Fighting the Fight

Back in Horseshoe Cottage with the wind and rain outside, we might ask ourselves why didn't we didn't stay below, enjoying the winter sunshine on the Guadiana? What I reply to myself, over and above the family and practical reasons, is that there is time enough for perfect peace in eternity; meanwhile, in the few short years remaining to me, there is perhaps some small contribution I can make to the battle of life, even if it is simply a matter of attending to it and suffering it. Once aboard my boat, it has a certain habit of drifting out of my ken like a cloud of smoke!

This weekend I find myself more interested in following the fortunes of the British Labour Party than I ever have been before. While I would have my reservations about Mr Corbyn as a potential leader, I follow his story with interest for the simple reason that he appears honest and largely, in his attitude to the Syrian war, correct. He currently appears to be fighting for his political life. I expect he will lose it, but that only increases my sympathy for him.

I'm going to paste below a piece that I have just written for the Brandsma Review. I found myself giving the controversy about all the forgoing a rather novel twist, setting it in the context of another cultural war....

Yours etc, Offended!

and why Jeremy Corbyn should be attended to.

I know a grandmother who got into trouble with her daughter-in-law lately for trying to tell her grandchild that he had been made by God. ‘Nonsense, don’t ever mention that stuff to him again. Jim and I made him!’

Some people are going one better, and insisting that they make themselves. The media seem to reckon that their consumers are getting bored with photos of homosexuals getting ‘married’; they’ve moved on to holding up transexuals for our admiration. I used to take transvestites in my stride, not without sympathy for the  poor confused individuals, but something has changed with the ‘transexual’ variety; they insist we all buy into their self-mutilating fantasy-life, along with the media, the UN, and all the great and good of the enlightened democracies.

That old killjoy Technology  may be spoiling the fun with its sex-prediction, but up until very lately the first Word that was said about us, the moment when we entered human society, was either ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’. A sane voice like that of Dale O’Leary in The Gender Agenda may add that ‘biological sex is not determined by external organs, but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female.’ That only confirms, should it really be necessary, that our sex is an objective fact, bestowing a particular kind of orientation which in a coherent person follows through our whole personality.

We got the Gender Agenda - it’s all only a ‘social construct’- stuff trotted out with depressing predictability from our own grand-daughter, just down from reading psychology at UCD. “Is that what they’ve been teaching you?” “Oh no, it’s just what I think.” Well I say, when such facts as those of our sex are dismissed as mere ‘social constructs’ which a person may change at will, then language loses its meaning, along with everything else; it is hard to find any basis for conversation within our own culture, and we are confronted with the death of a civilisation; if we value it, being offended may be rather too mild a reaction.

Martine Delaney, a transgender Green Party candidate in Tasmania’s Federal Election, has lodged an official complaint to the Anti-Discrimination Commission about a booklet produced by Australia’s Catholic bishops entitled Don’t Mess with Marriage. He claims it is ‘offensive, humiliating and insulting’. They’re all off to a ‘conciliation conference’. Da-di-da; it’s sad to see even the Aussies flailing about in such mire. Maybe Germaine Greer hit the appropriate response over in Melbourne, where she ruffled a lot of the politically correct feathers by remarking that “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock!”

But there is a lot more to the fantasy-life that we are expected to buy into than such matters as transexuals and homosexual marriage. I might mention the notion that the USA and western democracy embodies all that is good, and has some divine right to decide who shall be permitted to exist and who not. It’s not immediately obvious to me why a Mr Trump promising to “bomb the Hell out of Isis” should not be labelled a terrorist; actually he frightens me rather more than the Jihadis.

In point of fact it is neither easy to find an appropriate response to homosexuals, transexuals and their pc friends, nor to Jihadis intent on destroying Western civilisation in a different way. Hard enough as it is for the likes of us Brandsma readers, I imagine it is just about impossible to do so if one happens to be a young Moslem in the West, constantly exposed to put-downs of his religion while struggling with serious issues of identity; and if we ‘Christians’ in the West have lost the ability to communicate with each other, what possible hope is there for dialogue with them?

When one is comfortable and affluent, with all the props for one’s ego that could be desired, it is very difficult to realise how important even warped religion can be to a person who has nothing else going for them. One is threatening to deprive them of their very operating system. It is not at all surprising when their anger and confusion spills over way beyond taking offence and into terrorism, and if we want to see an end to it, we had better start by getting the planks out of our own eyes. We might make some kind of a start by distancing ourselves from the overgrown adolescents who thought it was clever to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. In Ireland, we of all people should understand the dynamics of ‘terrorism’. Suppose the RAF had been sent to bomb the Bogside in order to get rid of the IRA? We might recall what it was like being Irish in England, when the Provos were on the go.  Pcdom is in danger of forbidding  that we should recognise any reason or humanity in Moslems.

Presidents Hollande and Obama’s rhetoric about ‘destroying Isis’ is pretty much on a par with Mr Trump’s. I find myself again going where I might expect only opposition, to the left-wing of the British Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, to find a sane voice on the matter. As he said in his response to Mr Cameron’s call to arms: ‘The PM did not set out a coherent strategy, coordinated through the UN, for the defeat of ISIS. Nor has he been able to explain what credible and acceptable ground forces could retake and hold territory freed from ISIS control by an intensified air campaign. In my view, the PM has been unable to explain the contribution of additional UK bombing to a comprehensive negotiated political settlement of the Syrian civil war, or its likely impact on the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.’

That the political/media elite do their best to rubbish Mr Corbyn only confirms the impression that he is someone who is really trying to see the truth of the matter. Almost alone among Western statesmen, he puts his priority where it belongs, on putting an end to the crucifixion of Syria. What more jets there are supposed to contribute to security in Paris or London is beyond me. The only justification for military force is to secure the Peace, and the question to be asked about any proposed use of it is this:- Is it primarily going to secure the Peace or amplify the Chaos? The more remote and depersonalised the force involved, the more likely it is to do the latter.

One immediate responsibility of us Catholics is to give the lie to those seeking to promote a populist agenda of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and war between Christians and Moslems. As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this article, ‘the West’ has anyway just about lost its credibility as the bearer of Christian civilisation. The future is there to be secured by building dialogue and trust, and the less bombers of all kinds have to do with it, the better, as indeed our Popes have ceaselessly tried to make clear.

The ground is clearly shifting under our feet, and if we are to build a new civilisation on the ashes of the old, there’s no knowing where we will find allies.  I would suggest the first move is to use language carefully, recognising that words mean something beyond what we would like them to mean; but if people insist on using them purely on their own terms, and interpret life only in terms of their own interests or obsessions, it is impossible for others to relate to them, and it is I’m afraid too bad if they choose to take offence. They might possibly learn a thing or two from Catholics - we are only too accustomed to being insulted, and worse!

Such misuse of language is the beginning of the process of dehumanisation that enables evil, which is so little understood in our contemporary Western world, to flourish in all its many forms. It is vital that our words should represent, not what we may think politically expedient or to our own advantage, as indeed most have been schooled to do, but rather our best effort at speaking truth. In the beginning was the Word. The good news is that the little flowers of truth pop up in all kinds of unlikely places, and it is not that difficult to recognise them.  Forgetful of themselves, they are orientated to the sun! And the Word was with God.                                                                      

Joe Aston,       

27.11.2015

Season's end on the Uadi Ana.

Some people don't like going anywhere twice, for without the factor of novelty, they cannot vividly appreciate a place. Well, a place does indeed feel different the second time you go there, and I was in a way fearful that I would find the fairy kingdom of the Guadiana (from Arabic Uadi Ana) had lost some of its magic, with its fancy new metal perches all up along it. But we soon settled in, and five weeks whistled by there as we pottered about in great contentment.

The moon waxed and waned, as it sent the tides pulsing up and down the river; the bright stars circled overhead and the birds went about their business up and down the river, all in the same old dance together. They twitter and sing blissfully in the riverside trees at dusk, giving way as night falls to the chorus of crickets and tree-frogs, with the odd heron screeching and owl hooting. In late October there came some rain and wind to ruffle our feathers, then high pressure reasserted itself and chased the clouds again, as the hills turned green and the sun turned less fierce and more smiling!

The morning mist is often slow to clear, giving us time to say and sing some prayers and even browse the web for a while before the sun comes over the hill, chasing the mist, drying the night-time damp and calling us to work. 

I chip away at the lists of jobs-to-do; the worst was to replace the rusty exhaust manifold that I found to be caput. We are slowing down, as another year dies, but thoughts are turning to the new one, and personally I feel good for another ten years or so of sailing, with the help of God! Fiona too is enjoying the life, and her company is very good. She however feels the sense of being in a kind of no-man's-land less positively than I do.

As well as being on water and between two strange lands, at this season, between one year and the next, one is in a bit of a temporal void. Memories well up from the past. A converted Irish fishing boat, the Ros Alither, has pulled into the river. She was built in Killybegs, the classic BIM (Irish Sea Fisheries Board) build, like all the Ros boats and our old Eiscir Riada, of which I became the proud skipper/owner in the late 1970s. 

When those little ships were being built with pride and joy in the BIM boatyards in Killybegs, Arklow, Dingle and Baltimore, and owned and crewed in the same tight-knit communities, with a sense of purpose and optimism, feeling themselves effectively supported by the State, what a different scenario was presented by the Irish fishing industry to the grisly scene evoked, exaggerated as it may be, in the recent Guardian article Revealed: trafficked migrant workers abused in Irish Fishing industry!

Of course the fish stocks were much better than now and the markets improving too.The white-fish boats in Killybegs had a fine time of it, even a fairly steady routine, fishing Monday to Thursday, servicing boat and gear on Friday, Saturday about the house, Sunday, going to Mass and a Gaelic football game in the afternoon. I vividly recall one crisp winter's day when I went out with 'Forty' Murrin on the Ros Alainn, for a day's seining at the back of St John's Point. We were back in Killybegs with a hundred boxes of fish before nightfall!

A Leprachaun postcard of Killybegs in the 195/60s.

Too good to last, you may well say! Once the bankers and the Government start to smell money, there's trouble ahead, especially in the context of an explosion of technology. Big loans were handed out to the select few. A class of millionaires emerged, while the majority of fishermen had to find work in factories or whatever. Not that they were able to make a steady living there. The women of course had to become wage-slaves as well.... Wonderful liberation!

Small boats were practically eliminated, markets rocketed upwards and then collapsed, places like Donegal Bay became fish deserts. The BIM yards were first nationalised and then mostly closed, while the big new trawlers were built abroad. Those fishermen who survived seemed to be serving the bankers and the machines, rather than the other way round. Needless to say, they mostly no longer found time to go to Mass on Sunday; perhaps that constituted some kind of 'tipping point'?

What conservation measures there were proved ineffective, while politicians collaborated in the process, with the odd brown envelope thrown in to encourage them. Some of us had dreams of doing things differently - Small is Beautiful and all that. Were we just impractical utopians? Maybe. Humanity, it seems, has to learn the hard way; but can we even be bothered to learn at all? Just how hard does it have to be? Well, I did not prevail with my ideas, but maybe I should be thankful for that too; it's hard to see how life could be better for us right now!

Delivering supplies

So long as the politicians manage to keep those pensions coming, it is hard to complain; but let us just remember that many of our fellow human beings have little or nothing coming; they have nothing to lose and are in danger of inheriting a bombed out world. If they rise up and try to destroy us in their anger, it is not good enough to respond in kind. I am writing this in the wake of the latest outrage in Paris, and I am distressed at much of the response as well of course at the murderous acts themselves.

Those crazy Moslems also have a story that must be listened to, and if we want Western civilisation to prevail, we must firstly attend to our own very serious shortcomings, and secondly make the effort to understand them. Maybe we just might be then able to make a wonderful new civilisation together, that will enhance the world rather than destroy it. Indeed there are many traces in the landscape and the towns of Andalucia (Al Andalus) of an Islamic culture worthy of considerable respect!

Fiona in Castellejos.

Laranjeiras

Last weekend, we took a spin down the river, spending a night alongside the pontoon at Laranjeiras, behind the riverside trees in the photo below.

Just another little village; it doesn't look much, and passing up and down the river on previous occasions, we had not given it much thought; but what a treat it turned out to be! The other side of our pontoon was a little fishing boat:

A short walk to the main road, and we came here:

Taking the road to the right up into the hills behind the village, here are some of the sights:

Fish, goats, pigs (did you spot them?), hens, olives, grapes, vegetables, not to mention the shrine with the little old lady saying the rosary, (did you notice her?)... what else does one need, along with the fragrant wild herbs on the hillsides? What a pleasure does to just breath in the atmosphere!

This is much the way of life that Our Blessed Lord grew up with, and from which he drew so many images, to such devastating effect, appreciating the perspectives of both the farmer and the fisherman. By His life, death and resurrection, He was able to interpret the basic rhythms of that life, and alone out of all humanity, He was able to open the way out of its apparent claustrophobia and final futility.

It's not that He was indifferent to or inappreciative of the city; but when a man sets off on the dusty road to find his destiny there, it is well for him to keep those country rhythms in his heart. No doubt the knowledge that spring comes after winter, that the seeds' death brings the harvest, helped Him as a man to believe in His own resurrection after death, when He tramped the dusty road to Jerusalem. 

It is well for us all to participate in 'the country life' when we can; I'm grateful that Fiona and I took drastic action to do so years ago. At least we should treasure the memory of it all when we can't, and do what we can to encourage it.

And so the matter stands with the nations. Let them value their 'peasants'; let them protect them from the predations of the greedy, and not tax them in order to finance folly; let them not devalue the money by printing more and more of it in order to build castles in the air; and above all let them realise that when we lose the ability to situate our lives in the context of death and sacrifice in order to rise again for that Final Harvest or Great Catch, then we are lost indeed.

Catholics of course help themselves to do so by celebrating the Holy Sacrifice whenever they can; and I think it tells even in the atmosphere of that little restaurant where we rounded off our few hours in Laranjeiras, with a delicious and very reasonable meal featuring their delicious porco preto, reared on the hillside, cooked and served simply but with love! 

Boat People on the Rio Guadiana

I fished the mooring up out of the mud easily enough. It feels different this year, mainly the difference between a new place and one you already know, I suppose. We were also here a bit earlier last year, and I think the weather was better. Also, we had a fellow Irish West Coast man nearby, and several people preparing to cross the Atlantic, who are missed. 

However we soon settled back into the river life. The temperature is perfect, neither too hot nor cold, and the calm and sunny days are all the more appreciated after a couple of windy and wet ones. There is no shortage of things to do; I always remember Molly Bevan's saying that if you manage to get one job done every day beyond mere survival, you're going ahead! Here, with heavy rain forecast, I am looking to fix deck leaks, and that fitting for the running back-stay had a fractured bolt as well as inadequate bedding- It's surprising how quickly a morning goes by with that sort of lark. 

I also spent a lot of time simply moving the filter for the cooling-water intake. There wasn't one at all when I came to the Anna M, apart from a perforated plate on the outside of the hull. That may well have been adequate; I only have to clean the filter about once a year, but the fact is I find quite a few little bits of this and that in it, which are surely better there that in the heat-exchanger or the Jabsco pump. I bunged that filter in a handy press, under pressure at the time, but now want to use that press for an ice-box. I'm thinking of putting a wood stove in where the old fridge is. I am very lucky that Fiona does most of the work of boat-keeping!

Besides the jobs on the boat,  there is this writing lark, and of course the dreaded internet takes up a lot of our time. It works well here, via our Vodafone dongle. Technically, they seem to be a good outfit, but I find dealing with the money side of it difficult. At present, a whole lot of payments we have made by internet banking seem to have gone missing. I am still getting to know my way round this Chromebook set-up, but am pleased enough. There seems to be more shape and coherence to Google than other internet giants, and I feel less manipulated and more in control.

Other activities include praying and dreaming and just looking at the river life around us. There is a funny kind of autumnal spring going on at present; it's a still and perfect morning after those three days of wind and rain, which have freshened the parched land up no end. As the sun came above the high hill opposite us, it lit up thousands of moths flying high above the river, shining against the dark hill-side. You cannot see them at all against the bright blue sky. They were zooming around in an ecstatic burst of life; but oh, so short! All of a sudden they began crashing down onto the surface of the river.

Now and again we go ashore, mainly to shop and maybe walk. Here is Fiona in Alcoutim, Portugal, with Sanlucar, Spain, behind her: -

This living in our boat, a little bit of Irish territory perched between two other countries, along with the fuss about Scotland and Catalonia, has jogged me into thinking about the idea of ‘The Nation’. It does rather shape our lives, and there's no better place for reflecting on it, as old man river drifts by regardless.

So long as peace and security are maintained in our part of the world (and money still arrives in our bank-account), for my part I’m usually inclined to be content, along with perhaps a majority, to let a minority of people wrangle and agonise about these things. However, there are so many people in the world with no peace and security, no pension, not even freedom of movement, thought or belief, nor even the right to life itself! Maybe we had better consider more attentively what ‘the Nation’ really means to us, and how those goods might be more widely shared and solidly secure.

Perhaps the most accessible basis for the concept is as an extension of the family. A viable nation is a kind of magic circle within which hopefully everyone can at least understand each other, even when they disagree, and they build up a sense of shared mutual responsibility and loyalty. But it should also be remembered how fundamental to such concepts are the Bible stories of a chosen people, on pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God.

There does indeed exist a visceral tendency to erect myths and shared narratives, with varying degrees of truth attached to them, in order to reinforce our human solidarity. I think these myths go bad in the absence of true religion. Anyway they are enacted and reinforced with all sorts of bizarre rituals, some innocent enough, such as rugby matches. Then there are the more sinister enactments, the warfare for which the rugby matches are perhaps a substitute, and which if anything has taken a more sinister turn with the annihilation of perceived enemies in distant places by operatives looking at screens in comfortable offices. A generation reared on computer games seem to be carrying their power fantasies over into the little matter of some distant ‘terrorist’s’ life or death, or that of anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of his phone … in the name of their nation! 

Lies always do damage to solidarity. The better the national myths are grounded in reality and justice, the more secure will the nation be. Although Pilate’s famous question to Christ - Truth, what is that? - represents the prevalent attitude among the worldly powerful, national narratives are in fact generally founded on territorial, racial and cultural realities, even when, as is so frequently the case, they are expressed in the terms of the victorious in bitter conflicts of the past. The fact that the myths are at best one-sided and frequently downright false is raised by the disaffected at their peril.

The tendency of states to become totalitarian needs to be balanced by an effective transcendent language of justice and truth, such as is generally conceived as a religion. Deprived of such terms of reference, nations have a dreadful propensity to fall back on finding enemies or aliens in order to bolster their identity; this seems to be indeed a psychological necessity, and the only way out is to rediscover those hardy perennials, Heaven and Hell!

How can we assess the aspirations to statehood of the many suppressed nations who have their own story to tell? When we have a genuine shared grasp of justice and truth, we can afford to be more relaxed about the whole business. In the absence of such spiritual cohesion, the process of endless jockeying for power and disintegration will be more acute. Usually the disruption of changing existing arrangements is costly, and beware the minority who profit from it, aspiring maybe to be bigger fish in a smaller pond! In fact provided the people can communicate with and respect each other, a degree of cultural and linguistic plurality enriches a nation-state.

As a Catholic of English background, I maintain the conviction that the narrative of national emancipation and freedom achieved by the Reformation was very far from the truth, and that the main beneficiaries of it were the members of the plutocratic establishment centered on the king, who set themselves up by robbing the church and enforced their rule with a reign of terror. Such has proved to be the true story of all too many revolutions and ‘liberation movements’.

Apart from those who heroically resisted, the mass of English people acquiesced only to show their disaffection by further using the protestant ethos to set up whatever new denominational identity that they could find to suit their temperament. With the Church suppressed or fragmented, the stage was set for the British Empire, empires generally being based upon an attempt to combine the functions of state and religion.

In Great Britain, firstly the Christian religion was largely ditched, and then the Empire, in favour of a narrative of technological and material progress, which while apparently evading the old problems, in fact finds itself nowadays bereft of coherence or even any terms of reference other than those dictated by the market, much as its fundamentalist adherents try to establish them in terms of ‘objective scientific fact’.

Whether the high priests, the politicians and technocrats and media bosses, try to disguise them with such ‘facts and statistics’, or simply invoke ‘the national interest’, the criteria for allowing or refusing access to the magic circle are in fact predominantly economic. Nationality provides a useful fig-leaf in order to justify levels of discrimination that would not be tolerated within a genuine nation. Ask the refugees about it, or those living in terror of drones visiting destruction from the sky!

Such is the situation we are stuck with, and will continue to be stuck with until that narrative of material and economic progress is exhausted and finally breaks down. We try to survive in this awkward situation by indulging in all kinds of technologically enhanced fantasy to an unprecedented degree. It may however be possible to make that breakdown less traumatic by anticipating it, and preparing in whatever small way we can for a new paradigm.

We have to begin by jettisoning the fantasies, ‘smashing the idols’, and setting about reconnecting with our forebears, with a history that has a future hope as well as a past, with physical reality and not least, with our own nature and bodies and our immediate friends and relations and, in the broadest sense, our neighbours; we may thus find it possible to rescue the rather beautiful related ideas of family and of nation, and even the family of nations, might I add, the Church!

Olhao to the Guadiana

After a couple of days chilling off Culatra, we headed across the lagoon to Olhao for supplies. It is a practical, fishy place, but has very little room for visiting yachts. Nonetheless I have never failed to squeeze into the little anchorage off the markets, even if only in a rather uncomfortably tight berth that one can only chance for a while in favourable conditions.

There's a big long rather dilapidated pontoon there, but they won't let you tie up to it. Well, at least it costs nothing to anchor, and the value and the produce in the markets are excellent.

This is how the John Dory (or something like) which I bought came home!

It seems that the Portuguese haven't gone overboard with big new boats, but there still are plenty of men fishing in their good old wooden ones.

 That's a big boat by the standards of Culatra, which hums with outboards day and night; and of course the pier-heads are always manned!

                                                               We left them to it, early next morning,

and said goodbye to the Cabo de Santa Maria for another while.These photos by the way are Fiona's;

the old man has his hands pretty full with these light, variable winds, and a spot of fishing himself too. Caught another little bonito this day, and four very respectable horse mackerel; enough to feed us for another couple of days. Ended up with a fresh south-westerly that took us all the way up the river to the Foz do Odeleite, against the tide.

They've dredged the Foz (Mouth) do Guadiana by the way, which is now supposed to carry a minimum of 3.5m, so it means we don't have to worry about entering at low water any more. Didn't fancy their other idea of progress though; they're marking the channel up from the bridge with steel posts, mostly painted black so far, except for the last ones that they've put in around Laranjeiras, suitably resplendent in red and green. Many of them are practically in the middle of the river, and I narrowly avoided hitting one. Someone seems to have got through to them that they are dangerous, unpainted, and maybe even that it is easier to paint them before they put them up than after. No darn use for small craft anyway; just another thing to look out for. They're probably thinking of cruise ships or something. Dodgy affair, progress; sometimes I prefer  going backwards! Not however back down the river; we dropped anchor as the breeze and the daylight failed.

Ria de Arosa to Culatra

O Nazareno was back in the church, with St Peter outside keeping the keys -

We wandered up to the woods behind the town, taking leave of sweet Galicia for another while. 

That evening the fiesta ended even more spectacularly than it had begun.

Time to think of the sea again, not quite in the same way as the guys on this tuna seiner!

I got Fiona back into it with a gentle afternoon sail to the Islas Cies, considerably tried as we anchored there by the fact that we were wasting a lovely fair breeze.

However it was still blowing in the morning, 

and Fiona put up with staying out the next night, as we powered down the Portuguese coast at up to 8 knots. The breeze died the next morning (24th September), so we went into Nazare rather than spend a second night out.

      I had passed it by in the past, thinking of the famous waves that the surfing dudes love, but actually it is a very good harbour. It is quite extraordinary how the massive breakers just across the bay don't affect the harbour overmuch. There is great interest on the quay at what this nice old boat has brought it -

Thankfully the swell had at last settled anyway, so next day we were able to enjoy the light breeze that took us the 26 miles or so down the coast to Peniche. We anchored in the harbour there, and pressed on with a better north wind in the morning to Cascais, with the sky clearing and the sun getting hot again. Still I wasn't inclined to linger, even though there was hardly any wind as we rounded Cabo Espichel -

and so came to Sesimbra-

It was gentle sailing or motoring all the way round Cape St Vincent, anchoring for a night at Sines and then at Sagres- 

A very sedate sail at 2 knots or less took us on to Lagos, for our usual date with Tony Simmonds at the Adega Marina. Yummy!

A fine breeze however took us on to Culatra,

and even jizzed up the fishing line enough to hook a very bonito bonito, even if he was small. That's the size that suits us, actually!

And so here we are chilling at Culatra again- 

The dull sky last night gave way to wind and rain this morning, but it's warm all the time and one knows it will soon blow over. The temperature is just perfect here at this time of year....