vagabond. sea-dweller. diarist. wreck.
https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/about
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
– Anne Carson
[from Sleep Chains, in Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera, 2005]
Another positive update to artist Liz Cullinane's 's appeal for us, as we haul our old, sea-worn boat ashore for repairs and overdue maintenance ahead of a long voyage east, across the Mediterranean, towards a possible opportunity to gain temporary residence (and health care!).
Please support us if you're able, even just by spreading the word.
The 'poniente' bares its teeth: gusts of force 9 across the dock, rivulets of Saharan sand along Wrack's deck.
Looking ahead:
North Atlantic pilot chart for May, including the Mediterranean.
Our Swedish dock neighbour, Peter, aboard his classic 32-foot Laurin Koster, Pinoseed, re-installing his diesel engine today after a long, fraught repair, with the help of two other Swedish sailors.
We still welcome whatever help we can get, even if it's just to broaden awareness of our appeal. We are deeply grateful for everything!
An update has just been posted to Liz Cullinane's #gofundme appeal on our behalf.
It has taken five months and the generosity of all our friends and supporters here but Wrack will, finally, be lifted out of the water in Almerimar, on Monday, 21st April, to spend a week ashore for repairs, routine maintenance, and antifouling.
Barring unpleasant surprises, she'll be re-floated on 29th April. All my wife and I will need to do then is take on provisions and around 80 litres of fuel and 120 litres of water, then sail a couple of short, ’shake-down' passages north-eastwards along the Spanish coast, before pointing Wrack’s bow eastwards into deeper waters and a long, non-step leg across the entire western Mediterranean, towards the Aegean.
Thank you, everyone, for having donated (many more than once) over the last couple of months, and over the last few years. We are now *this* close. to being able to untether not just from the shore but also from years of humbling reliance on this community.
"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."
– Malcolm Lowery
[from his 1947 novel Under The Volcano]
@neauoire And learn how to use them so you can be there for others.
The Pittwater at dusk, captured by my son in 2007 from the verandah of a small, renovated, late-50s, fibro' cottage in which my wife and I lived with our three kids on the large, sheltered inlet's southern shore, at Careel Bay, north of Sydney.
Three generations of my family had lived around this bay, off and on, for over 60 years. None live there now.
Photo by Finn L. O'Hanlon.
"I read somewhere that the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once argued that if two people dream the same dream, it isn’t a dream anymore — it signifies the existence of an alternative reality…
"The insane always occupy multiple realities: their internal narratives are always different to their actual or external experiences. For me, that can be complicated by the fact that, when I was unmedicated, which was for most of my 49 years, the character I adopted for one experience was very different to another that I adopted for a different experience somewhere else. The process was so compulsive that I would, for extended periods, devise a complex network of different characters and different lives in different parts of the world, with different relationships, then live intermittently in and between them, while blending them all into a fluid mutability that had the parallel narratives and multi-tiered options of a computer game. And the game engine was an invisible ‘real’ me, solitary, sentient and more than a little crazy."
– from a notebook (West Hollywood, 2004)