I suppose I shall see a lot of beaches in the years to come, but here, today, in Aruba, I really think I have found the best of them – at least, the best so far…

It is called Surfside Beach which is really a misnomer since the barrier reef turns this part of the Caribbean into an enormous, placid lagoon. The water is that particular shade of turquoise that comes only from zero pollution and the brightest white sand.

As beaches go, it’s right up there with the Princess Diana Beach in Barbuda. But Surfside has something special. Surfside has trees. Really: Trees growing right by the water – some of them actually in the water – and giving real shade too, unlike the thatched constructions the resorts put up because they’re too posh for umbrellas. Also, with a tree, your legs don’t stick out and get burned.

And I was ready for a beach.

On the boat, it’s 35°C in the cabin and the deck makes you wish your tired feet were fireproof, as the Drifters used to sing. Besides, I had spent the morning cycling 12 kilometres tracking down metalwork shops which didn’t stock the kind of aluminium pipe I need for the self-steering (get it from Amsterdam).

So, I packed a sandwich and a couple of beers into the cool bag and rowed ashore to stake my claim. It wasn’t hard. The beach is half a mile long. There’s a tree every ten metres and there can’t have been more than a dozen people.

Now, I don’t want you to think that my life is one long holiday: Along with the beer and the sandwich, I had my folding fisherman’s chair and the laptop. I would sit in the shade and write the daily chapter.

The Daily Chapter is set in stone (along with one from the Teach Yourself Spanish audiobook). I have worked out that if I write a chapter a day, I will have the next book finished by the time I leave for Cartagena and a month of language classes.

But it was hot work rowing the 400 metres to the beach, so first I had to cool off.

It seems that I was in the water for 90 minutes. Just floating like you do in a bath when you don’t have to be anywhere in particular – only, at Surfside, I didn’t have to keep reaching down to the other end to top up with hot water. It was 30°C and it stayed 30°C. When I came out, I looked like a prune. But staring up through the leaves and working out whether the deep blue of the sky is actually what they call “sky blue” does take time.

Besides, everyone else seemed to be doing the same: couples, mothers with children, dogs – all just lying in the shallows and letting the day pass.

But you can’t eat a sandwich in the water – or at least, you have to get out to fetch it and, afterwards, you tend to be a bit sticky and rather red from the beetroot, so you have to get back in, and there goes the rest of the afternoon…

But I am proud to say that I did, eventually fire up the laptop and I was sitting under the tree tapping away writing this when Henrik came by. Henrik is a Swedish sailor and a most interesting one. You wouldn’t believe it to look at him but he was born in 1975 which makes him 49 years old. 1975 was the Fall of Saigon – and Henrik was a Vietnamese orphan.

People of a certain age will remember this: The South Vietnamese capital was full of orphaned children, the offspring of American GIs and Vietnamese bar girls (think Miss Saigon). The rest of the world was terrified the Vietcong would murder them all.

Actually, Henrik has no American blood, but nobody knew that at the time. Nobody knew who his parents were, or even if he had a name. He was the youngest orphan to be airlifted out – just a few days old.

They sent him to Sweden where a factory worker and a kindergarten teacher adopted him and brought him up in a small town called Mariestad between Stockholm and Gothenburg. For most of his life, he worked for the council as a maintenance man. But something in his Southeast Asian genes was calling him to the sea.

Now he is in Aruba in an old boat painted up like a 1980s New York subway train, sailing along with the rest of us except he hasn’t got the money to go through the Panama Canal so he’s condemned to do another circuit of the Caribbean. Anyway, there he was walking back along the beach from his shopping trip, and he happened to have four cans of something called Balashi (born and brewed in Aruba).

To return the favour and to help with the Panama Canal kitty, I’m going to give him my old dinghy. I was planning to throw it in the Marina skip, but he swears he can sell it in Colombia.

Henrik and “Cordiellia”

One way and another, the laptop went back in the bag and as the sun dipped closer to the horizon, I began to wonder whether today might be the day I photograph the legendary green flash (I’ve only seen it once and that was before everybody had a smartphone in their pocket).

Once again, it didn’t happen, but I did get this shot of my neighbour from the next tree watching the same sunset from an even better vantage point.

And the Daily Chapter? Well, tomorrow is another day…