At a Stroke.

I wrote my last post in the Anna M in the very pleasant circumstances of her present mooring at Moaña on the magnificent Ría de Vigo. The weather was splendid and I dived over the side two or three times a day into Atlantic water at a perfect temperature for cooling off. I was just getting down to some painting and varnishing when I found my right hand giving me trouble. Next thing, it became quite dead and I couldn't grasp anything in it at all,- if I tried to do so, it would just fall out,- a most alarming feeling!

    I got on the phone to family, and our Cristíona soon had Pablo at the marina calling an ambulance and picking me up in the marina boat. I was whisked off to a very swish health centre and thence to the enormous Hospital Álvaro Cunqueiro at Vigo. Two nights on a trolley in the reception area were not fun, heart monitors beeping around me etc, but for all I know the stuff they shoved into my veins might have saved me from a much worse stroke, or even death. Anyway things soon looked up when I was moved to a two-bed ward in the neurological department. These public facilities were excellent and the care very friendly, efficient and thorough. The architecture of the whole hospital was startling and imaginitive, and the social expense involved, mind-boggling.

      My impression, that there was some kind of cultural statement involved, found a degree of confirmation when I looked up Álvaro Cunqueiro, and found that he was a Galician writer who didn't appear to have anything particular to do with medicine. I wondered what he would have had to say about having this huge hospital named after him, and what prompted the Galician health service to do so? Perhaps a writer from his time of fascism may have had some words of caution about grandiose social undertakings,- and unfortunately, for me especially since covid, a fascist is as likely to wear a white coat as anything else.

    When one is ill, one finds oneself deprived of one's normal precious sense of autonomy, as also do the victims of fascists, communists and totalitarians in general. The necessity for clear values and strong ideas of meaning becomes particularly acute. One needs an anchor equally in the personal and the transcendent. Saints, who managed to articulate the Word of meaning in their particular time and place,- to hit The Note in a way that reverberates down the centuries to us-, are a big help, as is a sense of belonging to a place. I am glad that, in Ireland, we traditionally name hospitals after them, but it's not much use if the people become deaf to that Note. I suppose that a 'secular saint' like Álvaro Cunqueiro may do the job, but I wonder who hears him after a generation or two? One would hope that, along with any genuine creative writer, he leaves a call to espouse personal responsibility and an holistic attitude which gets us beyond contingencies and specialist expertise.

    The word 'fascism' is a very unsatisfactory bit of shorthand for what comes about whenever humanity ducks such responsibilities. We suffer a crisis in our sense of meaning and belonging, as chaos reaches an intolerable pitch. In one form or another, it is forever threatening the human race. In desperation, we reach for shortcuts that will obviate the need to tackle 'the steep and narrow road' that leads to salvation,- but I like to think that this road need not be as difficult as we sometimes fear. The Crucified One shows us a very simple first step, which is to do our best to meet those whom we encounter, right in their pain.

    Knowing how difficult this can be, and how weak we are, we need not be ashamed of withdrawing somewhat, in order to minimise the necessity for such encounter, but only if we take the opportunities that do come our way. There will never be a shortage of them! And so we build the sense of care, of value and belonging, which is the foundation of, among other attributes of a good society, good health care. To say the least, this sits uneasily with the need to deliver profits to the health industry of today, not to mention all the other industries involved. When money becomes the first priority, we may be sure the whole system will break down.

    I came out of the hospital feeling pretty wrecked and a good deal older. I found myself shivering and shaking from head to toe from some kind of infection one day, and the blood thinner they gave me caused much itching and a rash. My right hand remains weak and shakey, and I doubt if I shall ever be as capable and useful in practical matters as I have until now liked to consider myself. Still, here I am, shortly to be another octogenarian, who until recently might have been expected to pass away by now, but maybe will remain on the payroll for another fifteen years. What will transpire in these years?

     So used to hearing that you can't say that, perhaps with my own inner voice as much as any other,- to keeping my head down with perhaps the hope that a bit of example is worth any number of words, I've come to the conclusion I had better do more than chuntering on in this blog, in order to make myself heard. Our eldest son loves to remind me how I bailed himself and our then polite three little children out of middle class life in England in 1973, with mutterings of impending doom, to live in a leaky thatched cottage on a mountainside in Co. Donegal.

    It happens that, by the grace of God, it all worked out very well, though not without difficulty, not to say trauma. We had another six children, all still alive and kicking and in their very different ways doing well. Perhaps that sense of impending doom can be a positive ingredient to human flourishing, though you wouldn't think so, listening to most contemporary discourse. I needn't catalogue here the many and diverse threats hanging over our heads, and I feel for the (diminishing cohort of) young recruits joining the fray. If I have something to say, it is to suggest ways in which these threats can be turned into positive opportunities for human flourishing. Instead of trying to pretend that we can batter on regardless, we must face and embrace those threats, and change accordingly.

    I have made an attempt in this blog to raise my voice somewhat, but not many people read it, though with strong growth lately to a total of 115541 page views. Curiously, Singapore has sometimes overtaken the United States to the top readership spot. I wonder why? Anyway, I am going to take advantage of our Cristíona's presence to see if I can get another dimension going with a podcast. I need another miracle if I am to see the Anna M's electric drive through to reality!

Wouldn't it be great to see those humungous outboards being replaced by electric drives?

  

The Renovation of the Anna M - a recapitulation.,

It has to be said that wooden boats pumping bilge water is as natural as peeing is to mammals,- the first boat which I owned was a 33' clinker-built half-decker called An Cnoc Mór, and my final season salmon fishing in her, off Donegal in the '70s, was an unforgetable battle with leaks, with nets that the fish could easily see in calm weather, frequently causing us to head west in the evening against the weather, from Teelin to Malin Mor or Glen Head. One had to fish at night. When I came back to the boat after going home in the daytime to get some sleep, the question was whether the electric pump had kept up, or would the water be up over and into the gear box?    

    A line was crossed in the Anna M one night in the Bay of Biscay, hard on a fresh to strong SW wind. It was in the autumn of 2002. I was awoken in my bunk by a loud thump and jolt as the boat hit either a bad wave or something more solid. After a while I could hear the bilge water sloshing around,- the electric pump was not coping. The hand pump was in a very awkward place under the cockpit (a mistake that I have taken care to avoid in the new Anna M!) , so it was no fun pumping our way to Galicia, where we hauled out in Portosin. 

    We discovered that there were thirteen cracked ribs on the starboard bow and you could push the planking there in and out by hand. We screwed a sheet of plywood with plenty of gunk under it over the planks and sailed down to El Rompido in Andalucía, where there was a Polish shipwright by the name of Michalsky who made a great job over-winter of rebuilding the whole foreward section with new laminated ribs. In March we set sail for the Cape Verde Islands for Tony Whelan to film humpback whales, with Simon Berrow and the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group,- see The Return of the Humpback Whale (2003).

    A trip to the West Indies followed, including penetrating some 40km up the Orinoco River in Venezuela. Back in Ireland, I settled down to taking dolphin and whale watching trips from Carrigaholt on the Shannon Estuary and from Sherkin Island in Co. Cork, but not before concluding that the Anna M needed a new deck, which she received at Liam Hegarty's yard on the Ilen River. There followed some good years, which included taking Nutan up the West coast of Ireland in order to make his photographic book The Islands of Ireland. 

    At last the old boat was actually earning a living for a few years, until in 2013, by now leaking fairly seriously, we decided to call it a day. Now in the happy receipt of a pension, Fiona and I sailed to Rome. We hauled out for the winter in Ostia, where I made some futile efforts to fix the leaks, and on the way back in 2014, found a birth in the Río Guadiana, between Spain and Portugal in the South. 

CEO's difficult decision.

    It was back in Sherkin, in July 2015, that I started writing this blog, and an idea of what was in my head may be found in the September post of that year, On Sailing the Gannetsway, after a cruise to Scotland. We sailed back to the Guadiana then, gave the hull some more attention in Olhão, but on the way home in 2016, off Nazaré in Portugal, I took the difficult decision to put the boat ashore and get to the bottom of those leaks.

 This involved taking the fuel tanks and engine out, also much of the cockpit, which was itself in poor shape. What we found was not pretty. There were many cracked ribs, and indeed in some places there was not a lot holding the planking to the keelson, especially under the cockpit where the worst leak had been. Only the water pressure was keeping them together, and when we trod on the planking, we could look through the gap between them to the ground!

After a few days cleaning out the filthy, oily bilge, I decided to take up with an old dream of a truly autonomous sailing boat, with some kind of electric drive. We launched into the project with enthusiasm, but.... Nearly a decade later I have a sound boat, but we are not much further ahead with the electric drive, all my available funds having gone into the renovation.

Alec Lammas and Stephen Colsman from Germany laminated many new frames, which we renailed with myself holding the dolly on the outside of the hull.

At that stage I was hoping to re-caulk the hull and vamoose, but concluded it would be difficult to do a good job. One thing led to another. Some of the steel floors, which hold the planking to the keel, were in poor shape. Fortunately Steve Morris, my old shipwright buddy from Kilrush (and originally from New Zealand), came and made a whole new set of them. He has become very well known for his work on wooden boats, including the Jeannie Johnston, and the Dublin Bay 21s which he has built, and I was very lucky to have his help and support for this entire project.

 

    

Steve and Alec thinking about Alec's ideas for an electric motor.

 

                                                 Steve also put in a couple of new planks that electrolysis had got at, but otherwise the acajou planks were in splendid shape. However we decided to rout out everything between them and glue in splines (strips of hardwood) between them, despite the immense labour involved. At one point, I had a Russian and a Ukrainian on the job, the Ukrainian having been wounded fighting the Russians. Poor bloke wasn't really fit for the job and didn't last, but Anatole the Russian, who had fled the 'mafia state' years ago, became a great stalwart for the Anna M. He had come from the shores of Lake Baikal in Siberia, and lives at Nazaré in a boat that he built himself. 

    It was indeed lucky we had him, because routing out between the planks and gluing in the splines was an immense labour, along with sanding them off. 

    We could have gone for varnishing or painting those lovely planks, but I didn't fancy maintaining that in my old age, and decided to go for an epoxy skin....

Firstly two layers of sheet glassfibre with epoxy...

 

Lulu from Belfast icing the cake,

then comes the icing on the cake, loads of epoxy fattened up with microballoons and colloidal silica,- 

and Toly (Anatole) on the job.

 

 

We ended up with two different batches, and colours, of microballoons...,

but it was all the same when she was painted!

 

Meanwhile, a lot of work went on inside the hull, with the rebuilding of the cockpit and the cabin. I had my own ideas about all that, more with practicality in mind than anything else. Instead of huge cockpit underseat lockers, used mainly for carrying spare cans of diesel and other junk, and a hell-hole under the cockpit with very difficult access to the steering etc, we now have two quarter berths, a more roomy saloon, and a smaller cockpit (I saw breaking seas fill the old one on a couple of occasions) with a bridge deck for steering.

   

The beautiful but somewhat rickety old wheel has been replaced by a functional metal one which drives the new hydraulic steering, so one can steer with some shelter on the bridge-deck and actually see what is in front of the boat. One had to stand on the deck aft to do so previously. I was delighted with the new set-up on the passage from Nazaré. The cockpit is also much better for fishing purposes!  Indeed the whole cabin is more basic now, but there are less fancy bits of gear to go wrong, the galley is much more liveable, the new heads functional, and the forecastle, though it has lost the second loo, has a work-bench and more space.

 

  John O'Mahoney of Belco Marine Electronics came out to spend a few days aboard rewiring the boat, and now, on the mooring here in Moaña, we have loads of power for domestic consumption. It would be great to pass the surplus into a battery bank for propulsion, but I do not imagine it would get us far! I am still hanging on to the original idea of using the power of the wind through the sails and the propellor for this. 

    If tied up in a marina of course it should not be a problem to recharge, and there is the possibility of a little diesel generator, but I tend to think the real answer will be some kind of fuel cells (hydrogen, methanol, ethanol, ammonia?) It's all of course more complex than Alec and I bargained for initially. Nonetheless, if we just wait for some top-down solution, we are likely to be waiting too long. God knows, oil could be three times the price it is now this time next year, and anyway I am an old man in a hurry. Eightieth birthday this coming November! 

    Just one other facet of the renovation, which has taken a good deal of effort lately, is that of the rig. Apart from the forestay, the standing rigging had all been up since before I owned it, and way longer than is recommended for stainless steel, which indeed I regard as a somewhat unreliable and brittle material.

For instance, the stainless steel rod to which the baby forestay was attached just parted on our recent passage. Besides, all that rigging was both a lot of weight aloft and above all, prohibitably expensive to replace. In one of many strokes of good fortune, Ian Major, originally from South Africa but having built his boat in England's West Country, turned up and parked his boat beside the Anna M, and he had used the plaited Dyneema synthetic rope for his rigging, which is extremely strong and easy to neatly splice. 

    I bought two coils of Dyneema and Ian helped me to set it up for the lateral shrouds.I bought some galvanised chain at the agricultural coop for the downhauls, which Alec derided but is supposed to have 1.5 ton breaking strain, though my big bolt cutters can cut it, which is very handy. I have left the stainless steel fore and aft stays, which are very heavy and at present carry sails with hanks. If I can ever afford it, the whole suit of sails will be overhauled.

    I have already spent way more than I should have on this boat, but what are old men for, if not for dreaming dreams? Besides sails and autonomous drives, I dream of a whole new Christian civilisation, if only we can get through the coming few years,- a much gentler, slower and more organic civilisation, with everyone more self-reliant and responsible, with open and accountable institutions. 

    The EU for instance is vital, but must take subsidiarity much more seriously. We should be encouraging regionalism, Western, Central, Eastern and Mediterranean being obvious starting points. I am an enthusiast for a Western region centred on the 'Celtic triangle' of Ireland, Brittany and Galicia, - by no means exclusively! Cracking this problem of how to power small craft seems a pretty good place to start,- we are talking of rebuilding the whole culture, but what could be more basic than navigating that old Bay of Biscay, as people did for ages before we found out what hydro-carbons could do,- and how destructive reliance on them could become! 

    Meanwhile, there is the best of fun to be had juggling such problems, but for me there is a bit of a race on, between someone coming along with a decent offer for the Anna M, and the other possibility of a partner coming along who wants to use her as a research, development and demonstration platform for alternative power. I tried in Portugal, and continue to do so in Ireland, but am currently focussing on Galicia and Brittany.

    Meanwhile, it was a huge relief to get the dear old boat sailing again, saying goodbye with grateful thanks to Nazaré. The passage to Moaña was splendid, and it was fantastic to find a mooring and a friendly welcome here. I get the impression that these are real sea people, who positively enjoy looking out at a wooden schooner moored off their town. I want her to repeat the trick, with a new electric drive, all over the Gannetsway!

Off Moaña

I am writing this aboard, off Moaña, hoping that I might find someone interested in this project, for instance at the Centro Tecnolóxico do Mar in Vigo or the University of Vigo's Centro de Investigación Marina. I am also pursuing interest in Brittany.

    Very many people have been involved in the decade-long saga of getting this far. It was of course complicated by covid and all the mayhem that went with it, and also by myself undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. However I learnt a lot and made many friends, and looking back on it, it was all good experience. I'm dubious about thanking everyone by name, because there will be some left out. In fact I will save it for another post, dedicated especially to them all!