All’s well that ends swell

I knew I was cutting it fine when I signed up for the delivery trip of a Lagoon 45 from the Grande Canarias to the Caribbean; I was hoping to make the 2500 Nm journey starting in mid-November and be back in Stockholm for Xmas. It seemed feasible. Although the initial leg would need to be southwest towards Cape Verde, the usually reliable November east Trade Wind should provide a comfortable following wind and sea for the rest of the crossing and get me to Barbados in time to catch a flight home for Xmas. The hurricane season had ended; what could go wrong? Albeit we were in the times of COVID, this was not like Love in the Time of Cholera and I trusted the skipper’s boat preparation. It was up to me to get a PCR test for COVID before we departed Las Palmas. But what use was a test if the standard requirement on landing is that it should not be more than 72 hours old? That is hard to satisfy when you are four weeks at sea. This would prove to be problematic!

Haiku for my family

Under a waxing moon on a gentle sea on the first night out, COVID 19 could not have been further from my thoughts. There were many more baffling things about crossing the great expanse of the Atlantic which were troubling me. The paramount question was why was I doing this? I