Forum Federato

“The paddle for knowing the ocean uses science and research to build from our existing ancestral knowledge, rather than replacing it. The transport and reconnection paddle will ensure that our people return to the ocean for transport and movement, filling it up with our life and our attention.”

https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/worlds-first-indigenous-led-ocean-reserve-a-step-closer-to-reality/

Missing this.

My friend, Swedish artist, surfer and activist Peter Stridh, has just anchored his 10-metre sailboat off the south coast of Mallorca after an adventurous long haul singlehanded from Algeria (via Ibiza). He’s inviting anyone who might want to join him there (to hang out or to sail with him to Sardinia in a couple of weeks) to reach out via Instagram.

instagram.com/pinoseed

My friend Peter Stridh has just anchored off the south coast of Mallorca after an adventurous long haul singlehanded from Algeria (via Ibiza). He’s inviting anyone who might want to join him there (to hang out or to sail with him to Sardinia in a couple of weeks to reach out) via Instagram.

https://www.instagram.com/pinoseed

Startled tonight by a bottlenose dolphin just a metre or so off Wrack’s transom: a loud tail slap as he dove beneath a school of large green mullet milling around our hull. He surfaced, circled astern of us for a minute or two then, with another tail slap, disappeared under the black water.

@GustavinoBevilacqua I can’t wait to be out of the Gulf of Cagliari.

@GustavinoBevilacqua I thought about that but I decided the open sea is safer than the rather exposed east coast and its patches of unpleasant local weather.

The end of August to the end of September, a season of uncertainty in the Western Mediterranean: unsettled weather patterns, fickle winds, brief but violent squalls, thunderstorms, and lightning. Passages are planned around benign but illusive ‘windows’ that, overnight, close and become chaotic.

Wrack is old but sturdy. Given and I are also old but a lot less sturdy. We staunch our impatience to set sail and wait, checking the weather every six hours.

“We are now witnessing a frightening attack on history — an ongoing effort to rewrite, and to whitewash, the complicated story of the United States of America.

“In recent months, many organizations dedicated to exhibiting, protecting, documenting, and archiving the multidimensional narratives of our country’s history have faced threats to their funding, and to their independence.”

An Unfinished Atlas consists of essays by authors of color, each of whom has been asked to select a place — intimately known or not; famous or minor; historical or contemporary— and to write this place into the record of the continent we now call North America.

[via Places Journal]

https://placesjournal.org/series/an-unfinished-atlas/

I wake amid the still, dark hours to realise I have just turned 71.

“Birthdays are ghost bounty hunters that track you down to ask, ‘Que pasa, baby?’”

- Jim Harrison, American author

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

- Aldous Huxley

An update:

We have been in Cagliari, a large port on the south coast of Sardinia, for the past three days. We sailed here from the rugged, somewhat isolated Gulf of Teulada, 30 nautical miles to the west, to replenish our provisions, refuel, and service our quarter-century-old diesel engine, which worked (too) hard to push us through wide patches of windless sea during the 330-nautical-mile passage from Ibiza.

Despite a restful few days at anchor off the tiny port of Teulada, we were all tired, hungry for fresh food (there’s no fridge or freezer aboard Wrack), and impatient to get somewhere, as I wrote last time, where I might get some specialist medical care. As we sailed towards Cagliari, we decided not to head southwards to Sicily, as planned, but rather sail to Ostia, on the Italian mainland, a couple of hundred nautical miles north-nor’east, and spend a few weeks ashore in Rome.

Despite the purposefulness of our voyage east across the Western Mediterranean, our confidence and resilience are waning. The issues confronting us (old age, declining health, poverty, increasing regulation and monitoring of free passage and migration, and the inevitable, costly wear and tear on our floating home) are becoming more complex and difficult to resolve, our options fewer. In comparison, the uncertainty and risk of seafaring are nothing.

Now we are waiting for a window of three or four days of benign weather to sail into the Thyrrenian Sea. Our son, Finn, who has sailed with us for the past seven weeks, will not be with us. He is co-producing a series of events related to Paris Fashion Week and will fly there from Cagliari.

Reaching the Italian mainland will be a significant achievement for Given and me: 1070+ nautical miles from Tangier, Morocco, from where our Mediterranean voyage began, a year ago, 880 of those in the last two months. Our profound hope is that, after three years as sea-dwellers, we are getting closer to an end, to settlement ashore, to a different life.

Thank you all for helping us get this far.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-in-search-of-home

Because of our engine issues (and a consequent lack of money), we’ve missed a narrow weather window to sail to Rome. We’ll lurk around the Gulf of Cagliari until the weekend, then head into Tyrrhenian Sea.

Nearly midnight and dolphins lurk in the darkness, alongside our boat. We hear them breathe but glimpse them only briefly in swirls of black water.

Flashback to our Mediterranean crossing: in darkness, 120 miles west of Sardinia, Wrack disturbs a sleeping whale. It slaps the sea close by the hull, and rolls away, churning the low swell to a white froth while blowing a saline mist and noxious rotting fish smell.

Along the southern coast of Sardinia at dawn, today.