I have decided, Sailing is the most stressful thing you can do for fun... and the Words of the week – Draconian & Avatar

The wind was light when we finally left Dr Dolittle's Marigot Bay. Saint Lucia shelters its leeward coast like a mother protecting a child from the wind, and we motor-sailed out with the engine humming its steady mechanical song, that faithful thrum that has become the background music to so many of our departures. Our batteries were full, our sails newly stitched and the hull clean as we pierced our way through the small blue waters. At 3pm, just after we passed beyond the island’s protection from the winds, the code zero filled with air and the boat picked up some speed. We were sailing along beautifully and then, the bowsprit cleat on the port side without any warning whatsoever just snapped.

As the sail whipped and flailed in the wind Pookie and I gazed at each other with a baffled and incredulous look that said everything words could not. This can’t possibly be happening. Not Again!? This was the same cleat that had broken during our Atlantic crossing. That time it had been the starboard side. Now it was the port side. But… how?

The symmetry suggested age rather than accident, the quiet failure of metal that has been stressed too many times and finally decided to retire, like an old boxer who simply declines to raise his gloves one more time. In a now all too familiar process we wound up the code zero furler as best we could. Pookie handled lines with a competence that still surprises her, a transformation from the woman who once asked me which way to point the boat when the wind came from the front. She opened the genoa to protect the furled sail from the wind and we stood there on the foredeck, two people who had crossed an ocean together, staring at fabric that had decided yet again to give up the fight. The code zero was ripped again. Three days after Kenny had repaired it. Three days. The apparent wind was only about ten knots. We were not pushing hard. The sail had simply decided that this was its time.

We were sad. We were baffled. We were quietly questioning our luck. We also had to consider whether we were throwing good money after bad by getting the sail repaired yet again. There is a moment in every sailor’s life, I imagine, when they look at a piece of equipment that has failed for the second time and ask themselves if they are in a relationship with a boat or a very expensive dependent. We despondently tied the sail to the deck in a messy indifference to how it looked and continued our way back to Bequia, the island that had become a kind of unofficial home port for this phase of our journey.

Bequia has a character all its own, a place where the old whaling tradition still lingers in a single boat that takes a handful of humpbacks each year under a special exemption. The islanders will tell you it is about tradition, about the old ways, and you believe them because the alternative is to imagine the sound of harpoon meeting flesh in waters that now mostly see tourists with snorkels. Nowadays the island is better known for its model boat building, with prices that make you wonder if the boats actually sail themselves to your home, and the local currency of turtle money. Those carved coins once circulated as real tender, pieces of art that you could spend on bread or rum if you found yourself in the right shop with the right shopkeeper. Imagine explaining that one to a customs official. I have a jar of coins made from sea creatures. No, really, they are legal here.

Theo and Pam were there on their fifty-one-foot monohull. Jan and Miguel had also arrived in their ketch, a sailboat with two masts whose front one stands taller than its companion like a proud older sibling. A small Viking convention had assembled without anyone sending invitations. We had crossed the Atlantic together, this little fleet of misfits who suddenly decide to sail an ocean, and now here we were again, drawn together by the invisible threads that form between people who have shared something most of the world will never understand. It felt to us like it was almost a funeral congregation – there to help us mourn our befallen Code Zero. We spent a few days looking round the bay and enjoying the company of our fellow Atlantic crossing travellers when Flo messaged that it was Ed’s birthday soon.

Now I was not aware until Pookie pointed it out but we had actually anchored behind Ed and his wife Flo in their Hattaras. Pookie, being very much more hands on when it came to digital communications, had kept in touch with Flo wince Rodney Bay. Pookie is the woman who remembers birthdays, who sends messages, who maintains the web of human connection that I would probably let fray and snap like a poorly maintained cleat. When the birthday idea was touted she asked if Flo would like to join us for an evening with our Viking friends and we could make it a birthday party at the same time. She was delighted and said she would bring some silly spectacles. And so the night was arranged.

Everyone joined us on Sawasdeekat. Our catamaran, the floating home we bought in Cartagena in August 2021 with no experience, no knowledge of boat maintenance, and a dream that seemed to come from somewhere outside our own heads. She has carried us across the Mediterranean, past Gibraltar, Gran Canaria and Cap Verde. She crossed the Atlantic with us, a journey that still feels like something that happened to other people when I think about it too long. And now she hosted a birthday party in Bequia, her decks filled with people who had become friends across the water. Ed got to enjoy a rather unhealthy amount of birthday cake and I think we all had one glass of vino too many. There is something about cake on a boat that makes it taste better, perhaps the salt air, perhaps the rocking motion, perhaps simply the knowledge that someone made it in a galley that moves unpredictably.

Pookie cooked. Of course she cooked. She is Pookie. She is the woman who was runner up on MasterChef in the UK, series eighteen, a fact that people remember more clearly than she does sometimes. She has returned as a guest judge so many times that the producers probably keep a chair with her name on it. She is the woman who gets recognised in every country we visit, spotted in streets from Barcelona to Bridgetown by people who remember her face from television, who approach with shy smiles and stories about watching her cook, about the dishes she made, about the way she spoke about food like it mattered. She cooked watermelon with pork floss, Tom Kha Scallops, some vol au vents with Larb Goong (Salomon Roe) and some grilled pork with sticky rice - Thai food that had everyone at the anchorage making munching sounds that were not quite words, those involuntary expressions of pleasure that cross every language barrier. Watching her in the galley, I sometimes think she is the living avatar of everything I love about this journey: the bringing of one world into another, the alchemy of lemongrass and fish sauce transformed into welcome. We ate until we could eat no more, then we ate a little more, because Pookie had made extra and it would have been rude not to.

We eventually made tracks south again leaving with Jan and Miguel in tow as we made our way to Tobago Cays. We had also been here before on an earlier leg of our journey and returning felt like revisiting an old friend. There is a particular pleasure in returning to a place you have seen before, the quiet satisfaction of knowing the shape of the anchorage, the best place to drop the hook, the way the light falls on the water at different times of day. Tobago Cays is a collection of small islands ringed by coral reefs that create a natural swimming pool of astonishing clarity. The water is the colour of something you want to drink, turquoise and green and blue all at once, so clear you can see the turtles from the deck of your boat.

This time we decided to try the evening barbecue that the islanders from nearby Maryreau cook on the beach. No one lives on Tobago Cays itself, which gives the place a feeling of being borrowed from the ocean, a temporary arrangement of sand and rock that the sea could reclaim at any moment if it chose. They set up grills in the sand as the sun began its descent and the smell of cooking fish and chicken drifted across the anchorage like an invitation you could not refuse. We took our dinghy to shore, that little rubber boat that has carried us to so many beaches, and sat at a wooden table with our feet in the sand eating food that tasted like the Caribbean itself. Fresh grilled fish with butter, chicken marinated in something spicy and sweet, rice and peas cooked in coconut milk, plantains caramelised on the outside and soft within.

We almost felt like locals. We were not locals. We were two people on a boat with a ripped sail and a broken cleat and a questionable relationship with battery charging that sometimes felt almost draconian in its demands on our patience and our wallet. But for that evening we belonged to this place. We had earned our seat at the table, not through years of residence or family connections, but through the simple act of showing up, of being present, of sitting with our feet in the sand and eating food prepared by people who live their lives in rhythm with the tides.

The Tobago Cays are a protected marine park, a nursery for hawksbill turtles that glide through the clear water like thoughts you wish you could hold onto longer. We watched them surface near our boat the next morning, their ancient faces breaking the surface with the calm of creatures who have been doing this since before humans thought to put a cleat on a boat and expect it to hold.

Our final stop before our home port of Grenada was in Union Island. Grenada, the place we had landed following our Atlantic crossing, the island that had felt like the end of one journey and the beginning of another. But Union Island had something special in store for us.

Previously, whilst waiting for me to row back to the boat for a passcode, Pookie had met the manager of Tenuta Hotel in Chatham Bay. She has a way of meeting people, my wife. She smiles and people want to talk to her, want to know her story, want to share their own. When he had learnt about Pookie and her dishes he invited us to return and for her to suggest some menu choices for them. Before we knew it Pookie was back in their kitchen dreaming up some stunning dishes. Some local dignitaries and important folk on the island had been invited to a meal on the beach in the now hurriedly finished bar area. There is something wonderful about watching Pookie in her element. On the boat she is patient, learning the ropes, handling the lines with growing confidence. But in a kitchen she is transformed. She becomes the person the television cameras loved because she understands food not as fuel but as conversation, as connection, as love made edible.

What a fantastic event it was. Jan and Miguel joined in as Pookie, together with one of the hotel’s hosts and manager, had prepared a stunning meal. The dishes she created were Thai with Caribbean influences, a fusion that made sense in a way fusion rarely does. A green curry with local fish that had everyone asking for the recipe. A papaya salad that used unripe fruit from trees growing fifty metres from the beach. Sticky rice steamed in banana leaves, the smell of it drifting across the sand like a memory of Bangkok carried across the ocean. The local dignitaries and important folk ate and smiled and made those same wordless sounds we had heard on Sawasdeekat during Ed’s birthday. The owner said that once his beachside villa had been completed we would be very welcome guests at his pleasure. A visit we very much looked forward to.

We finally sailed south to Grenada and stayed in Prickly Bay. Here we met up once again with Ed and Flo yet again and went on a day trip with them to some waterfalls. Grenada is called the Spice Island for good reason. The air smells of nutmeg and cinnamon and clove, the scent of colonial history and agricultural abundance mingled together. The waterfalls we visited were the kind of places that tourists pay to see and locals swim in on hot afternoons, water falling from green heights into pools so cold they steal your breath.

Join us next time as we are invited onto their Hattaras for a four day holiday back to Tobago Cays. Ed and Flo have become more than fellow cruisers. They have become friends, the kind who appear in anchorages at the same time you do, whose boats you look for when you arrive somewhere new, whose company you seek out because it makes the journey richer. We will return to Tobago Cays not on our own boat with our ripped sail and our broken cleat, but on theirs, guests rather than hosts, a holiday within a holiday.

It seems the sea keeps breaking our boat. We keep fixing it and this is the rhythm. This is the life. The cleat will be replaced. The sail will be repaired again or perhaps replaced entirely if we decide to stop throwing good money after bad. There will be something else next week, some new failure, some fresh challenge that requires us to learn something we did not know we needed to learn. And despite the horrific bills, the moments of bafflement, the times we look at each other and ask what we were thinking when we bought a boat with no experience and decided to sail it around the world, I would not trade it for anything.