danny’s cabin door. It wasn’t a dramatic gush, but a steady, seeping presence, like the boat was quietly sweating with anxiety. Having already ruled out a blocked sink (Danny’s confirmed mechanical triumph), we were baffled. We deployed the maritime equivalent of nappies, a pile of absorbent cloths, and mopped with the solemn regularity of nuns in a flooded convent. The water, however, was unimpressed by our piety. It returned, hour after hour, a damp ghost haunting the corridor.

It took us most of the 954-mile journey to Mindelo to diagnose the culprit. With the boat riding lower under the weight of spare parts, provisions, dreams, and several kilos of gluten-free crisps, we deduced that the diesel heater exhaust outlet, now kissing the waves more intimately than designed, was letting the Atlantic in for a taste. Each large wave that slapped the hull was essentially forcing a shot of seawater through a poorly-sealed gap. A quick investigation revealed our starboard hull was hosting the same uninvited cocktail party. The boat wasn’t just sailing; it was slowly, doggedly, importing the ocean.

One very interesting happening was the strange occur

In Mindelo, we presented this theory to a local boatyard engineer with the hopeful desperation of patients showing a strange rash to a doctor. He nodded, uttered something in Creole that probably translated to “obvious,” and set to work. Five minutes, a tube of Sikaflex, and €160 later, both exhausts were declared sealed. He charged us with the serene confidence of a man who knows you have no other options. We handed over the cash, choosing to believe we’d just purchased a permanent solution, and not merely a very expensive temporary truce with physics.

Cape Verde itself was a place of stark contrasts: stunning volcanic vistas that stole your breath versus the constant, wearying pressure of people offering unsolicited "help" or simply begging. It created a persistent, low-level hum of negotiation where even a simple errand became a tactical exercise.

Take our quest for a chandlery. Google Maps had the coordinates locked in, and we were following its digital breadcrumbs with the focus of a military patrol. Enter a man in his twenties. “Hey Boss, want some help?”

“No thanks, I’ve got it on the map.”

“Where you trying to find?”

“Really, it’s okay. The map knows the way to the chandlery.”

“Oh, the chandlery! I will show you. Follow me.” He fell into step beside us, a self-appointed guide. I explained, firmly, that I carried no cash, only a credit card for the purchase. His reply was a masterpiece of leveraged empathy: “That’s okay, I am just being friendly. But if I help… maybe you could buy a small tub of baby powder for my young baby? Only $2.”

Our resistance softened. $2? For a baby? That seemed almost charitable. Our scepticism, however, remained on high alert. It spiked when, at the end of the street, he gestured away from our plotted course. “It’s down here, man.” Google vehemently disagreed. After a brief, awkward détour down a very unchandlery-like alley, we recalibrated to our original route.

“Nah that’s the long way round, Bro,” he sighed, deploying that modern, fraternal title that always makes me feel about a hundred years old. *Sir* has retired. *Mister* has sailed away. Now, it’s just ‘Bro’ - a pale, generic label for a transaction masquerading as fellowship.

He shadowed us all the way to the correct door, even entering with us. The shop didn’t stock the spare air cylinders we needed, but our ‘Bro’s’ commitment to his own mission never wavered. On the return trek, we entered a grocery. Here, the plot thickened. He clearly knew the teller and vanished towards the back with Kenet, our new crew member. He returned not with a modest $2 tub, but a gigantic, family-sized sack of powder costing $8 USD.

The charitable baby powder fund had just quadrupled in ambition. Kenet, whose patience for dubious geometry was even lower than ours, had heard enough. Our ‘Bro’ was left empty-handed. We later learned the likely truth: oour "Bro" probably didn't have children at all, this powder would be traded to buy a very different kind of powder. It was Cape Verde in a nutshell: a journey where even directions came with a hidden tariff, and kindness was a currency with a wildly fluctuating exchange rate.

Another thing we noticed was the lack of customer service. You ordered a drink and had time to write a novella before it arrived. 30 minutes seemed like the average time for a drink to arrive and it would be another 45 before any meal you'd ordered would appear. Hey ho, this is island life i guess.

An uneasy energy thrummed through the streets. And then, the final, baffling act of the Cape Verde chapter. We discovered that our crew had helped themselves to the bottle of wine. The very same bottle they had given us as a gift only a week earlier. It was a move of such spectacularly odd social geometry it left us speechless. It wasn’t theft; it was a recursive gifting loop that completely short-circuited our understanding of maritime etiquette.

Through it all, small frictions sparked. Danny, perhaps used to military bunkers with unlimited power, left every cabin light blazing like a lighthouse, draining our batteries with casual abandon. And we discovered a curious chain of command: a direct request from Pookie would often be met with a muted resistance, requiring me to later issue the exact same request for it to be actioned. It was diplomacy, again, on a micro-scale.

They were perhaps feeling the strain of proximity and so in Cape Verde, they disengaged entirely, opting out of meals together. The dream, for a moment, felt cramped.

Our one beam of light in this confounding port was the arrival of a new character. After two days of social frost and recursive gifting, Kenet (all the way back from Blog 013 entered stage left. He arrived not with the wary silence of a crisps-connoisseur, but with a grin as wide as the horizon and a tackle box that clattered with the promise of piscine glory.

Kenet brought two immediate things: first, a huge, uncomplicated smile that seemed to operate without any hidden diplomatic clauses. Second, enough lures, line, and terminal tackle to feed the entire flotilla and possibly negotiate a treaty with Poseidon. His presence didn't just add a person; it changed the weather. It was a fresh, steady trade wind cutting through the stagnant, crisp-scented air that had settled over the boat. Suddenly, the conversation turned to currents, species, and the optimistic logic of the hunt; topics that, wonderfully, required no translation and carried no emotional baggage. It was a relief as palpable as a solid landfall.

Just as he was getting to know Danny and Vikki it was time to leave. We left Cape Verde with a patched leak, a confused social contract, a new fisherman, and a creeping question about what the real Atlantic crossing would bring.

Join us next time, when we set sail from Cape Verde into the great blue unknown. With a sinking ship, a potential mutiny, and enough fishing line to catch Neptune’s trousers.