Hi Everyone!

Sometimes you get caught up thinking that what you did was a serious act. In our case, sailing across the Atlantic felt serious. But then, here we were on our modern Quest, our gorgeous girl plastic-fantastic and filled with instruments that whir and ping. With most of these instruments I feel like that African tribesman in the movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy. A glass Coke bottle is chucked out of a passing plane, the tribesman finds it and it completely changes the tribes' lives even though they don't understand what the bottle is actually for. They make music with it, pray to it and fight over it, before declaring it's a bad, bad thing and decide to get rid of it. A young Gerard Depardieu is in the second half of the movie but this part always fades into the back of my memory. God, maybe I've read the news too much over the past days but this 1980's movie suddenly seems Brexit-like right now. Maybe we could use Gerard for happy EU negotiations somehow? Don't tell Jack though. If he has to explain our instruments to me one more time, I think his head might actually explode. Never mind the hooter on Depardieu.

During our first week at the boatyard, we discovered Ben. He runs the woodwork section and is from Devon. His wife, Philippa is also British and also guilty, self-confessed about reading too much news lately. They came across the Atlantic on their boat, Dhanu a year before we did but they did it with two very small children. While had our girls who could entertain themselves with an electronic pile of audiobooks, John (don't ask :) and a dog who wouldn't pee, their crew was a 5 months-old Alfi and a 2 year-old Olive. Dhaka herself is made totally of wood, bathroom-less, almost completely electrically unburdened including no fridge or navigation gear (I still gasp to myself in horror at that bit), has a mast made of Oregon pine and amongst other amazing adaptations like a little underwater porthole which enables Ben and his family to get the take on all the underwater gossip, also has an actual piece of the Cutty Sark incorporated into her floor. Surely this goes to show that not all Polish are bad since Ben helped to re-build the Cutty Sark in Greenwich after that Polish cleaner accidentally burned her down. Do I remember correctly that he or she left the vacuum cleaner on? There, that'll stop all that ragging on the Polish! Joke. Well, sort of. I feel I need to clarify this last point in case Quest starts getting daubed with graffiti too. In which case, I'd say, ‘The crazy Poles were 100% in the war too and all we got was stinky Communism for almost 50 years after it ended. You guys got Maggie Thatcher.' The Cutty Sark was just slightly bad luck. Except of course, if you're Ben. 

Ben has a Steve Buscemi look about him; for me the same wide and googly eyes, though Delphine thinks he looks more like the dwarf who's in Adam Sandler's Pixels. She happily says, 'Hi, Dwarf,' whenever she sees him which leads me to think that if cruising has done anything, it's got rid of any last fragments of shy genes being expressed from these girls. Ha! Because those kids had real confidence issues before. In fact, Ben has sailed the Atlantic twice before he'd sailed it with his young family, including once in Dhanu, who was engine-less at the time. It took him 63 days just to get from the Caribbean to the Azores, at one stage becoming becalmed in the Sargasso Sea. 'I love reading my log at the time,' he says. 'It says 10 miles one day, 15 the next.' 'Did you have enough food?' I ask. He smiles. 'I had a large pile of rice and vitamin tablets.' Vitamin tablets, I think! Brilliant.

He crossed the Atlantic to Brazil too on an even smaller boat, 26 feet, with two other guys. They trailed a rope from the stern every afternoon to cool down, taking turns getting in the ocean and holding on. One day, Ben was holding on and being pulled when the wind gusted, the boat lurched and his shoulder dislocated. For two days his friends tried unsuccessfully to relocate it. They still had about two weeks left in their crossing and knew in Ben's injured, dislocated state that he wouldn't make it. Seeking medical help, they managed to get in touch with a huge passing tanker. The tanker had no medical crew but a comprehensive medical manual and said it would drop it to them if they could get alongside. It took them hours to get alongside, the tanker itself taking four hours just to slow down, but eventually they managed it in the middle of the night and aided by a huge ship's searchlight beamed on them, the crew threw down a massive heaving line with a bag on the end. In the bag was the photocopied pages of the manual on how to relocate a shoulder. Ben said his mates pinned him down to do it but it was so painful he hit them off with his good arm, giving one of his friends a nose bleed before he passed out. When he woke up he discovered his shoulder had gone back into the joint. It had done so naturally in his sleep! They carried on to Brazil, though I think they dropped the rope-pulling sessions after that.

When he tells this story with his wide, googly eyes, we listen, silent and open-mouthed. Jack says then that he likes to call tankers on the VHF to make sure they can see us. Ben says it's always a problem for him too because radar doesn't pick up wood so well. 'Always ask the tankers for ice,' he finishes with a slightly maniacal smile. Even more Steve Buscemi. 'Sometimes they'll drop it off in the water and you pick up a bag of ice and it's the best thing in the world.' He shakes his head then and gazes at Olive who's now 4 and Alfi (short for the wonderful name, Alfreda) who's 2. During our days in the boatyard, I watch his brown twiggy legs leading him around and think of tiny, floating bags of ice in the ocean.

This is Dhanu in her own words: http://philippaodonnell.wordpress.com/

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx