It's rare that I stumble across social media posts that draw me in with fragments of an unconventional personal narrative — oblique references to disparate places and experiences, disjointed diary-like musings, images that pause the eye and provoke questions — but I spent the graveyard hours this morning immersed in @lake's feed and it felt like I was reading a treatment for some cool, intriguingly experimental, autobiographical documentary.
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After yesterday's torrential rain, blue sky — but it's still cold. There's a strong Levanter and fresh snow on the mountains north and west of the marina.
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“Find something you really love doing and mix it with something you really care about.”
– Kathleen Hanna, singer (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre) and writer.
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Drying out the boat this morning after late-night torrential rain — leaks from window frames and deck fittings.
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A hard 'poniente' — 30 knots, with occasional gusts of 48 knots, through the marina yesterday. Wrack slews and rocks a bit but remains comfortable. No rain, at least.
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Another day of fierce winds and the boat's dervish dance between its tethers.
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Windless and in decreasing visibility, Wrack motors westward on the ebbing tide through the Chenal de l'Île de Batz, north of Roscoff, Brittany, July, 2024.
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"Their ageing boat has been a sanctuary and a burden for them, floating on a sea of uncertainty as they navigate a world offering few safe harbours. What expressive lives they lead, I am always thinking. Their work—writing and photography mostly—is important, and their lives no walk in the park even on dry land..."
– UK-based writer Peter Bach on my wife and me, via @counterpunch, December 2024.
Below: an excerpt from a daybook, a b&w contact sheet (with later annotations) from 1978, portraits of the late Michael Moulin and me aboard my 24-foot sailboat just before the start of The Observer Round Britain and Ireland Two-handed Race.
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My first day back on my feet after a week laid up with a painful kidney stone and a nasty flu. I still felt like shit but the need for a hot shower couldn't be ignored anymore — nor could a chance to feel warm sun on my foetid skin (it was 20ºC here this afternoon).
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Gulf of Mexico sounds so much more poetic than Gulf of America.
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"In Anton Newcombe’s studio in Berlin, there was a typewriter. On this typewriter was a faded, dusty note that read, 'Everyone should be shipwrecked once in their life.'
"These words had an unsettling effect on me. Whether I understood it at the time or not, my ship was already on the rocks.
"Unhappy in Berlin, no longer making art, and having abandoned my few social responsibilities, I had been dreaming of escape — maybe to Brighton, England, the place I was born. But instead I took off for Morocco..."
– Finn Lafcadio O'Hanlon, my son, from his Essaouira Diary (2019)
https://burninghousepress.com/2019/09/29/essaouira-diary-by-finn-lafcadio-ohanlon/
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"The ancient, unkempt boat we bought as a temporary shelter — a temporary solution to an imperative to keep moving in order to satisfy immigration proscriptions — until we found somewhere we would be allowed to settle, has turned into something more enduring."
From an update posted to the appeal page set up for us by Irish artist Liz Cullinane, after my wife kicked off the New Year by being taken off our boat and transported to a local hospital experiencing a critical cardiac condition.
The next day, it was my turn.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-in-search-of-home
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I bitch about the cold — and keep a heater running below decks when the sun sets — but the daytime temperature is usually around 15ºC. Of all Spanish cities, Almerimar boasts the most hours of unclouded sunlight a year.
I still feel bloody cold.
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Dusk as seen from Wrack's deck, Almerimar marina, Spain.
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The entrance to Carbeile Wharf, a Mad Max-adjacent boatyard and tidal marina, one of last refuges for British live-aboards, in Torpoint, Cornwall, 2023.
“Every boat looks lived in, every deck strewn with jerry cans, pot plants, and mildewed canvaswork, coachtops and rigging draped with laundry and improvised awnings. The effect is of a shanty town, a floating favela thrown together by the vagaries of wind and tide, the disparate vessels caught by the tendrils of a slow-moving gyre that eventually stranded them here, in this shallow rural backwater.”
You can read more about it in a piece first published in Dark Mountain Project’s recent anthology, Dark Ocean.
https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/post/765701934957166592/unmoored
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Every image out of America these days is a portrait of accelerating societal collapse: not just the west coast fires but the fractured roads, dry rivers, neighbourhoods boarded up, factories and malls abandoned, decaying, fields of spoiled crops and poisoned earth, and makeshift encampments of the disposessed.
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Wake to 9ºC in the cabin and the creak of warps and timber as Wrack shifts in her berth on the last of the spring ebb.
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Feeling every minute of my age:
Nursing angina and a kidney stone, a morning of phone calls to boatyards, chandlers, riggers, canvas-makers, and marine engineers for quotes and bits and pieces to aid Wrack's low budget refit.
Life's bloody basic when a tin of varnish has to be weighed against the cost of a doctor's appointment.
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"The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed."
– Sterling Hayden
[from his memoir, Wanderer, 1963]
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Actor, author and seafaring vagabond Sterling Hayden at age 65, aboard his ancient, 100-foot, river barge — and refuge — in Besançon, France.
An unsettling thought: he died at 70, the age I am now.
[from the 1983 documentary, Pharos of Chaos]
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