We enjoyed eleven days at St. Helena and found the island to be a very welcoming stopover, echoing the times when the sailors who manned the East Indiamen were royally entertained and given the chance to recover their health. Yachts were arriving and departing almost every day, and generally there were ten or more on the moorings at any one time, most of which we were acquainted with already. It would have been difficult to anchor due to the depth, so we all appreciated the availability of reliable moorings. There are twenty five especially for visitors, well engineered and laid within the last couple of years. The round, cheese-shaped buoys are big enough to stand on but soft enough not to damage the topsides as they jostled together in the swell. Usually it was very peaceful, but, like any open roadstead, life on board occasionally became uncomfortable. One day, the wind sent gusty downdrafts from over the cliffs with showers of rain, leading to a disturbed night as "Egret" pitched and rolled and bumped against the buoy.

Most of us decided that the ferry was worth the £1 a trip fare, as landing at the quay from a dinghy would have been tricky due to the perpetual swell. It would also have been necessary to lay a stern anchor to hold the dinghy off the quay, or else man-handle it onto the shore. The ferry boat coxswains removed the worry as they are very skilled at holding station alongside the quay while you leap on or off with the aid of a rope hanging from an overhead metal frame. During the ride ashore one morning, the coxswain pointed out a ghostly shape just beneath us. It was a whale shark, which can reach 15m long and weigh 30 tons - the largest species of fish in the world that people come from far and wide to see. Thankfully they are harmless to humans, as they are filter feeders of plankton and tiny fish. We felt safe enough to swim and to dive with snorkels to clean the barnacles off the bottom of our boat.

The St. Helena Yacht Club occupies one of the quaint, blue-and-white painted stone buildings built against the cliffs on the quay. On the wall outside is an ambiguous sign commanding: "Alcohol must be consumed between the yacht club and the bollards". Disappointingly we never saw the clubhouse open, but there were decent toilets, hot showers and laundry sinks in the building next door that we could use. We could also fill water cans there, obtain diesel from 'Solomon's' on the quay and have gas bottles filled by the 'Queen Elizabeth' store. For internet, one is reliant on wi-fi outlets for the monopoly communications company, which provides one of the most expensive and slowest services in the world. There isn't even a mobile phone network on St. Helena - amazing when you are aware of the good service provided at many, far less developed, islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

One wouldn't want to rely on doing much provisioning at St. Helena as prices are on the high side due to the expense of importing goods from South Africa and the U.K. However it was a treat to be able to obtain a few longed-for items from home. For instance we could buy the first real English cheddar cheese that we had tasted in over three years: sharp, crumbly and tasty. What a difference from those bland, bendy impersonations that are labelled cheddar in so many countries around the world which give English cheeses such an undeservedly bad name! Locally produced vegetables and meat were quite reasonable, but the best buy was freshly caught fish such as tuna or wahoo, which was available vacuum wrapped. We were occasionally given a few of the delicious, plump little bananas that we had spotted growing around the island. Although they were not generally for sale in the shops, we managed to buy a couple of bunches from 'under the counter' before we sailed.

We let go our mooring half an hour after dawn on the 13th April and sailed away from the island just as the cruise ship "Silver Whisper" was approaching. The wind piped up to 25, gusting 30, knots as we left the lee of the land, but by lunchtime it had settled down to a steady 12 to15 knots from astern. We poled out twin headsails, and settled down for a week at sea. The "Silver Whisper" steamed past at 15 knots just as the sun was going down. Her passengers, having 'done' St. Helena, were no doubt being waited on at their dinner table whilst being carted effortlessly towards their next exotic destination. Talk about whistle-stop cruising! Soon after, we picked up a non fare-paying passenger. A brown noddy (a large type of tern) landed on the sprayhood, but, as it wasn't going to do the fabric any good, we encouraged it to move forward onto the deck, where it stayed until dawn. We hoped we were carrying it in the direction it wanted to go.

We carried the twin pole rig for a couple of days until we started to get some big wind shifts associated with the passing of rain clouds, so we set the mainsail and genoa to give us more flexibility with apparent wind angle. With a gentle breeze and not a cloud in the sky on day 4, we hoisted the cruising chute which provided us with a very pleasant day's sailing. We dropped the chute as the setting sun cast an orange glow across the horizon. The Plough was getting noticeably higher in the sky as we headed towards the equator, and we were looking forward to the appearance of the North Star. The wind picked up during the night so we took in a couple of reefs. The wind and seas continued to build during the course of the following day, reaching 24 knots at times.

We were taking on a small but worrying amount of water into the bilge, so we spent much of the day following tiny rivulets under the cabin sole trying to determine the source. I was probing behind the engine where the "saildrive" leg (a built-in vertical propeller shaft a bit like an outboard motor's) passes through the hull, when a gush of water appeared causing a moment's panic that the rubber seal had failed, but then the flow ceased. The seal had been replaced only the year before in New Zealand and it still looked sound, but the plastic hose-tail that the mechanic had fitted to the new cooling water seacock had sheared off, allowing the contents of the hose to run out. It must have been about to fail as I hardly touched it (honest guv!). Luckily I had turned off the seacock before starting the investigations. It meant we couldn't use the engine which wasn't a problem for now, and we sailed through the night while I worked out a solution.

At breakfast time we were surrounded by flocks of terns, boobies and frigate birds, and the feint outline of Ascension Island began to emerge when 30 miles away. As we closed the coast during the afternoon, we could identify guano-covered Boatswain Bird Island just offshore, where most of the seabirds nest. The seaward slopes along the mainland coast are formed of lava flows that looked as if they had barely set. We rounded North Point, where there is a forest of communications masts, antennae, satellite dishes and octahedral domes, in the late afternoon. I had rigged up an alternative cooling water system with some spare hose connected directly to the intake strainer, with the other end lashed to a broom-stick to hold it below water over the stern of the boat. We started the engine, and thankfully water soon started spurting out of the exhaust pipe as normal. We dropped the anchor in 13m of water in Clarence Bay at two hours before sunset.