Call of the Cape: Sleep, eat, work. Life on the open sea is stripped down to the bare essentials, writes Theo Dorgan, in the third report from his South Atlantic voyage.

There's a sailors' adage, "harbours rot men and ships". I can't say we exactly rotted in Stanley, capital of the Falkland Islands, but a few days tied up left us all anxious to be back at sea again. Not that we didn't feel welcome in this reserved, somewhat somnolent place, where you don't see much of the people and

99 per cent of the vehicles are Land Rovers. The governor, Howard Pearce, drives a maroon one, with a crown in place of the number plate on the front. Our lad Justin, it transpires, has a friend in common with His Excellency, and our lad Justin got talking to HE after Sunday service, as a result of which the captain and crew of Pelagic Australis found themselves invited to drinks in the residence on Monday night.

Very agreeable it was too. HE is newly-married to Carolina from the Netherlands, a seven-month-old month baby was secreted about the premises and an air of genial, slightly baffled domestic bliss balanced out the chintz and china and photos of royals living and defunct.

A nice man, Howard, and more than amiable to a ragged, newly cleaned-up bunch of sea rovers. After the second round of G&Ts had been polished off, the witty Filipina waitress appeared with a big crystal jug full of the stuff, it having been decided evidently, to cut to the chase.

He is upbeat about economic developments, particularly positive about oil prospects in and around South Georgia, administered from Stanley. He considers Argentina as "still being unhelpful". UK armed forces on the islands total 2,000 men and women, almost as many again as the current population.

Next day Howard comes to visit the boat, bearing freshly plucked basil, rosemary and parsley from Carolina's hothouse. A thoughtful, very Dutch, parting gift.

We cleared out of Stanley early next morning and faced north-east for the long haul to Tristan da Cunha, minus a crew member whose heart had been giving him concern, our numbers made up again by Dolly, a freshly-butchered sheep.

We ate the hind legs off Dolly last night; now her forlorn carcass hangs wrapped in muslin on the after gantry, lashed by spray. Neck chops next, we think. The things you see at sea!

Life on board has become stripped down, simplified: you sleep, you eat, you work the boat. The watch system means you get two periods of four hours for sleep, alternating with two four-hour periods of work, and this is followed by six hours on and six hours off. Sounds good?

Imagine taking a small apartment filled with 10 strangers, loading it into a washing machine on the back of a large truck, then driving it down an unpaved mountain on spin cycle. Try shaving in that, or showering or cooking or washing clothes or cleaning the floors or reefing sails. Or sleeping. We manage, of course, but at the price of a constant habit of attention, the mind and the body ever-vigilant even in sleep.

The Southern ocean is a place all to itself: colder, cleaner and emptier than the North Atlantic. The seas are higher, the spaces emptier and the winds stronger - the men and women who sail here call 60 knots (storm force in case you didn't know) "a bit breezy".

This kind of understatement appeals to our collective sense of humour, and Pelagic must be one of very few boats on which four-metre waves have been recorded in the log as two metres. Most yachtsmen, like fishermen, have often only a passing acquaintance with standard units of measurement, and tend to exaggerate in the other direction.

The log, incidentally, has become a source of great interest to us all. So much has happened in the past 19 days (I write on Tuesday) that people have been going to the log to sort out confused impressions. Only yesterday, for instance, we discovered that Tony Macken was at the helm at our furthest point south. Naturally, he has been christened Captain Antarctica, and we are thinking of having a special uniform made up for him.

For most of us at this point, Cape Town is the shining city set on a hill, a place with hot baths, privacy and beds that don't go bump in the night.

For Macken, Cape Town is where he meets his friend and their two girlfriends before they set off to ride on two motorcycles all the way home to Cork via Cairo. He's doing it for charity but we suspect it's a ruse to get as far away from us and the sea as possible.

Right now, though, we are near the middle of a vast open ocean, 700 miles or more from the nearest settlement on South Georgia.

We are, in fact, the largest and perhaps the only human population in nearly 50,000 square miles of grey and blue cold heaving emptiness.

We plough on for Tristan da Cunha, day and night, minding each other, minding the boat in a kind of battered and buffeted eternal present moment.

We are not entirely cut off, though: some of those satellites we see winking in the night sky bring us news, and they let me say peace to the honourable soul of Mick O'Riordan, honour to the men of Munster and happy birthday to the stalwart Ailbhe Smyth, 60 tomorrow as you read this. One world, even out here on Planet Water.