May Day!

It's now five years ago, in May 2017, when I set out to sail home to Ireland from the Rio Guadiana, and half way up the Portuguese coast, had to admit that it was not safe to proceed north across Biscay with the 'Anna M' making so much water that the bilge pump started up every ten minutes, taking about five to empty the bilge. When Lent came round again this year, it seemed a good time to take a break from shovelling yet more precious words into the bottomless pit, or maybe I should say the fire, of the internet, like so many dead leaves. Lent is a time for digging deep, to see if the dead looking branches can really burst into life again, or will they be like those dead old branches on the tops of our trees in County Clare, which the winter gales have indeed killed. 

Words that fail to produce action are just like those dead leaves! It has sometimes seemed like that lately, both for my old boat and indeed my own body. I felt dreadful in the early part of this year; on top of covid, my whole lumbar region was in a state of misery, after the radio-therapy I had last year for prostate cancer. Still, as I hoped, things got better the more I got into work again, and along with the usual homoeopathy, a course of thalassotherapy here in the seawater baths on the beach in Nazaré did me a great deal of good. In fact this is my third session here this year and since my last post. 

Thank God Steve Morris spent a fortnight here and finished the new planks, (thank God also he is on the end of Whatsapp to give advice and direction!) and I had my good friends Ger and Canice out here doing sessions too. But would we ever make that old boat seaworthy again?

Canice stripping the old paint.

Would Alec get the electric drive together? Would I be physically able to rise to the challenge? Are our aspirations nothing but fantasies? Can humanity indeed overcome the challenges the world is facing? Well, Alec and I have declared a race, to see who can get their bit done first; will it be the hull or the drive?  Will we get it together this year at last? Will the aspirations that we have been chuntering on about finally 'make it':- to get the lovely old boat seaworthy again, to develop our own sail/electric drive, to set up a company producing custom-buit units for small craft, indeed to foster an approach to cruising suitable for our times? 

(I can't say I'm sorry to see a few of those super-yachts hitting the rocks, but I hope taxpayers are not going to end up with the cost of maintaining the damn things for God knows how long. Take them out and sink them, I say!)

What a five years it has been! It turned out I was most fortunate to have the old boat in a safe berth that was not breaking the bank.  My scribbles took off in all kinds of directions that had little to do with sailing; yet I hope remained - I can hardly say 'rooted' or 'grounded' in the sea - let's say true to the spirit of the sea. A sailor must live with that special, vital and immediate imperative to discern where safety and where danger lie; what is in fact a deception or lie, and what is true. He shares 'the common sacrament of mankind' with all those who succumb to the lure of the sea, for whatever reason. He will recoil in horror at those who would deliberately leave any human being at peril on the sea, and hence if he is true to his calling he believes in the brotherhood of all mankind. 

(Forgive me, sisters, but I can see no way to rejecting the old-fashioned idea that the male gender can and should be used inclusively; to do so seems to me to make language impossibly cumbersome and unwieldy, such as sailors do not like.)

The lies that I have been busy lambasting, with regard for instance to Brexit and the covid vaccines, I might even mention gender-bending of one kind or another, now seem in danger of being overwhelmed by the effects of an even more massive lie, that seems to have engulphed a huge swath of this same mankind in a poisonous fog; I refer of course to the crazy notion that bombing, shelling, murdering, raping and generally tyranising a whole nation can possibly be imagined as constituting their 'liberation'.

While I am at it, in a degree of despair as to the state of this human race or at least of our modern civilisation, I am reimagining the 'Anna M' as possibly a kind of survival capsule, which after all is what boats are about,- surviving in that frequently hostile element, the sea, so often a kind of 'no man's land'. Yet paradoxically its waves constitute perhaps the most fundamental and vital physical medium of communication on Earth. Navigare necesse est! I count Fiona and I lucky that our nine children are not hopelessly scattered, and are mainly clumped in two groups on the west and east coasts of Ireland, with the exceptions still being accessible by sea, even the ones who look like heading for Florida. It looks like I might get an excuse for stretching my notion of 'sailing the Gannetsway' once again! Anyway I love the idea of a craft that can sail around between them all without even having to buy and burn any fuel!

So anyway, for the last lap, with a hull massively strengthened with many new laminated ribs, new steel floors (attaching the keel to the hull) and some new planks, we are now down to the little matter of making sure that no water can enter by way of the cracks and holes in it! We have to fill all the holes, rout out the seams between the planks and glue splines into them, sand it all off and apply a skin of epoxy and glass cloth.

It is a great deal of work to be done this month. Now it is the first of May and everywhere the leaves are blooming, another summer is opening up. I am hoping to leave the hull fit to float when I go home in five weeks' time! As it happens I have a Russian and an Ukrainian on the job. Anatole, the Russian, I met on the pontoon when I first arrived, - he lives with his wife in a little sailing boat that he built himself. I have chatted with him now  and again since. Needless to say, he thinks Putin is mad and worse. Anyway he turned up at the 'Anna M' asking would I like him to work for me? Sure, he made a great job of his boat and we know he can work with resin. He it was who introduced the Ukrainian, Valerii, who did that routing, but sadly their relationship is strained, understandably enough, by the present war and God knows what. Valerii has a family still

in Ukraine; he got a nasty wound himself fighting the Russians back in 2016, for which he is still getting treatment here in Portugal. Maybe I am being paranoid myself, but I don't feel inclined to put their photos up on the internet at this stage....

So another dark cloud hangs over us. Putin has clearly revealed himself as a crook of the worst order, whose main preoccupation it would seem is to avoid being held to account for his crimes. Like all such crooks, he defiles every worthwhile thing he touches, trying desperately to use them to cloak his fear and self-loathing. Of course, any liar grabs at any bit of truth he can lay hands on, and thereby demeans it. Personally I dislike the 'liberal agenda' as much as any reasonable person could, and will agree that it goes with a certain cultural colonialism. However there's a lot more to Western culture than that, and anyway surely Russia is big enough to cope with it! 

Putin's notion that we Europeans hate Russia or would want to take it over, while indeed we may regard it as culturally belonging to Europe, is the paranoia of one who can only maintain his position by fear, and has to ruthlessly suppress opposition and dissent. Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, Tchaikovski, Rachmaninov and all the other great Russians who have contributed so much to our European culture must be turning in their graves, that things have come to such a pass. However one good thing Putin has achieved is to mightily push along the agenda for escaping dependence on fossil fuel, and thus contributed to our little effort to develop our own electric drive. 

It takes some effort alright, especially for an ould fella like myself; yet meanwhile it is a great pleasure to be getting to know Portugal better. I have to say I've become very fond of it, and the place suits me very well. They were complaining about the lack of rain last time I was here, but it rained quite a lot while I was enjoying the good weather in Ireland, and then it settled the moment I returned to find Portugal bursting with growth. My favourite path for a Sunday afternoon walk, behind the Praia do Norte, is blooming with wild flowers, and the birds in the pine trees are full of song. How beautifully they go with the everlasting som do mar!