Reflections on the year and the decade…

Hello All, Family & Friends,

The year - 2019

We are sorry, but Alex and I just didn’t feel the Christmas spirit this year. We sent no cards, bought few gifts, and spread little cheer. As the year and the decade come to a close, I was prompted to think about where the time has gone and what significant things we’ve accomplished, if any, in that time.

As to the past year, we released the 3^rd Edition of our book Happy Hooking – The Art of Anchoring and conducted several webinars helping sailors learn about anchoring gear and proper techniques for anchoring in remote places. The book is selling well, and we get many thanks from sailors who now are able to get a good night’s sleep aboard their boats.

I have been updating my blogs (Aleria’s Adventures, Viticulture in Ireland, What it means to be Ukrainian) which has made me slightly schizophrenic. (Yes, we’ve started a vineyard – more about that later.) I began anew to write a book based on my mother’s memoirs but as a historical fiction novel this time. I only got a few chapters in before being interrupted by life. I will get back to it in January.

I was also elected Vice Commodore of the Ocean Cruising Club, which keeps me busy. I am editor of their website and handle all their PR work, as well as being a member of the Board. Alex is Regional Rear Commodore of the OCC for Ireland and is responsible for organising events.  He is also the editor of the Irish Cruising Club Newsletter, which he produces beautifully.

Alex is about halfway through his third novel. He’s also written several magazine articles, and he teaches a wonderful course on self-publishing in which aspiring authors actually complete the course with their own printed book in their hands. A local bookshop has a mini printing press. The life altering stories that have emerged out of Alex’s experience here have been heart-wrenching.

We spent our third summer aboard Aleria in Spain and then brought her home to Ireland, offloaded 15 years of acquired gear, and put her up for sale. It’s time to trade down to a smaller boat. Halfway across the Bay of Biscay, our engine failed when we had a calm spell. Drifting in the ocean for days without wind left much time for reflection. I wrote an article about it for which I won an award for literary merit from the Irish Cruising Club, the first time it has been awarded to a woman. I am very honoured.

Alex’s mother Meike is now 86 and quite frail, but still living on her own, with a good deal of support from Alex and Kirstin. Kirstin opened a new sustainable living shop in Westport called Pax which has been doing gangbusters. Her partner, Michael, fell just before Christmas and broke several ribs and punctured a lung but is mending well. Cormac, our nephew, has a new job and a new girlfriend, Louise, a neuropharmacologist. They travelled to Sri Lanka and had a wonderful year overall.

Our five cats are driving us mad, the birds are coexisting nicely, and a pine martin has moved into the neighbourhood. We both suffered back injuries in November and ended up in tandem physiotherapy.

It’s very nice to be getting our social security and retirement fund checks like clockwork every month, and I’m looking forward to free travel passes next year. I get to name a companion who gets free passes too, so we’ll be seeing more of the country in coming years. Although this year, we did manage to get around a bit – Kinsale twice, Cork, Dublin, Derry, North Wales, and more. We’re celebrating the New Year at home with some bubbly and a half-price turkey. Not too bad overall.

The decade – 2009-2019

It was an interesting decade for us. We made a lifestyle choice by leaving our killer jobs and crossing an ocean to live in a new country in 2008. That was a transition year – we built a house, restored some boats, established new friendships. The financial crisis was upon us and times were tense.

In 2009-2010, we left and spent a year sailing a Caribbean circuit – Spain, Portugal, the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean and the Azores – before returning to Ireland. It was an experience that forever altered our outlook on life and what’s worth pursuing.

We returned home and started a business which took us in several directions. One got us some funding to develop a system of online health education. Alex patented the system, we wrote a business plan and were prepared to conduct studies for proof of concept when our local authority failed to file our application for EU Funding on time, missing the deadline. We elected then to fold that part of the business and concentrate on writing.

We also set about planting a garden on land that had been bulldozed flat and hard. After ten years, and hundreds of trees and shrubs, we now have a forest, a beautifully landscaped hillside, an orchard, a vegetable garden with lots of berries and fields that lay fallow to enable re-wilding. Some of the fields are summer home to our neighbour’s donkeys – 9 of them. They are the sweetest, most interesting creatures we’ve ever gotten to know. We love where we live. Stunning scenery, pristine waters, always changing light. Nature at its best and, at times, its fiercest.

For the next few years, we wrote all winter, gardened in the spring, then sailed all summer. Scotland, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. We turned around rather than heading for the Med when the temperatures reached the 40˚Cs. Too bloody hot! We wrote about it all in magazines, blogs and books.

And because it’s been getting warmer, I came up with a crazy idea that we should plant some grapevines to see if we could establish a vineyard like they have in Galicia. Their maritime climate is the same as ours except 2 degrees warmer. We started with 5 vines as a test and now have about 135. It takes 5 years to get a grape harvest so this year will be the test year. We had a few grapes this year, but the birds ate them all. My blog tells the story. It turns out, I’m no so crazy.

Our weather has been very mild so far this year, as it was last year and the year before. The weather has definitely been changing. In 2011 was the last year we had any snow, and it was mostly freezing rain that year. We’ve had more severe storms, which, as an island in the Atlantic, are taking their toll on erosion and destruction of the ecological systems. The fish populations have changed and we’re now getting migratory populations that were never seen here before. The cod are gone, and tuna have returned. More whale species are being seen in Irish waters. Our bees – we had a hive -- collapsed one very damp winter. That year, 50% of the hives collapsed in Ireland. In our inlet, we now have a resident population of snowy egrets that co-exist with the herons.

Moreover, two hurricanes, two years apart, formed off the coast of Africa and came straight up the Atlantic to Ireland without veering toward America first. It had never happened before. Ophelia caused widespread damage when she made landfall in Cork. Lorenzo in 2019 made landfall here in Clew Bay as a tropical storm, fortunately without major damage. We sheltered several British sailors at our home who were stranded by the hurricane as they headed north to Scotland.

I became a citizen of Ireland after living here continuously for five years. They have an extraordinary ceremony in which 1000 people from more than 100 countries take part on the same day. The woman next to me from Zimbabwe kept hugging me and crying, “We made it. We made it.” I felt unworthy to be asking for something when so many were desperate for asylum. But I was proud to be part of this great small nation. The first to legislate for gay marriage in a referendum. Things have changed so much in this country in the last decade. The Catholic Church no longer has a stranglehold on the country or its people.

We woke up one morning to hear that Trump was elected President of the USA. I lived in NY during his heydays there. I knew what we were in for.  A couple of weeks later, we woke up to the news of the Brexit vote. A few months later, a comedian who played a President on TV was elected President of Ukraine. Who knew that those bizarre events would all end up interconnected?  Now, children like Greta Thunberg are suffering from anxiety and depression in staggering numbers. It became clear the world was changing dramatically and the polarised landscape was not ever going to be the same.

Moreover, this decade has seen us lose some very good people. Drake Sparkman and Mike Bruno, friends in America, gone way too young. My cousin, Bohdan, after a very full life. But saddest of all was our nephew, Cillian, who took his own life. Living with severe bipolar disorder was too painful for him. We miss him most.

The coming decade – 2020-2019

What do we wish for in the coming decade?  We wish for these madmen to stop feeding their own egos and do some good for the world. We wish for a world leader who can see past skin colour and bank accounts and pull everyone together to work for the health of our planet and its lifeforms, all of them. Can it happen? Perhaps the youth rising up today as we did in the 1970s will change the institutions that are so rooted in their myopic ways. I have hope.

For myself, I’ll retire from office (OCC) in two years and rewire again. I’d like to find a cause to support. Perhaps I’ll finally write the great American novel. Most likely, I’ll just write away in obscurity comforted by the knowledge that most great creative successes were only recognised posthumously.

We’d like to sail north to Scandinavia over the next few years, and I must finally get to Ukraine.

The only thing we truly hope for is good health. We have love.

From us to you the wish for a happy, peaceful, and successful new year

Daria and Alex

Advice about copyright

The Alliance for Independent Authors (ALLi) has excellent resources for self-published authors online. Published November 15, 2019, a new report on copyright infringement outlines common mistakes made by indie authors, especially when citing the work of others. Many of us have no clue that if you reproduce others' work, even a paragraph or lines of a poem or song, even when citing it properly, can result in fines of up to $250,000.

It pays to know.

My first Haiku

The sea welcomes us

As waves break over the bow

And wind fills the sails

Route planning around Ireland

I used Google Earth to plan our trip to Southampton in the UK which never materialized. When a friend asked us to help him plan a circumnavigation of Ireland, I returned to Google Earth to work out the distances around the west coast with which our friend is unfamiliar. This way I could point out the places where there's nowhere to find shelter for big enough distances to worry about the weather. I found it to be really easy but I forgot to get a screengrab when it was all done, so I'll have to do it again. In the meantime, here it is for reference. NOT FOR Navigation. The miles really add up when you have to go in and out into anchorages and harbours.

Distance from Start (not point to point)

Crosshaven to Kinsale                   17 NM

Kinsale to Glandore                       48 NM  (Alt Castletownsend)

Glandore to Sherkin Is                   66 NM

Sherkin to Schull                            81 NM

Schull to Crookhaven                     92 NM

Crookhaven to Bere Is                  116 NM (Alt Bantry - SCH)

Bere Is to Valentia Is                     171 NM (Alt Dingle - marina)

Valentia Is to Inis Mor                   256 NM (Alt Kilrush, Shannon  or Rossaveal, Cashla Bay – SCH)*

Inis Mor to Inisbofin                     302 NM  (Alt Killary Hbr – long way in to anchorage)

Inishbofin to Clare Is                    322 NM (Alt Achilbeg or Rosmoney - Westport)

Clare to Blacksod                          349 NM (Alt Inishkeas in settled weather)

Blacksod to Broadhaven               380 NM

Broadhaven to Teelin                    431 NM (Alt Killybegs in Str S - SCH)*

Teelin to Arranmore Is                  473 NM (Alt Gola Is)

Arranmore to Sheephaven Bay     504 NM

Sheephaven to Loch Swilly           523 NM

Next steps

Today, they announced the winner of the NineDots prize. "Annie Zaidi has won the $100k @NineDotsPrize for innovative thinking with her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus: http://bit.ly/2Qw2GFj" Oh well. I gave it my best shot. I may still write the book. I already have an outline. I should have been writing it all along.

I'm still suffering from writer's block when it comes to starting the new book about my family's journey to America during WWII, but that hasn't stopped my other activities, including planting a vineyard and writing new poetry. So I'll get back to it. But first, I'll have to take a little break to go sailing for a couple of months. If you're interested in 'what on earth is she up to now?', check out my sailing blog. See you later.

Writer's Block

I haven't written very much in the past year since our nephew Cillian died. Oh, I've written a few bits of poetry, website posts for the Ocean Cruising Club, my blog on sailing - but I haven't picked up a big project in the past year. I seem incapable of concentrating long enough. I suppose the time shall come. I've never really had writer's block so this is new to me. But I think it's a bit more than that.

I think the passing of a young man, combined with all the dire warnings about the state of our precious earth have taken their toll on me. I'm weary. The unprecedented decline in species due to man's trashing of the earth has confirmed what I've suspected for a long time. We're heading for a mass extinction, annihilation. So why bother to write?

In the meantime, I am forcing myself to stop working and trolling the net idly and read more instead. Reading will eventually inspire me to pick up that pencil again. But what I've been reading is Michele Obama's book Becoming, which although inspiring also exposes hatred and divisiveness among people. Destructive people. And Climate Justice by Mary Robinson is supposed to inspire individuals to act but instead points out how little has been accomplished and how difficult it is to move the needle. Maybe I've succumbed to depression again?

I have been trying to get a bit of inspiration for my mom's memoir again and have picked up The Shoemaker's Daughter, which I hope will help. Also waiting in the wings is Red Famine about Stalin's starvation of millions of Ukrainians to death. Such joyous topics, but the background is needed to write my story effectively.

We have released a new edition of Happy Hooking The Art of Anchoring so that's something. It's our third edition -- who would have thought? A webinar is coming up. And we've delivered a webinar on sailing in Galicia, so perhaps a new guidebook is in order. But who knows?  I just know that I haven't been in the mood to concentrate for prolonged periods on starting a big project.

I've installed Grammarly on my laptop and I must say, I am impressed to a degree. It picks up more than Microsoft but it still misses quite a bit and yet insists on things being wrong when they are stylistically correct.  For example, above I said I was weary and Grammarly insists that I'm wary instead. I tell it no, I'm tired but weary is more evocative. They disagree. Who writes the algorithms anyway?  Can someone be both a tech guru and a grammar wiz at the same time? Such important questions beg to be answered.

If I can get past this depressive state, perhaps I can work through such issues and find joy in writing again.

Get started

Writing poetry

I was inspired by a radio programme interview with Michael Longley, whose poetry sang to me over the airwaves. He inspired me to continue to write poetry, even though I really don't know what it is anymore. It used to rhyme. It used to have rhythm. Today, it is just a shorter collection of words strung together in a way that may or may not speak to someone. Michael said poetry is best written by the young and the old. I used to write poetry when I was young, as so many of us do when we have powerful emotions battling inside us through hormonal surges. Now that I'm older, I've started again, in tune with what he said. Perhaps it's because in the middle, we're too busy to be emotional. At both ends, we can't help it. Here goes...

Emotion on the ocean

by Daria Blackwell

Getting Older

I used to be honored to be carded for being under 21 when I was 30. Now I find myself honored for being carded for not being over 60. It's interesting how that dynamic has changed over the years. To get discounts at museums, shops and public transport, I'm being asked to show my ID. The other day, I had to show my ID at the supermarket, for buying wine for god's sake. Truly, I do not look a day under 60. I certainly don't feel like it. So get with it, young whipper snappers. I deserve those discounts for all the years I've been paying full freight.

Journalism

I used to be a medical writer and a creative writer in the ad business. Then I became President of a marketing communications company and had multiple divisions reporting to me, including the main ad agency, a PR group, and the web development group. I became dangerous as I got to know a little about everything.

Immigration and the concept of home

It's a long time since I made an entry. Christmas and New Year's Day were gentle this year, and I spent most of January in the US with my niece and her two children, a newborn infant and 2.5 yo, both boys. It was busy and lovely. As a result, I haven't been writing much, although I did manage to enter the Nine Dots Prize competition. It's a project of Cambridge University Press. The subject this year was right up my alley. The question to answer was, "Is there still no place like home?" Naturally, since I've been thinking about this for a lifetime, I had my thoughts pretty well defined. I had to provide a document exploring the topic and how I would approach the writing of a book on the subject, including sample chapter titles (which I had already outlined in a book proposal several years ago and was able to refine), as well as a rationale for why I will be able to complete the writing in seven months. Suffice it to say, I had sufficient evidence to present about years of working toward deadlines.