This year we finally completed our offshore sailing circuit out across the Atlantic Ocean and back again. And I'd love to say this now makes us experts of some kind, but it really doesn't.

This was our first time offshore ever. So if you're dreaming of sailing across the Atlantic, we're literally only one step ahead of you. And so this isn't going to be a how-to guide. It's just one example of how this can work out for beginners.

We started out from the UK. I reckon we have an unfair advantage in starting from Northern Europe, as it feels like each leg gets progressively more ambitious as you go along. So what we're going to cover here is crossing Biscay, sailing down Portugal, over to the Canary Islands, crossing to the Caribbean, up to Bermuda, sailing back east to the Azores, and finally crossing back to the UK.

Our boat, called Samphire, a Vancouver 34C, built in the UK back in 2004. She's not a fast boat, but she's solid, dependable, a good offshore cruiser and ideal for a crew of two. At the time we set sail, I had 4000 miles of sailing experience, mostly in the Hebrides and the Irish Sea. With me was Rosemary, who had less experience, and therefore had total belief that I knew what I was doing.

Finding insurance was hard, given our relative lack of offshore experience, the scale of the voyage and the fact there were only two of us. We felt we were aware of our limitations however, and while we certainly set sail with the ambition of crossing the Atlantic, we only ever looked one leg ahead at a time, so that we could think about our life choices at each stage, and assess if we were about to make a really dumb move.

So let's start at the beginning. It's early August and we're in Plymouth on the UK south coast. On the 4th of August, off we went, across the Bay of Biscay.

If you look up sailing advice for Biscay, it can come across as a fearsome rite of passage. We had a smooth start, and then our crossing became a rapid downwind sail in steep waves, which certainly felt alarming and unfamiliar for the first couple of days. But eventually we realised the boat was looking after us really well, and we stopped feeling on edge. This was our longest multi-day downwind sail ever, and it gave us a lot of confidence for later.

We ended up in Baiona in Spain, four days after leaving Plymouth. Then after a couple of weeks, we sailed out again with my daughter as crew, and we headed down to Lisbon where we waited for our passage to the Canary Islands.

We used all these early passages to refine our overall average speed estimate, which eventually came out somewhere near five knots. For us. In our boat. That’s about 120 nautical miles a day. And like everyone, we do boast that we sometimes go faster, but for long-term planning there's really no point in hoping you're speedy when you really aren't. If you are not a sailor then 5 knots is about double human walking speed. To give you an example if you could go in a dead straight line from the UK down to Puerto Rico that would take you about 30 days at this speed. It's a really slow way to get around.

On the 15th of October, Rosemary and I left Lisbon, and we crossed the ocean to Lanzarote, arriving six days later on the 21st of October. So, why are we in Lanzarote? The Atlantic hurricane season dies out from November onwards, and the trade winds start to settle in, sweeping sailors out from the Canaries down to the Caribbean.

There is a large organised Atlantic-crossing flotilla, the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, the A.R.C. or ARC, which departs en-masse at this time. I only hear good things about the Arc, but we had already decided to go it alone. And as Gran Canaria fills up with over 200 Arc boats for the start, we decided that we would leave from the neighbouring island of Lanzarote instead.

And as the Arc fleet ends up in St Lucia on the far side of the ocean,  we also opted to avoid the crowds and aim for somewhere else. So if we weren't going to St Lucia, then where were we going to go? Without prior experience, we found it really tough to settle on an island destination, but in the end we opted for Antigua.

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So off we went, departing Lanzarote on the 15th of November, stopping for a night in Puerto del Rosario, on Fuerteventura, to do some final shopping and clear immigration, before finally committing ourselves to the open ocean. And then, unbelievably, we were off. I half expected someone to come out and tell us to stop, but no one did.

Instead, we just vanished over the horizon, and we headed west into the sunset. All our passages up to this point had been big achievements - for us - but this was now a different scale entirely.

So let's see how that worked out. In practical terms, it was mostly plain sailing, every day, and none of it was beyond what we already knew, and, even better, much of it was also in glorious weather. What was new was the sense of isolation. We had some limited internet, for weather and for emails, but otherwise we were alone. It was just us.

So on logistics, let's dive into what went right and what didn't.

On water, we did well on this one, because on all our previous shorter passages, rather than just taking water straight from the tank, whenever we wanted, we had manually measured all our drinking water that we used, day after day, for everything. And we also counted all our usage of milk, soft drinks, fruit juices, everything. And we worked out that as long as we only washed ourselves and our dishes in salt water, then the tank on the boat was going to be enough for the voyage and also give us a comfortable margin. But we also squeezed 50 litres of bottled water into storage under the saloon floor, just to be doubly sure.

How about diesel, for the engine? We only carry enough for about three and a half days motoring - at five knots. We were light on fuel on arrival in the Caribbean, but hey - we're a sailboat - so it wasn't really a problem. Except when it comes to electrical power.

So electrical power, this didn't go well, despite the fact that we had zero problems before this long crossing. Firstly, we only set sail with 110watts of solar power. This had just about been enough up until now because when we motor - with that diesel - we recharge the batteries, and this had always kept us going. However, now, with weeks at sea and still only the same finite amount of diesel fuel, the percentage of time that we could rely on recharging was now really, really low. Secondly, we still only had the manufacturer’s standard alternator on the engine generating our electrical power, and the internet will quickly tell you this is generally not adequate. And thirdly, the warmer weather meant that our refrigerator was now chewing up a lot more power than when we'd been further north.

Luckily we had a way of cheating. Samphire also has a small fuel cell generator on a shelf in the pilot berth, running on methanol. We've always carried this, but only ever used it as a backup. This doesn't generate a lot of watts, but we had enough fuel for that to make up the shortfall. And then for subsequent legs around the Atlantic, we upgraded our solar until by the end of the circuit, we had about 220 watts, which is really the minimum that we should have started with. And the fuel cell is back to only being a backup again.

We settled into a sleep pattern that worked for us. So after the sun went down, Rosemary slept for three hours. Then we both did any boat tasks together, however long that took. And then we swapped roles and repeated.

Anyway, on we went. The days all kind of merged into one. Towards the last week of the voyage, trying to skirt around light winds had driven us far further south than we had originally planned. We half -wondered at one point if we should just visit French Guiana instead. But no.

We first got sight of land again, Martinique, 23 days after we'd seen the last of Fuerteventura, way back east. But Martinique still wasn't our intended destination. So we plodded on past Martinique, past Dominica, past Guadalupe, and finally arrived in Jolly Harbour on Antigua on the 12th of December. And by complete fluke, this was actually the date we'd told the marina that we would arrive. So we felt pretty smug. And massively elated.

After Christmas and a long spring break, we then sailed north out of Antigua on the 1st of April, with a brief stopover in Barbuda. And then we were on our way, heading north to Bermuda on a brisk breeze.

So why were we going to Bermuda? Because the cool kids today point out that you can sail directly from the Caribbean to Europe without going north to Bermuda first. But Rosemary had work commitments to meet, so we headed to Bermuda anyway for a crew change before the next leg.

We anchored off St George's, seven days after clearing Barbuda. And I did some provisioning and did some chores and waited for my next crew.

At this point, the boat was in pretty good condition. We'd had the hull scraped by a diver back in Antigua, and I gave it another scrub while I waited. The VHF radio had misbehaved while we were inbound to Bermuda. I eventually narrowed this down to the antenna on the top of the mast. But luckily that was an easy replacement from a shop in Hamilton. We also refilled one of the two propane cylinders we used for cooking. This was the first refill we had needed since leaving the UK.

On the 18th of April, I was joined by Steve as crew, and we headed east from Bermuda. We were on a bearing for the Azores, but we had a faint dream of continuing all the way to the British Isles in one go.

But this crossing was an eventful leg for many, many reasons. It was as if everything that hadn't gone wrong before this point finally conspired to happen all at once. We had an engine failure, a gale, a steering failure, a small fire, then we rounded it off by bumping into a sperm whale off the Azores.

None of this will happen to you, fingers crossed. But maybe this passage is always rougher than the warm and predictable tradewind sailing of our outbound journey. Steve and I eventually arrived in Ponta Delgada on Sao Miguel on the 2nd of May, 14 days after leaving Bermuda, Needing to fix the engine meant we had dropped the idea of continuing straight on to the UK.

So, out of anywhere in the Azores, why did we choose Ponta Delgada? All the cool transatlantic kids generally stop first in Horta, further west. But ultimately we chose Ponta Delgada, because we knew it was a large marina and they were likely to be able to accommodate us for a while.

And it was lucky they did have room, as real life intervened, the summer got away from us, then bad weather stopped us leaving again at the start of September. So we accepted we'd just left it too late in the year. We were going to be in the Azores for the winter and all we could do was wait for the season to turn again.

Then on 19th June, Rosemary and I were finally ready for that last leg. We left the shores of Sao Miguel and headed north-east to Plymouth, on a delightful and drama-free crossing, and we finally arrived back in the UK after 11 days on the 30th of June.

And then we had some fish and chips and we went to bed.

We weren't really done yet as we still had a long passage up the Irish Sea ahead of us, back to our home in Scotland. But certainly the round Atlantic circuit was definitely over And we were over 9,000 miles richer in experience.

Would we do it again? Of course we would. I do hope we will. But I suspect there's nothing quite like doing it for the very first time.