Ocean Blue - Reflections on crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing yacht

January 21, 2026

Ocean Blue - Reflections on crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing yacht - Part One

15th December 2025

As I write this, the thick black night is singing with exotic creatures, while the Caribbean Sea below us thuds against a rock bluff and the soothing sound of waves rush and retreat on the white sand shore. I am in Grenada, the southernmost island of the West Indies chain, and the final destination of the Arc+ rally which we have recently completed.

86 boats have long-prepared for the crossing of a lifetime, for some never to be repeated, for others their second or third time of doing, for others many more. Each boat has come with its own back story and a new chapter has been written as the 3,000 nautical have slowly been ticked off.

We departed from Las Palmas in Gran Canaria on Sunday 9th November 2025 following a week of intense preparations: getting the boat ocean-ready, provisioning for up to 24 days at sea, seminars on safety, weather and everything in between…and let’s not forget the parties and getting to know our fellow people on this same journey. Oh, and an encounter with Influenza A!

I use the word ‘journey’ with a certain level of caution. It is a word often over-used these days, but here I use it with intent. This was a trip that we were invited to join a long 18 months before we were due to set off. Despite it being an invitation from very good and dear friends, my heart sank when we were asked to join them as a couple. My husband had done this crossing in 2022 on the same friend’s boat but with 5 guys on board. This was going to be just us two couples (of a certain age!) and I wasn’t sure I was up for it. We learned to sail about 20 years ago and have enjoyed many a holiday ever since; but pottering around the Med with land usually in sight and nice anchorages, beautiful swimming and a good supper promised at the end of every day is a tad different to embarking on an ocean voyage with land out of sight for most of three weeks. To complicate matters further, I am (bear with) convinced that in my previous life I was involved with the Titanic (something I will write about at The Healing Habit in due course). With that in mind, you can perhaps imagine that three weeks of crossing this mighty ocean in a 46ft monohull sailing vessel, even if there would not be an iceberg in sight, was a mental barrier I had to jump extremely high to overcome.

To say this was a ‘process’ is an understatement but, as I say, I will not go into this here. All I did know was that this was a ‘life challenge’ of monumental proportions for me - and one which I guiltily felt I should be brave enough to undertake. I was never going to climb Everest or K2 or Mount Kenya after all (vertigo and bad feet rule that out!) but if I could overcome the mental bit of crossing an ocean, I knew I could do the sailing thing. Zero walking for a start! It is true that in the end our friends had to enforce a deadline on us to make our decision and I now see how rude that seemed and how I should have explained my visceral and, to many, my seemingly irrational fears. Yet it is quite hard to explain, even to good friends, something that I knew they wouldn’t understand. Our skipper had been a long-standing captain of the skies so fear of the ether or huge bodies of open water - let alone past life baggage - was not really in his vocabulary.

As part of the decision process, I even resorted to my pendulum to see if this ocean crossing was ‘in my highest interest’ and annoyingly it repeatedly said ‘yes’. I knew why, of course - to overcome that life-limiting fear. This was my personal ‘life challenge’. Every lifetime is about growth through overcoming fear and other human limitations, so I knew I had to do it, even though I was relatively terrified. I would lie awake in bed at 3am with the wind and rain howling around our hillside house in the darkness and imagine the same scenario but on a small boat in the middle of the mighty Atlantic Ocean. I would stare endlessly at Google satellite images of the route between Gran Canaria and Grenada, noting all the land forms miles below the huge expanse of deep blue water and not be able to even imagine being that little pulsating dot of ‘my location’ in the middle of such vastness. I would watch petrifying You Tube videos of sailing yachts being bashed to bits by ocean waves during storms; but to give my brain some balance, I would also watch other more hopeful ones such as Lauren Landers happily sailing single-handed around the world with just her cat for company!

I would worry about our ages and health and what might happen if any of us had a bad accident on board or got life-threateningly ill. I was concerned about the fact we had an elderly dog and my mother in her late 80s and who knew what sort of health they’d be in 18 months down the line. There was this sense of death lurking in the shadows which I couldn’t quite get out of my mind. And what about our girls? They too were concerned about both their parents setting sail across an ocean…

I also worried about four strong-minded adults being cooped up in a small space in potentially stressful conditions for weeks on end and whether the long friendship would survive it. I would quiz my husband about how it was when he did the crossing previously but his answers were not helpful: a diurnal round of boat routines was about the best he could come up with and how it could be ‘boring’ at times. I can cope with ‘boring’ as I am good at filling my time, but I always felt that sailing an ocean has a certain duality to it - either ‘boring’ or ‘terrifying’! Was there anything else in-between that it could be? And, of course, I was haunted by the disturbing and tragic memory of the story of Cheeki Rafiki and the loss of all its crew when the damaged keel fell off on in bad weather on its return across the Atlantic…

Yet, in all this, I was always comforted by the knowledge that the boat we would be sailing in, a Moody 46, while not the youngest, was robust and designed originally to make ocean voyages, together with the fact that our skipper has crossed the Atlantic twice before and is used to keeping thousands of souls safe during his long and distinguished career in aviation. I know the huge amount of time and effort he spends on always making sure the boat is safe and seaworthy for which I also have enormous gratitude and respect. So, finally, in October 2024, a year before the adventure would begin, we finally said ‘yes’ and the scene was set for my life’s challenge: namely, to overcome my fear of sailing the Atlantic.

Thus I found myself, a year later, sitting in a seminar room listening to all the things that could go wrong on an ocean crossing and still wondering what on earth I was doing there! The overarching mantra, though, is that ‘preparation is key’ and I can safely say I was mentally prepared for the good, the bad and the ugly, when we and 85 other sailing vessels finally crossed the start line under grey skies in Las Palmas in choppy, sloppy grey seas with difficult wind conditions on that second Sunday in November…