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• Post #4158564

  We have been staying with our son in Rome for the past week. We were driven off the boat by extreme heat — In Cagliari, as in Rome, temperatures have rarely fallen below 30ºC, even at night, and have occasionally risen to the mid-40s, which made walks even to the grocery store, 1.6 shadeless kilometres from the marina, something of a risk for us. I have also been struggling with my health; I was often unsteady and in pain whenever I moved around the boat. Given put some of this down to deepenin...

• Post #3479600

  My wife and I are *this close* to finalising a long-term lease on an apartment in Palermo, Sicily, and securing a home for the first time in eight years (not counting our ill-fated attempt to restore and live in a 16th century stone ruin in Puglia, five years ago — only to be refused residence permits). Please read our latest update. We have to raise around 2,500 Euros quickly, for the first month's rent, moving costs, and basic furnishings (a bed, a table, and a small fridge will do it)...

• Post #3476405

  "Wisdom comes by disillusionment." – George Santayana

• Post #2494105

  At dusk, rolling thunder, lightning, and rain, driven across the Gulf by a hard sou'easterly. Wrack yaws in the strongest gusts and tugs against her doubled bow lines. Below decks, unbothered, I listen to Cecil Taylor as I read Raymond Horricks' The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy.

• Post #2494104

  On Wednesday, this week, a possible new custodian for Wrack is flying to Cagliari from Northern Italy to spend a couple of days aboard, to view the boat, and discuss the 'nuts and bolts' of a transfer of ownership. As I've written before, we intend to 'gift' the vessel, paying forward the generosity that we have experienced from this community. We continue to work on the boat to prepare her for at least one last passage. Despite her age and sea-worn appe...

• Post #2494103

  Having fallen overboard from Wrack in a Cagliari marina a few weeks ago — ending up with a couple of fractures and huge, purple, Rorschach test-like contusions all over my body — I fell on the foredeck yesterday and broke half a molar (and no, I can't afford to repair it).

• Post #2494101

  A pleasant morning with Leo, who flew from Verona to Cagliari to inspect Wrack, before considering whether to become her new custodian. He arrived just as a strong mistral was setting in, which made boarding the boat something of an adventure. After an hour or so of going through the boat and its gear, we talked about the logistics of the ownership transfer and re-flagging over pasta at a local swimming club. We're going to meet again on Thursday.

• Post #2163570

  "Resist much, obey little." – Walt Whitman

• Post #2092675

  Woodcut from La Petit Histoire Bretonne: ‘On the Open Sea’ by Rene Quillivic, 1921 [via @Sardonicus]

• Post #2055747

  Wake at 3.30am to light rain and an eddy of cold air through the open companionway hatch.

• Post #2055746

  Passing Es Vedra at sunrise, an uninhabited, limestone island, 413 metres high, off the south western corner of Ibiza, at the end of a passage from Alicante, last summer.

• Post #2054980

  "Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free." – David Graeber

• Post #1959315

  At sunrise, the air below decks is gelid and damp. I pull the duvet over my shoulders and head. A school of flathead mullet bumps along the hull, feeding.

• Post #1959313

  A dry scirocco has set in, gusting 20 knots over the deck under a cloudess sky. Given is preparing a simple Greek vegetable soup (peas, potatoes and carrots) while I make to-do lists for next week's maintenance push.

• Post #1959312

  A day of leaden skies and a 30-knot scirocco, Wrack dancing like a marionette between bow and stern lines.

• Post #1959311

  Grocery shopping in a hard scirocco: a walk of about a kilometre, each way, to the nearest supermarket, then the acrobatics of passing shopping bags along a narrow 1.5-metres-long gangplank, between an agitated dock and Wrack's after-deck. Rain and thunderstorms, maybe, in the graveyard hours tonight. Right now, the sky is the color of stale milk.

• Post #1706712

  So...The Guardian newspaper and all its sections and editions (27 million followers) are abandoning the shit-pile formerly known as Twitter.

• Post #1706711

  "It costs so much to be a full human being...One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying." — Morris West, fro...

• Post #1706345

  A late afternoon thrill: a flamboyance of flamingoes flying low, in formation, over our boat, en route to the salt marshes at the north-west corner of the Gulf of Cagliari.

• Post #1706344

  Early evening and we're working on Wrack's electrical system, isolating batteries, checking alternator connections. At sunset, a 'hail Mary' press on the ignition button, and our Volvo Penta 20hp immediately chugs into life followed by the alternator. My wife: "The African Queen is back!" The diagnosis? One dead lead battery in the series of three.

• Post #1694572

  An opportunity for someone you know? "If Given and I were looking for a more persuasive argument — we weren't — that our water-bound life is at an end, we've found it, writ large, in the last few days. We have decided to sell our boat or (our preference) gift her, fully equipped, to younger, fitter, adventurous people who might want to take her on and sail her further. "Wrack is scruffy but sea-kindly and sound; with little work, she'd be a strong, rel...

• Post #1660285

  A week that went from bad to...just as bad: On Monday, our first day aboard Wrack in four months, I fell overboard, sustaining a couple of fractures, severe bruising, and a few nasty wire abrasions; yesterday, Wrack's entire electrical system failed, bricking the engine, lighting system and our modest suite of electronics (a dead battery, for sure, but also an unknown, as yet untraced power drain). Our hoped-for departure on a relatively long passage to the mainland, late next week,...

• Post #1624322

  After a rare six months together, our family (80 per cent of it anyway) will fracture again at the end of this week: our youngest is heading to Sydney, our eldest to southern Turkey (to walk the 800+ kms of the Lycian Way), and Given and I to Cagliari, in Sardinia, to move our storm-damaged Wrack to a yard on the mainland for a refit. ‪ It will probably be a couple of years before we're all together again. But Given and I are determined to have a home ashore, somewhere everyone can gath...

• Post #1624320

  Strangely diffident about being back in Cagliari, in southern Sardinia, upset by the state of our boat, and fretful about our youngest, who is now in Australia, Given and I are holed up in a borrowed apartment just two streets back from the harbour, catching up on three straight nights of lost sleep in Rome. Wrack looks so forlorn, it's heartbreaking. On Sunday, we'll start clearing her decks and drying her out below decks. A diver is coming next weekend to scrape the hull below...

• Post #1624318

  When the then best-selling novelist Jay McInerney visited Paul Bowles in Tangier, 1985, for Vanity Fair, one of his most intriguing observations was that, "Bowles makes his way around town in a bronze 1967 Mustang." Photos by Mary Ellen Mark https://www.maryellenmark.com/bibliography/magazines/article/vanity-fair/paul-bowles-in-exile-637529608261264050/V

• Post #1624317

  A(nother) 'senior' humiliation: While loading and stowing personal gear aboard Wrack again, I had to cross from the deck of our marina neighbour's Catalina 34 sailboat to Wrack, over a gap of maybe a metre, in dead calm conditions. I ended up in the sea. ‪ I blacked out for a second. Then, disoriented, I reached for rigging that wasn't there and fell between the hulls, my ribs and wrist hitting Wrack's gunwhale. The water was bloody cold. I managed to...

• Post #1624316

  A strange, formless morning — warm but overcast, an occasional light shower, no wind. We woke late after being forced from our bunks at 3.00am by a small, wooden, German Folkboat bumping alongside and a high powered spotlight flooding our portlights. As I clambered on deck (painfully, with bruised ribs, knees and arm), its husband-and-wife crew were attempting to uncleat an anchor line from my after-deck and transfer it to their boat. They tried to argue that Wrack was tethered to the wrong li...

• Post #1076028

  A maelstrom of activity as we help our youngest prep' for the second half of her escape plan: a long flight home to Australia, for the first time in 14 years: phone calls to Sydney, flight and train bookings, payment for a temporary passport, and emptying an old North Face roller duffel for her use. ‪ She has been with us for six, necessary (but not always easy) months of recovery. Now she says she's ready to move forward with her life and re-establish roots in the country where...

• Post #1035928

  Sometimes, big decisions are settled obliquely. My wife, gazing at the intricate, Arab-inflected designs on the roof timbers of a spectacularly over-wrought cathedral in Palermo: "It's so damn beautiful...it really is. I love it. [long pause] I'm missing Rome. That's our real home." She had tears running down her cheeks. Later, we sat in a park, under a palm tree, and I booked tickets for next week.

• Post #1035927

  02.45 in Palermo: jagged thunder, heavy rain on the terracotta rooftops, and a hard westerly. I'm lying here shivering with dread (nothing to do with the weather).