Land to sea

Longer days, real warmth from the sun when it shines, lighter breezes, all this brings on our sailing urges. Our elderly Cornish Shrimper sitting on her trailer under the carport down the garden talks to me whenever I go down that way saying 'When are you taking me sailing, putting me back in my natural element? I'm getting all dried out and wrinkly here.'

So who are we to ignore her.

But first, I have a big reel of rope, 60 metres of the stuff, which needs to be divided up to make three new halliards and a main sheet. [Non-boaty's bit: A halliard is the rope what pulls the sails up. A sheet is what pulls them into shape so they catch the wind. The various bits of cordage on a boat all have different names. Nothing, in fact, is actually called a 'rope'.] 

We're upgrading too. When we bought the boat a few years ago we're pretty sure that all the halliards were original, fitted when the boat was built back in 1985, and 8mm three strand rope was considered adequate. Indeed it has survived pretty well. But the rope is quite stiff, hard on the hands, and there are a few little nicks here and there, little frayed pieces, so we reckon the time has come to upgrade. The new rope is smooth, soft to touch, 10mm thick and is white with a green fleck running through it, matching the green of the hull. But threading all this correctly into place when the mast and the other spars are lying horizontally along the deck requires concentration and patience, without which you will end up with a tangle of twisted lines to sort out when the mast is raised.

Despite knowing this, it is time for the first mast raising of the season. We pull the boat out clear of the car port but no further. Since we live at the end of a quiet road this is a place where we can almost guarantee not to have an audience watching us, an important factor when you are about to try something as exciting as a mast raising. The process involves us both climbing up onto the deck (which is now high above the road as the boat sits on her trailer) so that I can lift the heavy wooden mast while Kate pulls on the jib halliard [again, this is a piece of rope]. We have done this before, many times, so we know what we're doing and surprisingly, there are very few tangles to sort out. The new halliards present a flashy look on an otherwise aged boat. Job done, everything is folded down again until launch day. It's all down to the weather now.

Ah yes, the weather. 'Today is the hottest day of the year so far!' It is blasted out all over the news so it must be hot...somewhere. So how is it that where we are the rain poured down from dawn to dusk, torrential at times, the wind blowing it horizontally and the sun never showed its face? The answer to this question lies in the fact that we live in a remote and forgotten place. Few people live here. General statements about the weather made on the national news are aimed at the majority, people who live in cities, and mostly those who live in the south east of England, which might as well be a different planet to the one we inhabit. We wish you all well as you swelter in your 27 degrees of heat, sitting out in your parched gardens praying for rain to water the grass.
But I digress.
Returning to the matter at hand, there is a combination of factors that must coincide in order that Eun na Mara can take to the water safely. The wind must be light and preferably from a westerly direction so that in Carradale Harbour we are sheltered. Anything from the east will pick up waves and push them sideways across the slipway making launching almost impossible. The rain must also cease (this is purely a preference - we don't relish getting wet) and then finally the tide must be coming in, at least half way up. This last factor is because if anything delays the launch you don't want the water to be disappearing downwards away from you. As it happens the lower part of the slipway down which the trailer must roll is covered in a green slimy weed which is like an ice rink to walk on.

At high water this weed is covered over and the operation can be carried out much more safely. So we wait, watching the weather forecast, letting the hottest day of the year slip by and hoping that when the moment does eventually arrive for this combination of factors to come together it won't clash with something else in our busy agendas.

Local assistance is on hand to ease our stress levels when we do decide to 'go for launch'. John is just the man we need, a practical sort who can anticipate things before they happen and doesn't mind getting his hands grubby. He has a boat of his own on a trailer in the garden of his house so there may be a trade off involved soon.

Now we just need the tide to give us a bit more water... so we wait, something which I admit I find very difficult to do. I need a project, a job to do, to while away the hours. Then the rain starts. Then it stops and the sun is out. What can possibly go wrong.

Time slips away and we drive to the harbour, Eun na Mara following dutifully behind us, and start the mast raising, for real this time then reverse down to the waiting wet stuff. A time lapse here. Getting the camera out is not the first thing you think about when you're hanging onto the piece of rope that is all that prevents the boat drifting away to sea without you on board. Between trailer and sea there are a hundred things to worry about but it all goes well, experience shows, and we even manage it in the dry.

It is late in the day when we motor out of Carradale Harbour. We have a passage of nearly 20 miles to the next safe harbour, so up go the sails and we steer northwards, a fresh little breeze carrying us away. It is cool and it gets cooler when the rain begins to fall but there's no going back now. We're sailing quickly with the wind behind us but the cold gradually seeps into our bodies until finally, hours later, the entrance to Tarbert harbour finally comes into view. Then it is engine on, motor in, tie up alongside the pontoon, kettle on, time for a late dinner. It is 8pm.

Once inside our tiny cabin the hatch is closed so the heat is retained, allowing the warming up process to proceed, and before long we are tucked up in bed. Job done. Eun na Mara will be berthed here for the summer, waiting quietly, ever ready for us to take on a new adventure.

Things not mentioned about small boats like ours include the way we navigate. Modern electronic navigation systems require electricity, invariably 12 volts, but we have no means of generating this. Instead we use our phones which use only 5 volts and we carry spare power in small battery packs that can be charged up from a small solar panel. The operative word is small but this doesn't mean less powerful technology. Evidence of this is shown below.

 Passage data: Distance 19.2 nautical miles; average speed 4.4 knots; maximum speed 7.4 knots!

Back to an old subject

The date is 10th September 2014 and, having just finished writing an entry for this very blog, the 'Publish' button is clicked and the words sail off across the Internet. Here's a link to what was written. The subject was vegetarianism, which for reasons I then explained was not a word I was comfortable using to describe our eating habits, hence the chosen title 'Neither meat nor fish'. So why should this topic be one to return to now? Perhaps it is because having spent many weeks on the road, passing through first England then Holland, Belgium and on into France, we are now in a position to reveal our revised and updated views on how each of these countries regards our long standing dietary preference.

Whatever your point of view, there is little denying that the last five years or so has been a period during which interest and concern about the impacts of meat eating as part of the human diet has heightened. Already, farming is the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction and the global loss of wildlife. It is responsible for about 80% of the deforestation that’s happened this century, beef production being the leading cause of deforestation in tropical rainforests. Roughly half the calories farmers grow are now fed to livestock, and the demand for animal products is rising fast. Livestock farming has an impact on the environment and thus ultimately upon world's climate. In other words, climate change and the impact humans are having on this are now being directly linked to, amongst other things, our consumption of meat. Arable farming is more productive per acre than livestock farming, or to put this another way, we could feed the world using only a fraction of the space we do now, leaving more wild areas where nature can do its thing.

Here's another couple of interesting factoids:

 - Only 29% of the weight of birds on Earth consists of wild species: the rest is poultry.
 - Just 4% of the world’s mammals, by weight, are wild; humans account for 36%, and livestock for the remaining 60%. 

So has this knowledge given rise to any changes in people's eating habits, their diet, or their way of life?

Let us begin with the UK in general (there being no discernible difference between our home nations so far as we can tell) where even in the last year or so we have noticed some changes. In supermarkets now there is often a section entirely devoted to vegetarian foods, quorn based products, plant based sausages, mince, etc., plenty of choice and mostly marked with a little 'V' so that there's no need to scan the ingredients for hidden meatiness. Meat consumption in the UK fell by 17% in the decade up to 2019 and this is reflected in some of our own shopping experiences. Perhaps the only criticism might be that there is increasing confusion over the use of the word 'vegan' when referring to anything that is meat free. We eat both eggs and cheese as well as drinking milk and none of these items would figure in a vegan diet. 

So the UK is getting the message then, what about Holland? Here the picture seems similar - marked products in larger grocery stores - and we were taken to a vegetarian restaurant in Rotterdam, which means at least one exists. Some research seems to show that although meat consumption is increasing, after a lull over the last decade, the increase has been in other meats and less in beef.

Belgium is a strange country, in our experience, in that the culture depends upon whether you are in the Dutch or the French bit, so we can probably assume meat eating habits will follow cultural stereotyping. We had an interesting discussion with a young lady serving us in a small Belgian restaurant who explained that her country has a number of regional authorities (governments?) who barely talk to each other and probably don't even speak each other's language. She in turn was interested in the distinction between the UK and Great Britain, something we had to admit we could not explain, but clearly there are similarities in the way our respective countries are governed.

Moving on to France then, have eating habits changed here since we last visited, so far as we can tell? The simple answer is no, not at all. We encounter a strange look at a boulangerie sandwich counter when we ask for something vegetarian and finally when we were offered a salad filled wrap it seemed like the assistant was only too delighted to get rid of her last one, and after eating it we could understand why - it was ghastly! As to grocery stores, we tried many but struggled to find anything vegetarian, despite optimistically scanning the product ingredients, many times. This even applied to the offerings of so called 'international' stores like Lidl or Aldi. It seems then that, from a vegetarian perspective, the French are way behind us and somehow, sadly, we expected nothing more than what we found here. This contradicts, to an extent, the official figures which show that meat consumption in France is declining but if this is so then we cannot help but feel sorry for the vegetarians who live here and find it difficult to buy what they want. (The Spanish, incidentally, top both the meat and the fish eating league tables.)

There we have it then. Just our views, of course, and we fully accept we might be proved wrong but it seems, after all, that we might be living in the country best suited to our needs.

Returning from a significant adventure

Home at last; turning the last corner and there it is, our house. Perhaps we should have felt a sense of relief at being once again on British soil but somehow it didn't come. Quite the reverse, in fact. There is a distinct feeling of sadness, depression even, that our long journey had come to an end. Even the thought of living and sleeping in our own house doesn't have the appeal one might have expected. Surely, after six weeks living, sleeping and eating within the confines of a small campervan we ought to be desperate for our own beds, for the comfort of a warm house, for the convenience of a microwave and a dishwasher, for hot water that comes out of taps! For us though, that's just not how it works.

After a few days of adjustment, meeting friends from this tiny community we live in who, of course, all know how long we've been away, where we've been and roughly when we'd be coming back, we take a walk on the beach...

...and it does its magic, just as it always does. It gives us something new, something unlikely, in this case it is a mass of tiny mussel shells which glisten in the sun, pinks yellows and purples amongst the mother of pearl. 

A little research reveals that lady marine mussels release their offspring into the ocean where they float about for anything up to six months before doing like their parents, glueing themselves to a convenient rock. So these were mussel babies who, due to some unforeseen event, all ended their short lives in a heap on our beach. It is sad to think that something so magical for us was the consequence of such a disastrous event. But the natural world doesn't make choices. It simply is.

The last part of our journey home was through England and involved a brief stopover at my brother's project house, which gave us much to think about.

Clearly the everyday pressures of our community lives, treasurer and secretary respectively of the Community Trust and the Village Hall, have not come my brother's way since he returned to the UK after living in Italy for many years or else he would not have been quite so keen to try to turn a quite ordinary semi-detached property into a high tech, state of the art, eco-friendly masterpiece of modern living all capable of being operated from his mobile phone!. (Clearly this surpasses all the house renovations we've ever done.) After stumbling around inside for a while, admiring his floor tiles and the kitchen units, all of which are stacked up in boxes waiting to be fitted, then tripping over the piles of rubble outside caused by his enthusiastic actions with a sledgehammer, we take a few pictures, wish him all the best then leave him to it. We are, secretly, envious of what he is doing and cannot wait to see the final result.

Our final stop is in Glasgow where we purchase an enormous reel of polyester rope, which I shall use to replace all the halliards on Eun na Mara, then we are safely home by late afternoon where we begin wrestling with the clocks, whose reference has shifted in our absence, GMT becoming BST. Some of them, heating timers and computers, have worked things out on their own but our microwave is not so clever and needs help. We had already changed Mrs Google's spoken language from kilometers to miles and Martin's speed display from kilometers per hour to mph before leaving the ferry so we think this takes care of everything... well apart from Kate's watch and our Kindles, and I'm sure there's something else somewhere. Time has played only a minor part in our lives for the last six weeks as we travelled from country to country. Living in our campervan our days started when daylight began and generally ended as it faded away. We ate when hungry, I shaved when the hair on my face became annoying (to me that is), and Martin's dashboard clock played no significant role in our lives. Back home and suddenly clocks are important again. We have meetings to attend, schedules to adhere to, diaries to programme so we don't forget things, this is the real world we escaped from. We're back home.

So what's next for us? Before we can answer this we both have to engineer our escapes from the community roles we currently occupy and which have reached the point where they are dominating our waking lives (and at times our sleeping ones too). Replacements need to be found, people in the community who will accept the responsibilities we have carried for so long, people who can step up to the challenge just as we did and ensure that village life can continue to function as it is now. Volunteers for these roles may be difficult to find but what is certain is that we have served our time and must be allowed to step down.

Final days in Europe/Holland

Here is a list of what we will miss most about Holland:

 - it is a flat country, although this is largely a matter of perspective seen through the eyes of people coming from an unflat one;

 - it is full of tall people, this being due to their consumption of milk based foods, so one theory has it, and this is perpetuated by tall Dutch people choosing tall partners thus producing tall children;

 - there are a lot of windmills, more nowadays used for producing electricity rather than grinding corn;

 - everyone rides bicycles (I believe I may have mentioned this before) and it is something to be admired and envied that in the age of the motor car at least one highly civilised country has chosen to give preference to the bicycle;

 - tulips grow well here, and not just in Amsterdam;

 - boats and bridges proliferate here, indeed it seems easier to get around by boat than it is by road. Road bridges will open for even the smallest vessel;

 - neatness and tidyness are part of the culture - roadsides are not rubbish strewn playgrounds, unlike more than one place we could mention;

 - black locust trees grow well here. Native to North America these were introduced deliberately many years ago, perhaps to improve the soil. They are a fast growing hardwood, a member of the pea family;

- finally, statues of cows are commonplace, in all colours.

And here are a foreigner's confessions about driving in Holland. Navigating the road network requires great concentration, eyes that can point in all directions at once and a translator. This is due to the proliferation of painted road markings and signs which only Dutch people  understand (although at the ferry terminal there is a sign pointing to 'England'). Oh, and keep well clear of anyone riding a bicycle. 

Our last night in Holland is at a campsite in Hellevoetsluis, pronounced...no, forget it. This was once a major naval port, only going into decline when the ships became too large to navigate the Haringvliet, the waterway on which it stands. The town now has a large marina full of leisure craft as well as a broad sandy beach where one can sit and admire the passing yachts.

So this just leaves us the day before our night sail back to England and thankfully our Dutch daughter, Maartje, has this planned for us; pannekoeken for lunch followed by a wild walk amongst the trees, just what we needed.

Then once again we drive into the bowels of a ship, wait for that telltale rumble that denotes putting to sea and climb into our bunks to try to get some sleep before the 0600 alarm call, which is actually 0500 for us as we have already put our clocks back to UK time.