Halfway across the Atlantic the rhythm changes. The fleet has thinned itself into a loose scatter across a thousand miles of water, and life on board becomes a steady mix of squalls, routine checks and small daily negotiations with the motion of the boat. It is not dramatic. It is simply the shape of long-distance sailing. You trim, you monitor, you eat, you try to sleep. Eventually it becomes the backdrop to everything else, including the work.

Domestic life is its own quiet apprenticeship. We are long past the last tomato. Fresh stores reduced to onions, garlic and potatoes, so cooking becomes choreography rather than cuisine. Every pan, bowl and ingredient must be timed against the roll of the hull, which swings through sixty degrees with the enthusiasm of a metronome. A catamaran would have it easy. We drilled a hole in the door of our brand-new fridge and fitted a simple wooden peg because the factory catch was too polite to stop the door flying open and distributing yoghurt evenly across the cabin sole. A small mainsail tear took four hours of balancing under the boom while stitching in the swell. Even coffee demands discipline. You hold the mug until the last sip, then wash it, dry it, and put it away. Leave anything unsecured and you will spend the next hour retrieving it from the ceiling. As for toilets, the simplest manual system is the only system you want out here. Anything more clever becomes a late-night exercise in gravity, pressure and humility.

Inside this rolling environment we built GridCheck, a small app created mostly because we needed it ourselves. The ARC sends a daily forecast email divided into labelled grid squares. Offshore, everyone knows their latitude and longitude, but almost nobody remembers which grid those numbers land in. The printed chart taped above the table is the official method, although tracing a straight line on a boat in motion is a sport of its own.

So we created a cleaner approach. A simple offline PWA. Enter your coordinates and it tells you your grid square. Paste the forecast email and it turns the entire message into a 48-hour view of wind, swell and squalls. Nothing complicated. It just saves time, reduces errors, and stops you playing “hunt the grid” before the first coffee.

We shared it quietly in the ARC’s at-sea WhatsApp group. The responses came back from boats scattered all across the Atlantic. “Amazing.” “Genius.” “Great bit of kit.” Someone asked if it should become an official ARC tool for 2026. Another suggested we might be “SuperGeeks,” which is fair enough. Aboard Supertaff we sign off as Supertaffers, so the nickname fits. Every boat ends up with its own language. Ours now includes software.

What matters is the pattern. A simple problem shared across the fleet, and a simple solution built in the middle of it. This is how most useful tools tend to emerge. Not in workshops, not in planning sessions, but out here, where the only design constraint is whether it works in the real environment.

This is the Boatshed mindset in its purest form. Build inside the problem. Iterate while moving. Keep systems practical so people actually use them. When something slows the journey, make it easier. When something is unclear, reduce the steps until it becomes obvious.

GridCheck will evolve once we reach land, but the important part happened out here, in a small rolling cabin with repair tape on the mainsail and a fridge door held shut by a peg. A useful idea built in motion. And if this kind of thinking rings true for you, then you already understand how we approach partnership and innovation. There is room for more people who see the industry the same way, and who prefer to solve problems directly rather than talk about solving them.

For now, we keep heading west. Another forecast arrives tomorrow. Another grid to check. And, no doubt, a few more small ideas waiting their turn.