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 3rd 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
