c.c.

Woodcut from La Petit Histoire Bretonne:

‘On the Open Sea’ by Rene Quillivic, 1921

[via @Sardonicus@mastodon.social]

"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

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, reliable passage-maker — and/or make a practical creative, scientific, or activist platform — that might make a wild dream come true. Giving the boat away means we could 'pay forward' the care and generous support that we have received from so many over the past few years."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-in-search-of-home

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.

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 appearance, Wrack is still a sound, sea-kindly vessel and with a little more investment, is still capable of extended ocean voyages. She has been a cosy 'tiny home' for Given and me, and despite the past 18 months in which poor health has made life aboard more difficult, it will feel odd to think of ourselves no longer as 'sea dwellers'.

"Maybe we can sail to mainland Italy via Tunisia," Given has said. She is only half-joking. Although eager to make a home on terra firma again, she too will miss the sea, and our wider-ranging adventures. The north coast of Tunisia is just 120 sea miles from Cagliari. We love North Africa's deserts and we still talk with longing about southern Morocco, where we lived for a few months five years ago (we spent nearly a year in Tangier, in the north, between 2021 and 2023).

As I write this, there is a small pod of dolphins feeding between the marina pontoons, just metres from Wrack's transom. All morning, flamingoes have been flying overhead in ragged V-formations, en route to wetlands either side of Cagliari. A lone, black-furred nutria lurks beneath the timber pontoon to which Wrack is tethered, unsettling the beautiful white-feathered egret that visits us daily to prey on schools of flat-head mullet feeding on the weed along Wrack's keel. We are going to miss being amidst all this, just as we will miss the subtle (and sometimes sudden and boisterous) shifts of weather and sea state which we experience aboard every day.

We are moving forward. But we still have now idea of where we're going — about where we *can* go. Once we leave Wrack, we will be adrift. We are skilled at paring our lives down to the bare essentials — we are doing it now as we figure out what little to take with us when we leave Wrack, when we return (hopefully, not for long) to an unsheltered life — but after all these years, we have very little left to shed. We have lost long-standing friendships. Two of our four children have turned their backs on us. At least, we have been able to help our youngest return 'home' to Australia and a more secure foothold for her future: "One good thing," Given reminds me.

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.

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.

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.

"Resist much, obey little."

– Walt Whitman

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.

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.

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 line ("Nah, mate, it really isn't.")

Fortunately, an Australian-accented "fuck off" is well understood in most languages and carries just the right weight of menace. So they did.

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 swim, fully clothed, to a barnacle-encrusted ladder from which I was pulled onto the dock.
‪
I tried to stand up, with the help of three 'marineros' (marina workers), but couldn't so I lay on the dock for 15 minutes to regain my stability — and, it has to be said, my sodden dignity.

Below, the lurid souvenirs:

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

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, looks unlikely, even under jury rig. I can't haul on a shoelace let alone a halyard and moving about the boat, even in dead calm conditions, is excruciating.

The mood aboard right now is fucking grim.

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.

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 the water, and free the propeller of weed and shellfish.

If any of my Sardinian or Sicilian connections here know of cheap accommodation ashore in Cagliari or Catania (a boatyard there has offered us a good rate to haul out) then please, please let us know.

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

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.

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).

Discharged into the harsh white glare and blast-furnace heat of an August afternoon in Rome, I took my wife for a late lunch at an osteria on Via dei Cappellari — but my body insisted 'too soon'.

We cut it short so I could collapse into bed under an air conditioner with a large bottle of water.

"The world’s seas were hotter last month than in any July on record, scientists have said, as devastating heat struck western Europe.

"Sea surface temperatures hit record highs for July on the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, the EU’s Copernicus climate change service found, with severe marine heatwaves roiling Europe’s seas. Globally, the average sea surface temperature outside the cold polar regions was the highest on record for the month, beating the previous July record set in 2023.

"Surface air temperatures around the world in July 2026 were marginally cooler than July 2024 – by just 0.01C – leading scientists to consider the two months as the joint-second warmest Julys on record."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/10/global-seas-hottest-temperature-july-scientists

I wake to my wife's kisses as she reminds me, gently, that I'm another year deeper into the eighth decade of a misspent life.

I try not to dwell on the wreckage strewn around it.

[from six months ago]

In his 1987 book, The Songlines, the British author and traveller, Bruce Chatwin wrote, “A journey is a fragment of hell.”

My wife and I have been journeying together for nearly 38 years. Except for eight years in Australia, in the early ‘00s (during which we lived in seven different houses in Sydney and its northern suburbs), we haven’t settled anywhere for very long. Indeed, the longest we’ve stayed in any one 'home’ has been the three years we’ve lived aboard Wrack and since 2023, she has sailed more than 2,700 nautical miles, from the English Channel to northern Morocco, and from there to Spain, the Balearic Islands, and the southern coast of Sardinia. During the same period, we have also spent several weeks at a time ashore, in Berlin, Tangier, Truro (Cornwall) and Rome.

We might have sailed even further east across the Mediterranean if, at the end of September, last year — a year which began with my wife being hospitalised twice, in Spain, with heart problems — I had not suffered a heart attack while visiting our son in Rome. I underwent an emergency procedure, a balloon angioplasty, to unblock an artery. After a sluggish recovery, I spent most of January, this year, in bed with COVID and a painful lung infection.

Neither my wife nor I can ignore the portents, let alone the physical and psychic toll. We are tired and frail. The time has come to stop, to stay in one place — if not a home, then at least a long-term refuge or bolt-hole — and shape a different sort of life, no longer peripatetic but persistently still.

It’s not going to be easy. We have few options and multiple financial, social and legal obstacles. Still, we’re determined to be settled within a couple of months.

I’m ill at ease with the prospect of returning to a shore-bound world that is anything but settled or predictable; in fact, it’s downright scary. But my wife longs for a real home and feels we won’t have any peace until we find one. As she puts it, “We need to get somewhere we can start again.”

At our age, that might be the biggest challenge of all.

This is the last place
There is nowhere else to go...

– Lew Welch

[from The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings]

An Inughuit hunter paddling a kayak off the mountainous, ice-bound coast of northwest Greenland.

Photo by Kiliii Yuyan.

#RIP William Orbit, music producer, aged 69