Just want to say a big massive thank you for the incredible response I got from my last post after being quiet for quite some time on the social front. It really came as a massive surprise reading just how much I’d been missed over the last few months, and I was quite taken back by the avalanche of positive response, particularly on my Instagram profile (@captainmarkywarren) if you want to check it out). 

So a big thank you to everyone for that, it was a very humbling but even more so, a very inspiring and motivating experience to get back on the horse and stretch my writing legs again by sharing more stories of my escapades at sea and beyond in this epic adventure.

I hope you are all doing well and keeping safe given the circumstances of this crazy situation that is going on in the world at the moment. Gosh, who would have thought at the beginning of this year with all the great aspirations that we had for the new year and decade that we’d very quickly have a false start such as this and find ourselves in this mess. But I hope from the bottom of my heart that everyone is doing ok and managing through as we all navigate our way through this crisis.

The last few months since the beaching incident.

The last few months have been rather interesting, to say the least, it would appear that my little accident last year and the events that occurred immediately after that affected me far more than I realised, or could have imagined it would at the time, that took quite a lot of time to get myself right again. I guess its kinda similar to how a person who’s been involved in a major accident or soldiers who’ve had bad experiences in combat are affected by those events. 

Over the course of time, I realised that I was having to work my way through a form of PTSD or something along those lines. The first couple weeks after the accident I was a mess, and in many ways not thinking straight at all, although I tried my best not to show it, I was incredibly unstable, but you can only hide these things so much before they begin to spill out into the open, where you find you are doing things or being very out of character which only makes matters worse as it causes you to become increasingly desperate and lack control. 

Problems trying to leave Mallorca.

The next phase came when I had to leave Mallorca shortly after and sail back to southern Spain for the winter. Following a number of failed attempts to leave Mallorca where I was bombarded with one failure after the next, I finally managed to get off the island and sail away. 

However, that was only just the start of things to come of the gauntlet that the journey back became. From the moment I left Port Soller, the reality that my confidence as a singlehanded solo sailor was all but completely blown, it was in absolute tatters, but I knew I had to push on since one thing I remembered after my horrendous motorcycle accident at the age of 17 was my uncle Norton, an avid motorcycle rider and enthusiast, was how he drilled it into me back then to get back on a bike as soon as possible, else I’d fear it for the rest of my life.

Back then it worked like a charm, so I knew I had to press on no matter what. 

The journey as a whole was not a good one. It was like I was trying to run with a broken ankle, or trying to fly with a broken wing, which coupled with a number of bad experiences which I’ll tell you all about in the next few posts. 

I can tell you now, the intense fear and stress you experience when you’re alone out at sea, miles offshore, in the pitch darkness and you find that the boat is filling with water under the floorboards, where your first thought is that there’s a crack in the hull that wasn’t noticed before and the pressure on the hull from heeling over as you’re sailing is causing it to let water in. 

Or once again finding yourself 23miles offshore in the dark crossing from Ibiza to the mainland when it all very unexpectedly turns to hell on earth in the most violent seas you’d experienced to date, where you can barely stand on your two feet because your legs have turned to jelly from shaking so much, which turns out to be one of your most terrifying experiences at sea to date, is not the most pleasant thing to experience. 

Especially when your head is so messed up in the first place. Not to mention the constant pressure throughout the journey to get back due to the threat of incoming storms and very tight weather windows to make it back and get safely tied down. I look forward to telling you all about these experiences and how they unfolded in detail. 

Storm-bound for a week.

But after a week alone at sea along with being storm-bound in a marina up the coast of Spain for a few days, I practically limped through the breakwaters at the entrance of Cartagena harbour in southern Spain like a wounded deer on its last legs.

Being financially broke since my business to fund all this had pretty much failed a while before for various reasons (although I learnt a lot from it), with lots of things to fix, a great sense of defeat, and just generally feeling only a fraction of the person I used to be, I spent the rest of the time trying to get myself back together again and patch myself up. 

Its been a rough but interesting time, at first I became very withdrawn, I wasn’t my good old enthusiastic vibrant self, not by a long shot. You know when you have to force a smile and put on a face when you see people, so much that you begin hiding away below deck, eventually trying to avoid getting into a conversation with people because it just takes far to much effort and resources to keep putting on that face, which is quite difficult in a marina when everyone knows you as a completely different person. 

Over time you constantly question yourself, your abilities and you ask yourself, had you come as far as you could go? Had you finally met your match or finally discovered your limits out there? 

Had the universe decided to cut you down and give you a hiding with a big stick for playing in an arena that you may have not been cut out for, after all, singlehanded/solo sailing is something that is seriously not for the faint-hearted… 

Had I come to the end of the road?

Was it time to accept defeat and give up? There were a lot of questions that constantly kept me in a subdued state and one thing that it really did do well was, kill my determination, motivation and more importantly, my creativity in a big way, which is something I regard (and as many of you know) as being one of my greatest weapons or tools to succeed in life, and without it, I felt like nothing, completely powerless without a means of moving forward. 

But over time I’ve kept working my way through it, it did a lot of good to take a step back and take it easy for a while whilst I got back in the groove and got myself back into action. Through it all, I’ve figured a lot of things out and patched myself up along the way. 

Where through that and more recently through this current crisis, things began to positively accelerate at a massive pace.

This is also something I really look forward to unpacking and sharing with you guys, as I’m sure it’s going be quite valuable to many and help a lot of people considering once those who aren’t directly affected by the current health crisis. 

There is another crisis that has been brewing in the background in terms of the economy which is likely to affect so many more over the coming months, so it will be great to provide some value and help people through it, one thing is for sure, I’ve got a ton of great ideas that I’ll be implementing over the course of time which will do a lot of good in providing a lot of value and entertainment for you guys. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty damn excited about it all. 

One thing is for sure, I’m a South African 🇿🇦 and it’s pretty difficult to knock us down completely… We eventually get back up, we’re pretty stubborn like that… 😂

I think the best way to do it is to go back a few steps and start from where the sh*t hit the fan, or more so, when the ship hit the beach for that matter, and work our way from there. So I’ll repost the story of what happened that day in the next post so we’re all on the same page and we can move from there.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this pic, it was the first sunset pic I’d taken in months, just weeks before Spain went into full lockdown.

Have a great weekend everyone! 

Keep safe and above all, keep trucking! 

😎🙌🏻⛵️ 

Photo: Sunset over the ocean near Cala Cortina in Cartagena, Spain
Location: Cartagena, Spain

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