Plz read description: 200mile passage, Sailboats 1st time at sea, solo skipper

After filming this short I watched my shipmate heading towards Beachy Head through my binoculars. He was in strong 15 - 20 knot gusts, wave height 1 - 1.8 meters. At about three miles I could just make out a shadowy figure on the deck next to the mast clearly struggling with something. Probably a halyard, stuck jacks or difficulty getting the main out the bag I thought. I could clearly see the mast was swinging hard over like a fast pendulum to about 30 degrees, more if broadside to a wave probably and clearly without an Auto-helm he was unable to stay into wind for more than a few seconds. At about four miles out South East from Sovereign and very small in the binoculars I caught a glimpse of a small speck of white which grew and finally then filled into a main sail. The same thing happened with the Genoa some ten minutes later (probably after needing to catch some breath in the helm) which I just caught a glimpse of filling before he reached the even bigger chop that happens around Beachy head and then he was around the cliff face bearing West and gone. He left me a voice message in the night some twenty hours later to say he had been in thick fog in the shipping lanes through the Solent with a vessels fog horn going constantly getting progressively louder somewhere off the bow. He held and waved a torch up to the main to stay as visible as possible and the fog horn quietened as the vessel passed somewhere starboard and distanced from his twenty foot sailboat. During the next day we exchanged a few messages and I converted his hand held Garmin plotter coordinates to digital timing so I could enter into Google Maps and then text a screen shot back showing a map of his position. He anchored off Swanage Beach around 5pm after no sleep some 35 hours later to find the anchor kept dragging and only finally held when all of the chain lay across the sea bed. All of this in one passage after I pushed his vessels bow away at Sovereign Eastbourne at 6am the day before. This experience for me was one of the most impressive things I have ever seen and witnessed and an adventure I hope to emulate solo myself one day. I am now at the learning to drop and weigh anchor stage of teaching yourself to sail and I believe this is the gateway skill and a passport to the true adventures that can only be found in solo sailing.