The great pleasure of ocean voyaging, as opposed to day sailing, is that as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land — all the things you ought to have done, but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence — slough away like the old skin of a snake. You feel renewed and newly alive.

There’s nothing you can do about any of that old stuff, so you forget it andjust attend to the business of navigation and survival, because getting things right on an ocean voyage in a small boat is simply a matter of life and death.

This phenomenon, which strips people down to their essence, happens every time you leave the land. And, just as surely, when finally the lookout perched high up the mast shouts “Land ahoy!”, you are overwhelmed with longing for the land, and mysteriously ready and eager again to immerse yourself in that cloying bog of cares.

Sensing all of this, Tom [Cunliffe, the skipper], and I mused and chatted, sounding one another out, testing the para­meters where you could and couldn’t go. There was a tentative pleasure in getting to know each other, in the knowledge that we were soon to be hurled together in conditions of the weirdest intimacy.

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Tonight, though, we took a mild and friendly interest in each other, bandied compliments, trying to show ourselves in our most appealing light without overstepping the mark. We each sipped whisky from a mug, the traditional treat at the start of the night, and the whisky, in its wonderful way, warmed our hearts and spirits.

Then it was gone midnight, and a reverential silence fell for the shipping forecast. Like anybody else, I had heard the shipping forecast before on the radio; a meaningless, almost mystical incantation, the clear, clipped tones of the BBC enunciating “Dover, Thames, Humber, Dogger, German Bight... Fisher, Fair Isle, Cromarty, Viking, Faeroes, Southeast Iceland...” and so on; comfortingly obscure names that had suddenly become both personal and pressing.

Even its theme tune, Sailing By, which I had always thought rather vacuous, took on a different form, its rippling arpeggios charged with meaning and emotion. From now on, we would hear Sailing By each night as we plied our way north, until we’d sailed so far that not even the BBC could reach us.

Those five days on the North Sea, my first proper voyage, passed in something of a blur. Mostly, there was little to see but rolling walls of water, sometimes grey, sometimes brown and occasionally green, bearing down on us in endless pro­cession.

Sometimes they glinted or shone with pale sunlight, but more often they were opaque and brooding, then all of a sudden the midday sun would break through the mists and the sea would turn a deep pellucid blue, sparkling and glittering.

There was a curious soporific feel to the days, the long hours passing without any particular interruption or event. The watch system was relaxed during the day, and we would take a trick at the helm whenever we felt the inclination, or busy ourselves with the constant tasks of whipping and splicing ropes.

On land, it would have been too tedious to bear, but here at sea, I seemed to enter a completely different state of mind, the consequence of a hint of seasickness and not nearly enough sleep. I never had an uninterrupted night’s sleep; three or four hours was the longest the watches would allow you. We would doze during the day to make up for lost hours, but could never quite shake off a heavy-lidded torpor.

This had the effect of blunting the intellect a little and enhancing the feelings. I’m moved too easily anyway, but on the high seas I found myself constantly brought to the edge of tears by the simplest of things: a sudden burst of sunlight from behind a cloud, or a pleasing notion, or a particularly vivid thought of a loved one.

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