The idea

Michael and Kevin from the McLoughlin Boat Company hadn’t been gone to lunch for five minutes before the phone rang. I tore myself away from the engine to answer it. Even then, I wasn’t really interested in hearing who was on the other end.

The engine was back – and what an engine. The rusty lump of recalcitrant machinery which might stop with a “clonk” at any moment with (and wouldn’t go in reverse at all), was now transformed into a gleaming blue work of art – freshly painted, with new hoses and belts, a new water pump (because why not?) A new heat-exchanger, for heaven’s sake…

It took me a while to realise that it was the engine the man on the phone was talking about. This was Stephen Aldridge from A R Peachment, the UK distributor for Nanni marine diesels. He used to work in the parts department. I remembered him vaguely from when I called for advice after wrecking the impeller housing or when I couldn’t find the drain plug. Now he was in the sales department and wanted to know why I had just ordered the new heat-exchanger – after all, it’s not something you do every day, not at £1,584.93 (plus shipping, plus VAT).

He was remarkably sympathetic considering the engine had spent three years disconnected from the anode so that the block itself had become an anode and had been wasting away most efficiently…

But he wasn’t so happy to hear that it was all now back together and just needed to be checked for alignment and get hooked up to the fuel line and exhaust BECAUSE HE WAS CALLING TO SEE IF HE COULD HELP ME OUT WITH A NEW ENGINE.

A R Peachment Ltd recognised I was now an “influencer”. The company would be proud to be associated with the oldmansailing brand.

I stopped gazing at the engine and pinched myself.

This was big league stuff. Stephen had looked online to see how many followers I had (107,000 on Instagram alone). And don’t forget the oldmansailing Book Club on YouTube…

We reminisced a bit, and he went away grumbling that he should have been quicker in realising what was going on. He’d have a think and might get back to me – meanwhile, if I did need a new engine anytime…

I sat there with the phone in my hand, doing a bit of thinking, too. If someone was prepared to give me a new engine (because that was very much what it sounded like), maybe this “influencer” thing might help with paying the McLoughlin Boat Company bills. I paid for the first week’s work, but – like Woody Allen: “I’m not liquid or something…”

Book sales are doing well – June was like Christmas, but Amazon pays a month in arrears. What I need is a car boot sale (a lazarette sale?) Surely somebody wants a Tesco bag-for-life full of 8mm line (none of it quite long enough to do anything useful). I have a coffee grinder I’ve been carrying around since Santa Marta: It would be great on a decent-sized kitchen worktop.

And so, I went back to editing The Voyage #4: Falmouth to Grenada (by way of a slight detour into the South Atlantic). A new book always sells well. It’s just inconvenient that you have to finish writing it first.

Not that this is exactly a “new” book. I finished it six months ago - wrote it as I was going along. Now I’m going through it word by word (all 123,520 of them), transforming it from a series of urgent, wonderfully evocative episodes of grief, wonder, boredom, excitement (and the rest) into something people read on the train.

Actually, I prefer it as episodes of grief, wonder – even boredom.

And that’s how I came up with the idea for The Full Ocean Experience. Now that I’ve got Starlink, I can publish those daily entries in real time – and think how much more exciting it will be for people to read about the rip in the mainsail, the mung beans escaping or the unidentified bolt in the scuppers without knowing that I did in fact survive to tell the rest of the tale.

So, I floated the idea in a 1minute 59second video: “Let me know what you think,” I asked the 107,000 followers. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The idea was simple enough: A daily diary of The Full Ocean Experience. I can start on Friday when I set off for Poole (not exactly an Ocean Experience, just 388 miles across the Celtic Sea and up the English Channel, but who’s going to nitpick?)

It’ll take four days, so that includes Sunday when I can do a Sunday Webinar on YouTube Live – people can type their questions into the chat. I can wave the iPad around the forecasted easterly Force six on the nose. £5 a month sounds about right for 30,000 words and two hours of video – don’t want to get greedy or people will start cancelling when the relentless pace of excitement dwindles into a Doldrums sunset.

And I’m going to have to pay the yard bill or they won’t put me back in the water, so I have to give people something now.

This is it.

And tomorrow, of course. Nobody’s going to sign up to £5 a month if it only lasts one day. I can probably get a thousand words out of the engine coolant – why can’t they agree on the colour? I could resurrect the story of pouring it into the oil filler by mistake, trying to suck it out and ending up in casualty asking if I’d poisoned myself…

Until tomorrow.

Goodbye.