Why choose to cruise in an engliness sailboat?

“We can reasonably suggest that sailing is, in many ways, and perhaps even fundamentally, an ‘aesthetic’ activity. For cruising under sail to be meaningful…it must fit within a certain symbolic framework.”

– Jerome FitzGerald, author, proto-seasteader, ethical farmer, and founder of The Oar Club, a loose association of engineless sailors (now defunct).

http://web.archive.org/web/20041206200447/www.oarclub.org/page8.html

A beautifully restored, wooden, lugsail ketch — still bearing its registration as a fishing smack out of Fowey, Cornwall — berthed on a pontoon ahead of ours in Plymouth, this afternoon.

Beyond, thick fog obscures the rest of the estuary.

The 28-foot, engineless, wooden Falmouth Quay punt, Curlew, owned by Tim and Pauline Carr, moored alongside the derelict whaler, Petrel, on the Antarctic island of South Georgia. Designed and built in Falmouth by R S Burt in 1905, the Carrs bought her in 1968.

Photo by Colin Monteath.

Becalmed off Portland Bill at sunset, last night, the notorious tidal race a millpond, during our long passage west along the English Channel aboard Wrack.

Still looking for crew to voyage south with us.

Almost ready for sea, Wrack on a river pontoon opposite Lymington's town quay, with new mainsail stackpack, lazyjacks, sprayhood, and soon, jackstays. We're still working on our electronic and wind-vane self-steering and electrics.

It embarrasses me to ask but...my wife and I are between a rock and a hard place, right now.

Please help if you can.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-stopping-place?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm

You can take the man out of Australia but (sometimes) you can't take Australia out of the man.

#introduction

My wife and I live on a sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It's also an island on which we're trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom, even if we are like castaways, with few hopes and no expectations, unlikely to be rescued.

We are disenfranchised from the idea of 'home'.

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”

– Tennessee Williams

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

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.

https://patreon.com/wrack

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."

http://ladyjacks.com

"Fuck their borders."

Via the Sea Urchins (a France-based collective of 'anti-fascist pirates').

https://seaurchins161.wixsite.com/collective/

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.

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.