Porto Santo, Madeira

Left San Adrián on Wednesday afternoon, right after a storm low had passed through and caused havoc in the marina — a big motoryacht with a lot of windage tore its cleat clean off the pontoon and swung back and forth dangerously until four of us got it back under control. Once things had settled we slipped the lines, fuelled up across the ría at Bouzas, and set sail for Madeira.

We headed mostly southwest through the first night rather than straight down the coast: the Nortada, the Portuguese trade wind, was forecast to gust up to 35 knots inshore where it accelerates around the northwest corner of Spain. Once clear of the worst of it we turned south-southwest, running downwind with the sails goose-winged out either side.

Strong trades and large seas for the first two days, calming down a little after that — all in all five days of good sailing, dead downwind for most of it, with the occasional collapse of the sail when a big wave took the tension out of it. Footsie Blue was flying.

Clear skies most nights and more shooting stars than we could count. Further south we found ourselves surrounded by bioluminescent plankton, a magical sight combined with the stars overhead. Doing a passage like this two-handed means endless four-hour shifts on repeat — eat, sleep, sail, repeat, slipping in and out of consciousness at set intervals.

The gear got a proper first test. Running dead downwind with the kicker cranked in hard to hold the boom down, the mainsail was generating a lot of upward force on it — and the shackle holding the mainsail clew turned out to be the thing that gave way under it, twice. The first time was around 3am in the dead of night: a loud bang, and the mainsail left flogging wildly until we got it back under control. Rather than work out why it had actually failed, we just fitted a new shackle — which promptly blew again the very next day. The new offshore liferaft on the pushpit rail held up well against the large following seas, and the new Starlink dish worked perfectly throughout. The old lead-acid batteries, though, are slowly dying: we had to run the engine to juice them back up, and the fridge got warmer the further south we got. Time to install the lithium batteries that have just arrived.

A massive pod of dolphins came to play around the boat, a few lone birds hitched a ride on the boom, and there was no shortage of cargo ships and tankers heading to and from the Strait of Gibraltar. Where we used to flinch even when we were the stand-on vessel, this time we held our course against a 260 m cargo ship bound for New York. Ten minutes before a closest point of approach of 150 m, she altered 10 degrees to pass behind us. Phew.