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!

Donate to Support a Voyage to Find Home, organized by Liz Cullinane

Hello, my name is Liz Cullinane and for the past four years, I have been inspired to raise… Liz Cullinane needs your support for Support a Voyage to Find Home

gofundme.com (www.gofundme.com)

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]

#theLibrary

@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)

A 'feel better' story from Larry & Harry, innovative Danish manufacturer of the Bullitt cargo bike:

Rhino, Namibia, from the series Land of Nothingness, 2016.

Photo by Maroesjka Lavigne.

"By tradition, a voyage is never described as being ‘to’ a destination, only ‘towards’ it, as if anything more definite might tempt fate..."

There's already so much still unresolved (and unresolvable) about Given's and my life these days that when anyone asks us where we're heading next, we just tell them, "East."

We do have somewhere more specific in mind — this photo, by our son Finn O'Hanlon, offers a hint.

"That the police chose to forcibly enter a Quaker space—a site known throughout history for its deep commitment to peace and nonviolence—is both alarming and telling. These young people were not disrupting the peace. They were enacting it.

"We live in a time where the greatest threats to our future go unchallenged by those in power, while those who speak out are increasingly met with suspicion, hostility, and force. When the state begins to treat moral concern as criminal intent, we should all be paying close attention."

– Brian Eno

https://www.stopwar.org.uk/article/brian-eno-statement-on-arrests-at-a-quaker-meeting-house/

Dusk: two yachts at anchor off Cabo de Gata, Spain.

Photo by Eduard Niemi.

“The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place.”

– Arthur Ransome

[from Racundra's Third Cruise, 1922]

for @rek and @neauoire

#theLibrary

Snow on the Sierra Nevada mountains, el mar de plástico, and the littoral of the Alboran Sea, all beneath a clear spring sky, this afternoon.

"Living on the water draws in a fringe group: eccentric, creative, handy types, such as inventors, artists, engineers, and fishers. They take pride in catching their food, rebuilding their engines, and living outside the mainstream..."

– Laura Trethewey

[from The Imperiled Ocean, 2019]

for @jcalpickard

https://lithub.com/river-nomads-liveaboards-canal-dwellers-and-other-people-of-the-water/

@neauoire April/May before the fierece Meltemi (northerly) of the summer months sets in. We would sail via southen Sicily, then up the Aegean — few stops. Given would come because there are plenty of ports with good hospitals and anchorages (if needed, for rest) en route. We already have a free mooring in Istanbul (miracle!) as well as in Marmaris.

My son is quite well known as a video director there (he divides his time between Istanbul and Rome) and he loves the place. He has also found a lot of work as well as opportunities to publish, exhibit, and connect. We would live with him in a rented place but spend spring, summer and early autumn sailing. The Turks would give us residence, health care (Turkish nedical and dental is pretty good) and other social benefits as part of my son's residency. I don't expect I'll live long enough to find America as welcoming or as inspiring as I did in my youth and that saddens me. I do love North Africa, the Eastern Med, and I was raised in southern Italy. The Med' is about as good a home as I could wish for.

@neauoire Both voyages are long — but the trans-Atlantic, if we have to do it, would probably begin in October with a couple of legs (along the coast of Morocco to Essaouira, then on to the Cabo Verdes) then a wait to cross to the Caribbean in early December. In the meanntime, we'd loiter around the Western Med and try to live mostly on the hook.

It's a couple of thousand miles to Turkey but there are literally thousands of anchorages for rest and shelter for us both.

As for the preparation, Wrack is a very minimal boat: strong, basic gear, primitive electrics, ok sails, but she lacks self steering (I got rid of the ancient, unreliable Aries) and solar power and both will be essential for what would likely be a singlehanded Atlantic crossing (Given would have to fly ahead — her heart is now too unreliable for a long passage).

A flurry of activity along our dock: the westerly gales have subsided, for now, and an Atlantic high has brought clear skies and light winds for the first time this month. Everyone is readying their boat for sea.

Some are departing as early as tomorrow — our young neighbour, a Swedish singlehander, is loading aboard stores, bricks of beer and bottled water, and cooking gas before he heads north-east to Ibiza in the morning — others, we among them, are finishing repairs and refits with an eye to departures in late April.

We are working on two voyage plans: one across two thirds of the Mediterranean and all of the Aegean to Turkey, which depends on the outcome of the current upheavals there, the other south west across the Atlantic. Both have a terminus in a home and legal residence ashore (and consistent medical care for Given) but there are some bloody hard months — and thousands of sea miles — between that and where we are now.