As is almost tradition now I have taken to hiding a couple of words in these blogs like a lookout spotting landmarks from the crow's nest, and I invite you to keep your eyes peeled for them as you read. This week’s are “Jaunty” and “Tantara”.

You know those moments when you make a decision that feels so obviously right that you wonder why you didn't make it sooner? Inviting my mother to join us on Sawasdeekat was one of those moments. She had just lost my father, the man she had turned to and relied upon for almost all her adult life. A strong woman who valued family above all else had now lost the very person that made that family real.

I could picture her evenings too clearly. The house that had once hummed with shared rituals would now fall silent around her. The chair next to hers would stay empty. No amount of well-meaning visitors could fill that particular void. So I offered her something different. Something absurd, really. The chance to sail through the Caribbean on a catamaran with her son and his Thai chef wife, both utterly clueless about anything that floats, embarking on a plan so jauntily optimistic that it bordered on the delusional.

She said yes.

There was just one problem. The delayed return back to the boat in Trinidad had cost us two months of sailing season. The repair to the furler in Martinique had cost us another fortnight. And now we had been delayed yet again by the Victron repair in St Maarten and then the tragedy of a death in the family. It was early April and sailing season time was running out like sand through a fist.

My mother, at 82, had never been on a boat before. I worried how she might feel about sailing. My preferred plan was to move the boat as close to the Bahamas as possible and then slowly, gracefully meander through the islands, sipping wine and eating lovely foods. That utopian dream of relaxation had one significant flaw. Sawasdeekat was currently in St Maarten being repaired and that is 600+ miles of hard sailing to reach the Bahamas.

I decided to enlist the help of my best friend Paul, who you may remember had helped me sail Sawasdeekat from Almeria to Gibraltar back in Blog 042. This would free up Pookie to accompany my mother through the modern hell that is airline transfers and make sure she met us.

Sadly Paul could not get the time off work. And so my next idea was to solo sail Sawasdeekat past the BVI islands and Puerto Rico to the Dominican Republic where Pookie and my mother could join us.

It couldn't be too hard, could it?

Pookie was not in favour of the idea at all. My answer was OK, I had never sailed solo. But then again I had never sailed at all before we bought our boat. I would do it.

And then I wouldn't.

For during this period of negotiation I managed to badly twist my knee on a grassy verge whilst jogging to work. A hospital visit later and it was confirmed that I had ripped my medial and damaged my meniscus. Strange, because I never even knew I had them. I was now like a proverbial Captain Hook and Solo sailing was now all but impossible.

So my mother decided to come with us to St Maarten and she would sail with us. I wasn’t keen on the idea due to the distance but before I knew it the flight was booked and my mum was learning how to climb over the hand rails to get into our boat.

St Maarten is a peculiar place. It is the smallest landmass in the world shared by two independent states, the French territory of Saint-Martin and the Dutch territory of Sint Maarten. Christopher Columbus sighted the island on November 11, 1493, and named it in honour of St Martin of Tours, whose feast day it was. Salt was a key resource for centuries, a scarce commodity in Europe that kept goods preserved on long voyages.

I thought about that salt as I paid the horrendous bill that meant we now had more batteries, a new inverter and a new alternator, and I wondered if the Spanish and Dutch who had fought over this island three centuries ago, their cannons sounding a tantara across the bay, could have ever imagined a man paying thousands of euros for the privilege of getting a kettle to work.

We made the most of our three days there. Pookie cooked delicious food and shopped for more ingredients. My mum went swimming at a nearby beach and lay in the sun, and I broke my small toe (if it wasn’t a break it was certainly very painful, black and bruised).

I used those three days in St Maarten to also pay someone to roll up our folded code zero and hoist it back in its rightful place. My broken toe wouldn't allow me the strength to do it, I told myself. In reality I didn't actually know how to do it as I had never done it before. Anyway the code zero that had been folded away since Christmas and Blog 063 was now back up on its furler courtesy of two people from a nearby sailmakers.

Now the marina was considered too dirty to swim and clean the hull of the boat and so before our planned leave we decided to take it into the nearby bay. Now I seem to have lost the photo of the hull that I took but if you can imagine a vibrant coral, home to fish, crabs and barnacles then you are not far different from what our hull looked like after two months in a warm marina environment.

We said goodbye to Miguel, filled up with fuel for $309 and then motored into Simsons Bay to clean the water inlets of the engines before going out the gate at 4pm. Once in the bay, my plans to spend a few hours in the water cleaning the hull were immediately scuppered by the fact that try as we might the anchor windlass would not lower the anchor. We promptly returned to the marina where the electrician helped us find the fault.

The following day after many hours more by the electrician checking systems, charging the batteries, checking and calibrating the new inverter and dynamo against the engine we finally left the bay at 4pm. St Maarten had seemed determined to keep us there forever and so, once under the lifting bridge I decided we may as well carry on to the British Virgin Islands.

We put the sails up and the strong westerly winds blew us along. At a snail's pace. The hull, still covered in three inches of coral, just refused to go through the water.

This decision to push on turned out to be the worst decision ever.

Sailing dead downwind in 15 knots we only made three to five knots for the first two hours. The wind was strong and so to get more speed from the boat we hoisted the Code zero. The wind picked up even more and then even more. By now it was blowing 24+ knots and we were still only making six knots. We decided it would be too much for our sail and so we began trying to roll it in.

But we had problems winding it up. It seemed that when hoisting it, the men had not put enough turns of rope on the furler and so with the wind now strong, it didn't seem to matter which way we turned the boat we ran out of rope. It flagged, flogged and ripped again and had to be brought down onto the deck yet again. It was very apparent that this would be the last time we would attempt to sail with it. The people raising it onto its furler had already said it looked like a "training" sail. Well, we are clearly so bad at this that it didn't survive our lesson 101.

With winds howling and me shouting at Pook to pull this rope, let that one out and get me something to tie this damn thing up, my mum's maiden voyage on a boat was not going well.

I decided to turn back and get in the lee of the island and so put both engines on and we limped back to St Martin. The waves rocked the boat hard as the engines strained against the water, dragging its coral covered hulls laboriously through the water. My mum, bless her, felt sea sick and stood leaning against the side of her bed trying to work out which way her stomach was. Pookie was scared, tired and also sick and I was pissed off. Deciding to motor back to land was one thing but now with the 15 to 20 knot wind on our face and the water against us we only managed to make two to three knots and sometimes, made as little as 0.3 of a knot.

It was the early hours of the morning when I finally dropped anchor in the bay. To cap it all the starboard engine kept cutting out when I asked it to go in reverse. We are used to bad sailing days but if there was one day I needed to make a good impression it was that and we failed horribly - I think I have put my mum off sailing for life.

The following morning I jumped in the water and using my hookah system that we had bought in Trinidad I was able to clean the hull successfully. I made sure there was no debris around the intakes and on our third attempt we were finally able to say goodbye to St Maarten.

The British Virgin Islands lay ahead of us, a place that more bareboat charter yachts call home than anywhere else in the world. Approximately 600 charter vessels operate out of Tortola and Virgin Gorda. The Sir Francis Drake Channel between the main islands offers sheltered, wind-consistent waters with anchorages on virtually every shore.

My mother, at 82, had survived her first night at sea. She had been sea sick, scared and bewildered. But she was also a strong woman who had just lost the love of her life and had chosen to get on a boat with her son and his wife and sail into the unknown.

And I had chosen to bring her.