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Metronomes, steering backwards, and aiming a torch at the moon.

A good wind! - a sailing prayer answered. This was the day we sailed far and fast, and arrived at our destination on time. And the destination is Sami.

Sami is not a quaint antique Grecian town. It's a modern ferry terminal, expanded rapidly after the 1953 earthquake destroyed the rival harbour further up the coast of Kephalonia. And it has berths for twenty or so full size yachts, and as you'd expect, a breakwater to shelter them from the open sea. Or so it seems when you pull into the harbour.

Did you ever study breakwaters? They're very simple. Waves come roaring in from the ocean, hit the breakwater, and collapse into foam. The opposite side, the water is smooth and calm, and you can tie up your boat and sleep.

So the designers of Sami's breakwater designed it to let the water through underneath. It has about a dozen big arches which let the waves surge through. OK, a really really big wave will be reduced to a small swell, but an ordinary swell just passes through untroubled. So your boat won't sink, but it will bob around like a crazy cork.

"Dang," I thought (or words to that effect) "I certainly won't be able to use the Inmarsat terminal tonight!"

Here's the problem: the satellite is small and very far away, and can only detect my transmissions from the satellite terminal when it sees them. So I have to point the BGAN device at it, very carefully.

To make this possible, the BGAN modem has a compass on it, and an elevation indicator, and also it goes beep. You line the thing up until it points where you think it ought to point, and it starts beeping, and the faster the beeping, the closer you are to your target.

Fine: now do that on a boat which is bobbing around on the waves like a featherweight boxer dodging a mismatched heavyweight. But you probably don't have a spare boat or pair of boxers, so to share in this experience, I'd like you to point a torch at the moon, and see what difference it makes to how bright it is. Oh, you have to stand on a pogostick while you do this.

In fact the idea seemed so absurd that I didn't try at first. But after a good dinner at "the oldest restaurant in Sami" - actually, a superb dinner! - I felt rather more mellow, and that I had, at least, to give Inmarsat the chance. Aslo, we really did have a good day sailing, and everybody is starting to feel that we know how to do this thing.

The hardest lessons we've had to learn, boat-wise, are the ones related to reversing. A big sailing yacht really doesn't like going backwards, but the Greeks insist on tying up to the dock stern first. The trick is complex, but easy to describe. You drop the anchor three boat-lengths away from the dock, reverse gently up to the mooring, tie on, and pull all the lines tight.

That's the theory. In practice, the boat won't go where you point it. You start out aiming neatly at the dock, and turn the engine on in reverse. But the propeller doesn't pull you backwards; it pulls sideways, and by the time you're moving fast enough for the rudder to have any effect at all, you're pointing way, way off to the side.

At this point, it's important NOT to do what The Cook did, which is to shout: "My steering has all gone! It's locked" - and step away from the wheel.

In fact, it hasn't locked. It's just that steering backwards has some of the features of balancing a ruler on your nose. As long as you keep the rudder more or less pointing straight back, you can get it balanced. Let it go just a bit too far, however, and the force of the water on it grabs it, and slams it flat against the back of the boat, and you can't even move it, never mind use it to steer.

Fortunately, I'd experienced this doing dinghy sailing, where your tutors will encourage you to learn to sail backwards, and was able to get us up to shore. And here we are, and let's hope that the wandering path we took to the dock didn't cross our anchor cable over too many other cables...

So here I am, sitting on deck in the dark, and the boat is swaying from side to side like a metronome. And the Inmarsat signal?

Steady as a rock. I will admit, I was impressed. ®