 Breakfast today is Mr. Thompson. Can you see that? Can you see that? Go on, go on! Hello! Look at that. You know what that is? Yeah, I know that's the red answer. That's wind! It's wind in my sails! Wind! It's 8 o'clock Zulu on Friday the 12th. of July and I managed to drift for about 14 hours and travelled about 6 nautical miles just on the tide, on the current in 14 hours just waiting for the wind and I mean that's substantial that's 9 knots so that's not that's not just here today gone tomorrow I was expecting it to be from the west and this is from the north so maybe it's going to swing round or maybe I'm deluded Look Dave, you're going sailing hooray finally No you're fucking not No you're fucking not Yeah there you go off we go sailing 12th of July 11.30 lunchtime Zulu, Zulu lunch I wonder what Zulu's have for lunch Elephants probably, how do you eat them though? One mouthful at a time Yeah I'm slowly losing my mind still waiting for the wind to push in and things have got so bad that based on a whim and a suggestion from a friend over the internet I've shaved my bloody beard off Wind is testing my patience today I'm not kidding you I'm howling I'm howling at the moon here this is driving me crazy It's now 20 past 3 and we're still waiting for the wind to kick in I'm going to assume that's the front I've been waiting for for 2 days and behind it is the westerly wind that's going to take me through the Straits of Gibraltar Of course I've made assumptions before they made an ass out of me and they out of me 2 days now wasted but 2 days drifting in the Bay of Cadiz still the music's good Parker and Miles Davis it's lobster pots a lot of them if I was cheeky I'd whip over another one up but I'm not cheeky that's someone's living there rather than my supper as you can see we're making great progress that's what 2 knots looks like the chart station the hub of our operation here here we can see we have a radio and over here we have some switches I will eventually get round to fit in the last one but you know I'm kind of getting used to it like that now here's our electrical monitoring system we have 95% will to live remaining which is good it's very high it's been much lower over the last few days and down here we can see the chart for the next part of our journey we're currently over here can you see that I don't know you're tucked between my bosoms did I tell you that I guess you can see that we're currently over here and we are heading for here Tarifa and we're going to go over here which is Trafalgar good place for a battle we shall be coming up along not too close up along here to here Cabo de Gata Cape of the cat I don't know it's all Spanish to me so that will be our next leg in the journey assuming that we that the will to live meter doesn't get too low there are many places along the way which we could stop in for a shag and a beer Malaga where was that other nice place Alamira up here and there's other smaller marinas as well and we're never very far off the coast now look here's a little trick get some of these put them on a main jobber stretch them out to something comfortable I'm going to go there that's 30 or 30 miles in this area of the world so if I stick that on Tarifa there I can go it's not going to be straight because my boat doesn't go straight so that's 30 60 sliding all over the place 90 120 there's a mountain there 150 just short of 180 so about 170 170 nautical miles from here to here and at no point am I more than 30 miles offshore coastal passage 30 miles is small fry so yeah there's going to be lots of temptation to whip into somewhere and have a cold beer and a proper shower but I'm going to press along the coast as long as my milk and cigarettes hold out yeah it's 072 is the is the course now if you're being all fancy pants you might try and find some tidal atlases and calculate how many hours it's going to take you to do 178 doofus it's about two days for me the way things are going well let's say two days so 48 hours and then you look at the tide here here here here here here here here here here the tidal flow you note them all down and then you start there and then you do the tide one hour here one hour there one hour there and you go like in a random until you ended up with a point and then you know your speed of your boat and then you know how many how many hours you're going to go at that speed so you need to line that long and you draw that line that long until it crosses the original course line you draw a line on course from here to here so from all of the tidal correction you'll end up somewhere I mean you could end up up here you could end up down there it's two days the tides are going to basically cancel themselves out anyway so you'll probably end up right there but then you draw your line of how far you can go and wherever that intercepts the original course line the end of that line intercepts it could be before could be after doesn't matter then this would be the course to steer in order to achieve this course along the along the water and so of course you have to be a little bit aware because if you start off steering this course that you've calculated from here you run aground so it's not always appropriate to do that but yeah that's how you do like a course to steer and then there's lights all the way along here and what I like about these charts is when they when they show you the lights they give you the details of the lights you know how many flashes, how many seconds how many miles away you should be able to see it and so you could basically just navigate via these lights many of these I'll be too far off to see but if I was closer I'd be able to see the lights keep a track on roughly where I am and then I can take bearings, time bearing and work out where I am the whole time or I can look on there because that's connected to a GPS receiver which is WAAS enabled wide area augmentation system well SBAS to give it its proper name so space based augmentation system which means that this position here is accurate to about 5 meters up here here is my tracking device this is very good by the way oh it's flashing, got a message oh no you're not looking at it you're looking at it now so this is my tracker, my Garmin tracker again this is SBAS enabled accurate to about 3 meters even tells you on here how accurate it is the only problem is like so somewhere on here there's a location location, location, location there you go accuracy plus or minus 2 meters elevation minus 10 meters I'm a submarine no I'm not a submarine that's based on a sphere which is a theoretical sphere so you can be above and below that all the time and that's my latin long so I can do it this way and know exactly where I am or I can use the lights and I can take that position from up there that position from up there framing and I could draw a little cross on the chart down there and keep doing that, it's rather tedious makes a mess of your chart or just get exactly the same chart on your iPad this is exactly the same chart you see it's me mini me and link that to your very accurate I don't know if you can see this so you link this to your very accurate Garmin and then you've got you on there all the time where you are where you going doofadoof so it's super easy to use this equipment now what I've got effectively is with the Garmin and the iPad a completely independent navigation system compared to the boat which has its own GPS receiver and instrumentation on top of that I've got the paper charts in a bit of old fashioned adding and subtracting to do that and for my Garmin and iPad solution to make it really truly independent because of course it needs electricity electricity is coming from the boat battery ah not necessarily you see here we have Voltaic something I can't remember which one it is called that's a 10 watt solar panel with a big battery in there with a USB connector so I can charge the iPad and the Garmin from their own independent solar power source so if I did end up in the dingy by the way it might as well show you everything now oh no I'm revealing all the secrets so there's my E-PURB here is my what do you call that life raft there's some some flares in there so E-PURB life raft and flares so handheld radio to go with it and here this would be my emergency water supply if I did have to abandon so I started off with 25 litres in there but now that I'm so close to land I'm 30 miles from land basically I don't need to have any emergency water anymore and this is a lot sweeter to drink than the water that's in the main tank on the boat so this is my drinking water for just drinking water now there's the stuff in there the stuff in there this is where I keep the ropes and stuff over here is Mr Wu's Chinese Laundry everything on a boat gets wet because of the dew the morning and the evening dew and it's soaking inside and out because it's not sealed and it's not insulated very well so just everything gets wet and it's inevitable unless you keep it in sealed bags which I should have done but I was expecting this and this is my current bunk with the blackout shades poured out, starboard home and all that this is to keep the sun from blaring in here I would put one over this window as well but there is a slight fire hazard of putting a plastic bag over this particular window so that one has to stay open there's other things like I cut something that's not going to catch fire and stick it on there as well but you know, it's nice to have a look out while you're waiting for the kettle to boil that's another thing when the kettle boils fills the whole boat full of steam steam and cool air condenses more wetness, water everywhere all these kind of considerations what else? I'm giving you the full tour of my boat now do do do do do do do do I wish I knew the music from Steve Zeezu when he does the tour of the boat storage for rubbish you're going to love this this is the the four cabin now normally on modern boats this is like a posh little double bunk blah blah blah well I could have a double bunk in here I got mattress blah blah but as you can see this is the ocean voyaging so this is storage storage behind there this is up because behind there I've put my dinghy that's the dinghy which is massive well it's not a big dinghy but it doesn't fold down very small, it weighs 30 kilos it's a pain in the ass I'm thinking of just getting a little inflatable kayak instead and over here we've got rubbish this is all rubbish in here I haven't been throwing it overboard I've been collecting my rubbish in here this is the laundry so these are clothes that aren't really viable anymore because they don't have to be clean to be viable I can tell you and then sails that's the symmetrical spinnaker this is the storm jib there's another full genoa up there which I'm never going to use but I got it in case I need it and of course right now the asymmetric is flying the normal rolled it's not flying very well but that's because there's about 3 knots of wind not even enough to inflate that super lightweight material oh and now the business end the heads completely not glamorous but fully functional I don't want to lift up the lid just in case there we go it's actually fine sometimes this is the drainage outlet pipe goes up here, over there, down there through that sea cop there which is closed at the moment I like to have it closed when I'm at sea except when I'm flushing and when you close it sometimes whatever's in this pipe if the sea's rough feeds back into the toilet I flush enough but inevitably there is a bit of this and that yeah so this is like a 1920s design sea toilet they cost about 5 grand to buy new, you can still buy them new frankly I'm seriously thinking of replacing it with something more modern but it looks you know, it's in keeping with the boat so and I've got a water this is from the fresh water tank here but washing your hands in this crappy sink like I'm ever going to use that and you see it drains drains down that pipe overboard so it's all good but I mean really I'm never going to use it I'm going to take it off I was going to take it off during this journey but then I realised if I take it off I've just got to put it somewhere until I get somewhere and so I might as well just leave it here it's a convenient place for it to be until I want to throw in the bin but yeah so probably do some work on this area probably up here we've got a unique wiring scheme whereby I have disconnected the spreader running light, steaming light because it normally is connected here and is powered by the same power supply that powers the port, starboard and rear nav lights deck level nav lights and that's fine because they're the ones I use when I am steaming under power and when you're doing that you need to have a white light as well however, comma my aft navigation light has failed it's the white light at the back so and it's the cabling that's failed the bulb checked everything I know specifically which bit of the cabling has failed but I can't get to it I tried so, improvise, overcome what I've got is I've got an anchor light at the top of my mast the anchor light shines in all directions including the aft portion that that guy would normally do if I was steaming and the forward portion that the steaming light would do so, by using the anchor light and just the port and starboard nav lights I meet the requirements for navigation lights but I wouldn't do if the spreader was coming on as well because then I'd have two white lights and that would confuse the hell out of everyone including myself so I had to disconnect the spreader light in order to use the anchor light for steaming when required that was boring Dave no one's going to get to the end of that one