Gregory's Server
The first piece I’ve published in a few years.
Photos by Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque.
Thank you, Floriana and Alberto at Sirene Journal, Italy.
[Sirene 16, out March 24]
https://sirenejournal.com/#sirene-issue-16-intro
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A Merveilles meet-up with a difference: If there are any experienced sailors here who'd like to sail with us from the UK to the Med in late May/early June, this year, let me know — three berths available, no costs aboard, just take care of your own travel. A few days at our son's attic apartment in Rome — waking each morning to this view of the pyramid tomb of Gaius Cestius, a Roman magistrate, built between 18 and 12 BC, as well as surviving sections of Rome's ancient walls. The remains of poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and philosopher-writer Antonio Gramsci are interred in the park-like non-Catholic cemetery, alongside the pyramid. Two years after I shuttered my first effort on Patreon, I have returned there with 'the wrack' — log entries, snippets of memoir, and much else from the unlikely voyage that my wife and I will begin in England next week, . If you can, please support it. @ccohanlon Joined! And wish I could do the "Saloon" level, but, you know.... May it flourish! The editors of the visually gorgeous, Milan-based publication SIRENE journal — focussed on the sea and the littoral — asked me what I intended to name the boat. When I told them, their reaction to my unromantic, single syllable choice was...not good: "No, no." "Ma dai, non si puo..." It's good to know that some anarchic sea collectives like the Sea Urchins —"...sailors, builders, printers, dreamers and project makers..." — survived COVID. I have a found a few others , among them Ladyjacks, "for feminists, women, transgender, nonbinary and intersex sailors and the boats they sail on."  "Fuck their borders." Via the Sea Urchins (a France-based collective of 'anti-fascist pirates'). My favourite artefact in the sailing world: the medieval-looking galley aboard Wylo II, Nick Skeates' self-designed-and-built, 32-foot steel gaff cutter.  @ccohanlon such a classic ship, I recognized the galley instantly. That little paraffin jar on the counter 👀 OMFG... Our offer (subject to survey) on a 48-year-old, heavy displacement, sloop-rigged, 32-foot Rival — an old skool British ‘blue water’ design by Peter Brett — has just been accepted. It has taken over a month of negotiation and nail-biting to get the price low enough to be able to afford her. She’s strong, comfortable, and reasonably well-equipped (a manageable rig, great anchor gear!) even if she does have this somewhat raggedy, post-apocalypse, Mad Max ark vibe. Before Berlin (2013) and long before Lecce, in Puglia, Italy (2021), we lived for a while in Chateauneuf-sur-Charente, south of Angouleme, north of Bordeaux, in south-west France. We owned a dilapidated 19th century cognac merchant's house with a half-acre of gardens and a fruit orchard. Its restoration defeated us. Harry Pidgeon was the second person ever to sail single-handed around the world, from 1921 to 1925, twenty-three years after Joshua Slocum, aboard the 34-foot yawl, Islander, which he built himself on a beach in Los Angeles. Harry was also the first person to sail a yacht around the world via the Panama Canal and the Cape of Good Hope, the first to circumnavigate alone via the Panama Canal, and the first to circumnavigate the world alone twice (his second voyage, 1932-1937, also with Islander).  @ccohanlon Ah, one of my heroes. Absolutely self-taught. He'd never sailed before when he read some books on the subject and then built a boat and sailed it around the world. He also did it just to go and see the world, rather than for any silly competition or bragging rights. And he brought a camera! When he finally got married at age 72: "I have never been married, but now that I was 72 years old, I considered myself sufficiently ripe to give it a try." If you want to know more about why we bought a ruin in Puglia, southern Italy, and what we hope to make out of it (a retreat, or stopping place, for creative waifs, strays and outsiders), you can read what a friend of ours has written on her GoFundMe appeal for us. French sailor Capucine Trochet had just overcome a crippling ligament disease when she was given a 9-metre, modified S. Asian canoe, Tara Tari, built of jute and fibreglass by Corentin de Chatelperron (who'd sailed it from Bangladesh to France), and in 2012, sailed it across the Atlantic. If you read French, her book, Tara Tari: Mes ailes, ma liberté was published three years ago by Editions Arthaud. Seawater-soaked footage of Capucine alone at sea aboard Tara Tari, en route to the Canary Islands. (Turn the sound down – the song's awful.) @ccohanlon I loved following her adventure, she gave a few talks in french too, that were excellent. A week ago, on July 2, 23-year-old Australian boatbuilder, Tom Robinson, set out from Peru to row 8,000 nautical miles to Australia and become the youngest person to row solo across the Pacific. He is aboard a 24-foot, self-designed/built update of a 19th century whaleboat. You can learn more about the attempt — and follow its track (Robinson has just crossed South America's continental shelf into the deep Pacific) — at https://tomrobinsonboats.com @ccohanlon We don't have enough bandwidth to watch any of these docs, I'm looking forward to the fall when I can catch up on these. Shantyboats are a North American tradition spanning 200 years. Crude, ramshackle houseboats, they can still be found navigating the Mississippi and other rivers. The late Kentucky-born artist and writer, Harlan Hubbard, celebrated them (and the river life) in a series of books. I wrote about shantyboats (and Harlan Hubbard) for the UK-based Ernest Journal, a few years ago. https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/post/681161363631095808/shantyboat The 19th century Polperro gaffer Moonraker of Fowey off Honolulu, July 1953. She was bought, restored and sailed by Dr Peter Pye and his wife Anne on voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific from the late ’40s until his death in 1966. Peter Pye wrote five books about these voyages: Red Mains’l (1952), The Sea is for Sailing (1957), A Sail in a Forest (1961), The Sea is King, and Backdoor to Brazil. My favorite book: The Starship And The Canoe (1978) by Kenneth Brower — a dual biography of renowned astro-physicist Freeman Dyson and his son, George, who lived then in an illegal tree-house 95 feet above Burrard Inlet, Vancouver and built large baidarkas (kayaks) he paddled to Alaska. Central to Brower’s and George Dyson’s story: he Mount Fairweather, a 48-foot, six-person baidarka possibly the largest of its type ever conceived, built by Dyson in Vancouver when he was just 21 years old. Son of physicist Freeman Dyson, George dropped out of high school to moved to the Pacific Northwest. Now 68, George Dyson still builds kayaks but he's also a respected science historian (Turing's Cathedral, 2012, and Analogia: The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines, 2020) [via @vimeo] The English cling to the weather when it comes to small talk but for the Puglians it's food. Every day someone asks me, "Cosa mangi oggi?" It's not enough to name a dish or two. They want ingredients — a tomato is never *just* a tomato in southern Italy — and a detailed recipe. @ccohanlon I have family over in Campania and I can relate to this. Luckily I'm growing about 30 different tomato varieties now, so I have plenty to discuss. In the summer of 2009, The Swimming Cities of Serenissima sailed from Slovenia to Italy and made its way up the Grand Canal in Venice. Brooklyn artist Swoon (a.k.a. Caledonia Curry) conceived the Swimming Cities' shanty boats, built from salvaged junk as a collective artwork. Her work was included in Radical Seafaring at The Parrish Museum of Art, in 2016, which likened work created on the water by contemporary artists to the Land Art movement of the '60s/'70s; Photos by Todd Seelie.  |
