Stuart MacDonald - The Long Way Home

Seoul, South Korea, January 2009. It was away below freezing and a biting wind blew the snow into my face when I walked across Guanguam Square from the apartment towards my office. My left arm began to acheI was working myself into the ground, running a very tough project and making good money but I was mentally exhausted. I had had enough.

Eighteen months of hard work, and a certain amount of planning later, I stepped off a bus in Brest, into the wind and the drizzle and set off down the marina breakwater towards my boat, Beyond. I had a back pack, a hold-all filled with books, a long plastic bag containing my new boom tent and a few bits of wood from the shed at home, which I thought might be useful. My arms were aching and I had to leave the plastic bag on the pontoon, but I was within sight of the boat which was lying peacefully where I had left her. It was wet and grey outside, but dry and tidy down below. I dumped what I had and went back for the bag. With everything on board, I sat down and drew breath. The boat was about as ready as I could make her, all the domestic arrangements were in place at home, and there was nothing, apart from the present poor weather, to stop me going wherever I wanted for as long as I cared to wander. I put the kettle on. As a first step into the future it was hardly momentous but all journeys have to start somewhere.

Many years before as a young seaman I had dreamt of doing an Atlantic circuit and at one stage I had owned a small cruising boat capable of it, complete with the then obligatory paraffin stove, oil lamps and twin headsails. But I got shanghaied on a Glasgow tramp and by the time I got back to Scotland after fourteen months of hauling coal and phosphate round the Pacific I had missed the window. Somehow after that life got in the way, the boat went and the long cruise plans went with it. Now, forty years on, I had a modest pension, chronic high blood pressure, and apart from two wonderful children, now grown up, there was nothing to keep me at home. I was finally ready to go. I hung suspended between the world of work, which I was leaving, and the world of wandering, which I was joining. I had spent nearly fifty years doing what I thought I ought to do, and now I could pretty much do what I wanted. It was an odd feeling, like an animal in a zoo might feel after years of captivity when someone leaves the door open and the chance to roam presents itself.

I had built quite a collection of books about yacht cruising over the years of dreaming and I had brought some of them with me, the faded dates inside their covers spanning over forty years. Like me they had moved afloat, and would be setting off on the very kind of journey their authors had written about. The old classics by ground breaking sailors like Harry Pidgeon, Hiscock, Slocum and Moitessier sat a dignified distance from the more up to date volumes, with their talk of satellite communication, essential medicines and the minimum amp hour capacity you need to run your freezer. Times had changed. Beyond is a good compromise between past and present, and I had kept everything as simple as possible and she would probably be regarded as Spartan by todays American authors; with no freezer, water maker or air conditioning. How would I get by? I would soon find out.

I was all in favour of traditional seafaring skills and I had spent years navigating merchant ships with a sextant, but I didnt have one anymore and in a way I regretted it. I had sold it years ago, when car, home and family had taken care of all my disposable income and I wanted some new sails for my dinghy. You do what seems right at the time. Now I couldnt afford one. When you can buy a hand held GPS and a clutch of AA batteries for a third of the price, electronic back up seemed the way to go and many ships have been lost because they couldnt get a sight. Life moves on. Naval surgeons used to saw the limbs off wounded seamen without any anaesthetic and dip the stumps in hot tar, but that doesnt mean its still the right way to do it.

Back home the shed had been painted, the little garden beaten into submission and the house closed up. Perhaps most liberating of all, I had sold the car. I had squeezed enough medication out of the doctor to last a good few months and there was not really much else I could think of to do. I could go on preparing for ever and never get away, but you cant make a twenty year old boat into a new one even if you had the cash, or a sixty four year old solo sailor into a teenager, and I felt sure a few things would go wrong with both of us along the way. When people asked how long I was going for, I said, truthfully, that I didnt know, but the real answer was that I would keep going until I had had enough, or couldnt handle the sailing anymore. I might get sick of the whole concept after a few months, but I felt I had to find out.

I had a loose plan to follow the usual route across Biscay and down the Spanish coast then over to Madeira, the Canaries and the West Indies. Beyond that, I had only a vague idea of where I would end up and I thought that if I found somewhere I really liked I would stay a while, seasonal weather permitting. The Pacific had always fascinated me, but the problem of getting through the Panama Canal on my own worried me and I thought no more about it for a while. I would just let things take their course.

I had left the Clyde in early May and cruised down to Plymouth for the two handed Round Britain and Ireland race, one of the great classics of short-handed racing. My co skipper Angus and I got round in one piece, but it was hard going. With a combined crew age of 126, we lacked the stamina of most entrants, and their grasp of technology, when all that seemed to matter was getting the internet weather files downloaded and into whatever performance management programme was loaded onto their boats PC. At every stopover the talk had been of Grib files, optimum angles and polars and in some way it seemed to me that shorthanded distance racing had almost become a computer game. Angus and I had felt out of it, two old farts who still listened to the shipping forecast. I was glad to be doing no more racing.

A couple of weeks in the Yealm and in Falmouth followed. Falmouth is still the jumping off point for many would-be long distance cruisers and there were quite a few boats clearly intending to do the same as I was. The boats in the anchorage were a mixture of upmarket, generally immaculate heavy displacement cruisers, middle of the road boats like mine, and some distinctly rough looking efforts. Further up towards Penryn lay a sorry collection of almost derelict craft, the department of broken dreams.

The owners seemed to span a similar range of apparent conditions and, I assumed, prosperity. I spotted one gent polishing his winches with a toothbrush, whilst his immaculately clad wife sat in the cockpit reading a magazine and eating chocolates. From one of the owners at the other end of the spectrum I got some advice on where the best scrappy was to get a used alternator.

I left Falmouth one July evening and enjoyed an easy crossing to Brittany, with the Monitor doing all the work, and very little shipping to worry about. My brother Iain came along, but found that night channel crossings were not his forte; spending most of the trip in his bunk then emerging about breakfast time, spirits restored by the sight of the French coast.

Finally here I was, about to set off on a new life. There was nothing to hold me back. With the right forecast I had no excuse not to head off across the Bay of Biscay to Spain. I had no idea when or where it would all end, but I had put Glasgow on the stern so that I wouldnt forget where I started from and I hoped that perhaps a few people would see that and stop and say hello.