The melee inside my head mirrors the melee on deck on this, my first Atlantic crossing, writes Ben Good.

In the feverish hours of half-sleep before the 0300 watch, my senses get chaotic. Dreams and wild imaginings meld with reality.

The big red swathe of nappy rash across my bum is morphing into a North Atlantic Admiralty chart.

In the loud mosaic of noises as we push through the storm, different sounds assume identities of their own.

What’s that sound like a yapping terrier in one of the cockpit lockers? How can there be groans of pain in the foot of the mast beside my bunk? My damp sleeping bag – is that seawater, sweat or something worse?

We are three weeks now into our crossing from Nassau to Bristol, 1,000 or so miles south of Iceland, and I know the only way to banish this disturbing kaleidoscope from my brain is to get on deck, quickly.

So, it’s out of my bunk, into my least-wet outside clothes, to plot a course across the crew cabin, heeling at 30°, and pitching and plunging, to lurch from handhold to handhold, like a pinball, only with more soft tissue.

Through the galley to the bottom of the companionway, to struggle into more layers – survival suit, oilskins, lifejacket and tether – until I’m feeling thoroughly constricted and sweaty.

And, after skimping on the tinned vegetable curry at supper, rather queasy and low on blood sugar as well.

Time to get on deck to blow all that away. And blow it does.

We’re running close-hauled into 40-knot winds and 3-4m waves. Our mainsail blew out yesterday, so we’re flying a tiny trysail; with our smallest yankee, that is plenty of canvas.

Yesterday, the hub mechanism on the wheel failed, and it fell off, so now we are on the emergency tiller, and it takes two to steer the boat.

We control the tiller with one line to a starboard block and one to port, with a crewmember on each.

It is hard work: she’s a 30-ton cruiser prone to bad weather helm at the best of times, and it looks like we’ve got 600 miles of this ahead of us.

And if you are on the starboard line you get to sit where a bucket of chilly Atlantic is dumped in your face every few minutes.

None of which properly explains why we are enjoying ourselves so much. We are 11 people on board – two professionals plus nine others with little or no offshore experience – on a 60ft ex–Clipper yacht, courtesy of Rubicon 3, an adventure sail company.

We are nearly all strangers to each other, so navigating the personal relationships, as people get to grips with life in close quarters without its normal creature comforts, is one of the challenges.

But we are very ably led by our skipper and first mate, and it is our confidence in them, and in our sturdy boat, which is what makes it so much easier for us to enjoy ourselves out here, the very definition of the middle of nowhere.

Yet it is not “nowhere”.

Despite seeing just one other ship mid-ocean, and no land for nearly four weeks, it has never felt like nowhere.

As a newcomer to this, I now understand that the sea is so much more than a blue expanse of nothing that has to be crossed if you want to get from one land mass to another.

It is home to life but has its own vitality, as it changes face in its endless dance with the weather above it.

And when the sea picks up, what was two-dimensional – a flat surface we sit on and look across to the horizon – becomes three-dimensional, with us sitting between waves big enough to block our view of the sky.

Now we are properly immersed, as much in the ocean as on it, with big grey lumps of it all around, topped with turquoise strips and white quiffs.

When she lifts herself up to the tops of the waves, we might see how the raindrops are bouncing off the surface, making a kind of smoke on the water stretching into the distance, or perhaps a brief patch of sunlight, despite the squalls around us, giving a metallic sheen to the backs of all the waves between us and the sun.

For single-handers in particular, the open ocean must be a lonely place – I now have a new appreciation of their mental toughness – but we were never alone.

Almost every day, no matter how far from land, we see birds.

A streaking gannet, a pair of fulmars skimming the wavetops, disappearing into a trough, reappearing a hundred yards later and wheeling up into the clouds.

A wet and exhausted goldfinch, seeking sanctuary under our liferaft when we were 100 miles off Georgia. We did him the grave disservice of christening him “Lucky”, and he expired shortly thereafter.

Bobbing guillemots, and a common gull that spent nearly an hour trying to land on our swaying masthead before giving up and going on its way.

As from the sky, so from the deeps. Several pods of pilot whales, including one that we unfortunately bumped into. We guess it was already unwell, but it’s upsetting nonetheless.

One sunny morning, with my breakfast coffee, a baby dolphin does vertical take-offs beside the boat, for no other reason, apparently, than that it can.

We caught a tuna, whose rewards were gastronomic as well as visual. The barracuda we put back, worried about ciguatera. The Portuguese men-of-war we just avoided altogether.

First Atlantic crossing route

Our course takes us north from Nassau, even disconcertingly north-west for a time, to find the Gulf Stream, and a nice 2-knot boost for a couple of days.

We run parallel with America’s south-east coast until level with the mouth of the Chesapeake, then don more layers of clothing as we veer away into the colder, mucky weather of the North Atlantic.

We clip the southern edge of the Grand Banks, pass within a few miles of the wreck of the Titanic, then go direct to south-west Ireland and the Bristol Channel.

It is a course set for us by our PredictWind software, which guides us away from weather that is either too windy or not windy enough.

Such is its tyranny that when it tells us there will be no stopping in Bermuda, or the Azores, for mid-voyage comforts, we meekly obey.

Not that it is infallible; it seems to me that it often assumes we will sail the boat faster than we actually do, so that, 24 hours later, we haven’t quite reached the weather it expected us to.

No doubt the PredictWind people would blame that on us sailors, not their algorithm. The emphasis, though, is on celestial navigation.

The skipper has disabled all GPS-driven displays of our position and we are relying on our sextants.

The star sights are the most exciting. Most nights our view of the heavens is of clouds, but occasionally we get the full sublime array, Milky Way and all.

But of course that is only useful when there is enough light to see the horizon as well. So at dusk, there’s tension on deck, as half a dozen sextant-wielding crew peer in their prescribed directions, the bearings and altitudes predetermined by the magic of the Selected Stars tables.

Each of us wonders if Arcturus, or whoever it is, will come out before that cloud catches up with us.

It reminds me of wild game-spotting from the roof of a Land Rover in the Serengeti National Park, with the same levels of excitement, and the same tense expectation.

Thrilling amble

Unsurprisingly, though, for a group of sailors who have come along to sail, our greatest pleasure is the sailing.

To see our position inching forward across the chart, so, so far from anywhere, was very cool.

Cooler still to be on the plunging foredeck, tethered, with spray all around and the foaming briny creaming by.

No roller reefing for us: changing the sail area meant heaving and grappling mountains of canvas up and down, and across the deck.

For those of us whose most athletic days are a distant memory, that left us panting, bruised and sore. But also strangely elated.

Settling back in the cockpit, we look forward at our two headsails and the main, (when we had it), perfectly sculpted in the wind.

Perhaps it’s a beam reach, and the sun is shining. Or maybe it’s raining. Who cares? The wind is in our faces, the skipper is happy, and the helm announces we are doing a heady 9 knots.

How to explain to someone who wasn’t there, the thrill of crossing one of the world’s great oceans in something slower than the average commuter bike? And cross it we did.

Fastnet Rock may be the outer mark of a famous yacht race, but for us it was our first bit of Europe, telling us we had got to the other side.

For a while, we could study the cliffs and hillsides of Clear Island and County Cork. Never had land looked so fascinating.

No time, though, to call in at Baltimore for a Guinness; we head across St George’s Channel, and the next land we see is north Devon (in sunshine) and south Wales (rainy), on our starboard and port beams.

Those two coastlines close in on us as we head up the Bristol Channel. We have been heading into a beautiful sunrise, and everyone is on deck now as the end of our journey is so close.

Then we are into the lock at the entrance of Portishead Harbour. Curious faces peer down at us.

They may not know what we have achieved, but we do, and that is enough.

As I pat the lock wall, I am rewarded with brown slime all over my hands.

But no matter – this is my first touch of the reassuringly solid land mass that we call England, and I don’t care.

After 4,300 miles, and 28 days without getting off, we’re home.

Lessons learned from a first Atlantic crossing

1. 1 Do everything you can to pre-empt gear failure before your departure – but expect things to break anyway. So have back-up plans, incorporate redundancy and carry a comprehensive toolkit and set of spares – and make sure they are well organised and easy to access in a hurry.
2. On a long trip with a large-ish crew mainly unknown to each other, take care of the social dynamics. Not everyone will be happy or want company all of the time. So treat your crewmates with respect, and give them space when they need it. Making tea for everyone regularly helps a lot if you want to be popular!
3. Weather forecasting/route planning software – we used PredictWind – won’t get it right all of the time! Be prepared to have to make decisions in weather that is different to what the system told you to expect.
4. In a world reliant on GPS, don’t forget that traditional celestial navigation works too. And probably is something we should all be able to do in a pinch. That said, dead reckoning isn’t easy with an inexperienced helmsman applying a rose-tinted gloss to their stints on the wheel.
5. Don’t skimp on the personal gear. My packing was dominated by thoughts of the climate we started from – the Caribbean – rather than where we would spend most of our time – the North Atlantic. I spent most of the last three weeks recycling the same two damp outfits.
6. Meal planning matters, as good food is great for morale. We started the Atlantic crossing with a good variety of menus and recipes plotted out for the entire voyage, and were well-provisioned to realise that plan. We also had a good supply of supplementary treats.

Expert opinion

Expert response Golden Globe Race yachtsman and former Clipper Round the World Race skipper Guy Waites responds:

“My congratulations to Ben Good, you have immersed yourself in an adventure and been rewarded with a tale to tell.

“In this world of certainty, few things are as unpredictable as an ocean crossing, in spite of weather predictions, routing software and a well-found boat designed for the job. The ocean is a great leveller and will find out the slightest weakness of planning, person or vessel – what matters most is how we bend to the pressure and is as much the measure of our success.

“Ben says in his tale: ‘We were very ably led by our skipper and first mate.’ All credit to them for guiding you through your adventure, no doubt your faith in them was a foundation stone for your perseverance. They too will have the satisfaction of such a positive outcome.

“Adventure is not without risk, the two are inextricably linked, and it may well be the risk that attracts us to the adventure. But few places in life offer such potential as an endless empty horizon.

“We never stop learning – even the most experienced of sailors – it’s likely the attraction to set sail will return, so congratulations on a successful crossing of the Atlantic Ocean but beware… you could very well be hooked!”

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