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widebeamandwellingtons · 5 months

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🚤 Exciting news! 🌟 “Navigating Tranquillity - A Beginner’s Guide to Canal Boating” is now live! 🎥 Join the journey and discover the serenity of canal life. https://youtu.be/a9dfDCF7gqw?si=LR3ZRYgmy8fY0SvW

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#boatlife #waterways #widebeamboat #narrowboat #narrowboatlife #widebeam #narrowboatliving #floatinghome #barge #liveaboard #Youtube

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ccohanlon · 7 months

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how i live

I woke at midnight, last night, to a hard sou’westerly and the floor moving in three directions at once — pitching, rolling, rising-and-falling. Now, six hours later, the wind has moderated. Everything is still. The rest of the world is obscured by grey mist and sporadic showers, as if the sky has fallen across the shore.

I climb up a short ladder to the companionway to check that all is well on deck — it’s the first thing I do every morning — then I return to my bunk to download email and read a couple of news sites on a laptop before my wife wakes and we have a cup of coffee together across the varnished teak table that separates our bunks.

We talk about what we want to do today and waste a minute or two trying to agree a time-table before giving up. For half a decade, we have scraped by with a minimum of routine or planning. We are singularly unadept at making lists or coordinating diaries. We end up doing most things together. Today, we will pick up some paint and shackles at a chandlery and find a local metal fabricator to repair or replicate a damaged stainless steel stanchion. We also have to buy some groceries. But first I want to repair our rubber dinghy.

My wife and I live on a 32-foot sailboat. It is a life-raft of sorts. It is also an island on which we are trying to regain an unsettled but sheltered freedom after several years of being homeless. Most days, we feel like castaways, with no hope of ever being rescued.

It’s hard to explain how we ended up here. Moving aboard was not a ‘lifestyle choice’ but an act of quiet desperation. We had dropped out of a life in which I had somehow ended up running two well-known, medium-sized companies, one of them publicly listed — before those roles, I had been a musician, gambler, seaman, smuggler, photographer, magazine editor, and governmental adviser — and we had taken to wandering slowly across Europe, the UK, and North Africa. After a year holed up on the southern coast of Spain, a few miles east of Gibraltar, riding out the worst of the pandemic, we moved to southern Italy, where we acquired, and set about restoring, a small ruin, part of servants’ quarters attached to a 16th century Spanish castle, in a village not far from Lecce, in Puglia. We had just completed the work, two years later, when the local Questura, the office of the Carabinieri that oversees Italian immigration, rejected our third application for temporary residence and issued a formal instruction to us to leave Italy — and Europe’s Schengen zone.

The boat was not something we thought through in any detail. I had spent a lot of time at sea in my youth and had lived on sailing boats of various sizes on the Channel coasts of England and France, as well as in the Mediterranean. Which is to say, I had an understanding of their discomforts. But the prospect of resuming a life that, before we ended up in southern Italy, involved moving every three months — not just from one temporary accommodation to another but from one country to another, so as not to contravene the terms of our largely visa-less travel — had exhausted us. I made an offer on a cheap, neglected, 45-year-old, fibreglass sloop I had come across online and organised a marine surveyor to look it over for me. He gave it a cautious thumbs up.

I won’t forget my wife’s dolorous expression, a month later, when she saw the boat for the first time. It was in an industrial area of Southampton, on a dreich morning in early spring — bitterly cold, windy, and raining. Around us, the Itchen River’s ebb had revealed swathes of black, foul-smelling mud. Raised far from the sea, on the plains of north-eastern Oklahoma, my wife told me later she had been praying that our journey to this glum backwater was part of some elaborate practical joke.

There is a whole genre of YouTube videos created by those who live on sailboats full-time and voyage all over the world. The most popular, the so-called ‘influencers’, are young(ish) couples or families with capacious, often European-built, plastic catamarans or monohulls. Their videos focus less on the gritty, day-to-day grind of boat maintenance and passage-making and more on sojourns in ancient, stone-built harbours in the Mediterranean, white, sandy beaches and palm-fringed cays in the Caribbean, or improbably blue lagoons and solitary atolls in the South Pacific, where they barbecue fresh fish, paddle-board, kite-surf and practice yoga and aerial silks for the envy of hundreds of thousands of followers. My wife’s and my life aboard together is nothing like any of this.

We are both in our sixties — I am just a year away from seventy — and we have spent more than a decade on the move around the world, at first following eclectic opportunities for employment then, when those opportunities receded, in search of somewhere we might be able to settle with very little money. Four months after moving aboard our boat, we still think of ourselves as vagabond travellers, our boat a shambolic, floating vardo that we haven’t yet managed to turn into a home. We’re not really ‘cruisers’, despite the sense of community we sometimes find among them, but we are seafarers — historically, a marginal existence driven by necessity. A recent, 150-nautical-mile passage westward along the south coast of England was a shakedown during which we learned how to make our aged, shabby vessel more comfortable and easier to handle and to trust her capacity to keep us safe at sea.

She bore the name Endymion when we bought her — after my least favourite poem by John Keats (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever…”) — but we re-named her Wrack. Depending on the source, ‘wrack’ describes seaweeds or seagrasses that wash up along a shore or the scattered traces of a shipwreck, either of which might be metaphors for my wife and me in old age. It is certainly how we feel when we’re not at sea. Life aboard Wrack is spartan — fresh water stored in a dozen polyethylene jerry cans, no hot or cold running water, no refrigeration and when the temperature drops, no heating either — so, from time to time, we concede the cost of berthing in marinas to gain access to on-site laundries, showers, flushing toilets, and wi-fi. Whether we’re berthed or anchored somewhere, we shop for food once a week — mainly vegetables, fruit, bread, pasta, and rice but little dairy and no meat — and eat one meal a day, cooked in the mid-afternoon on a two-burner gas stove.

The days we spend in close proximity to others’ lives ashore remind us how disenfranchised ours have become. We were homeless before we acquired Wrack, but now we are without a legal residence anywhere, even in our ‘home’ countries. We enter and exit borders uneasily as ‘visitors’, our stays limited to 90 or 180 days, depending on where we are. We have no access to banking, insurance, social services or, with a few exceptions, emergency health care. Even the modest Australian pensions we have a right to can only be received if we have been granted residence in countries with which Australia has reciprocal arrangements — and we haven’t. It’s hard even for other live-aboards to understand how deeply we are enmired in this peculiar bureaucratic statelessness. It’s harder for us to deal with it every day.

But life afloat provides consolations. We are ceaselessly attuned to the weather and our boat’s responses to subtle shifts in the sea state, tide and wind even when we are tethered to a dock. We appreciate the shelter — and surprising cosiness — the limited space below decks affords us but the impulse to surrender to the elements and let them propel us elsewhere is insistent. Our best days are offshore, even when the conditions are testing; the world shrinks to just the two of us, our boat and the implacable, mutable sea around us. Whatever problems we face ashore become, at least for the duration of a passage, abstract and insignificant. We sail without a specific destination — ‘towards’ rather than ‘to’, as traditional navigators would have it — and without purpose. Time drifts.

At least half of every day is spent maintaining, repairing, or re-organising the boat, an unavoidable and time-consuming part of our days, especially at sea. When we’re at anchor or berthed in a marina, we do what we can to sustain ourselves. Most afternoons are spent prospecting for drips of income from journalism and crowd-funding — a source inspired by those younger YouTube adventurers — or adding a few hundred words to a manuscript for a non-fiction book commissioned by a Dutch publisher, whose patience has been stretched to breaking point. Because of our visitor visa status, we can’t seek gainful employment ashore, and we have long since lost contact with any of the networks that once provided us with a higher-than-average income as freelancers. Our existence, by any definition, is impoverished and perilously marginal, we have little social life, yet we make the effort to appreciate our circumstances, even if it’s just to sit together in silence and absorb the elemental white noise of wind and sea, to do nothing, to not think.

Our precariousness burdens our four adult children, who have scattered to San Diego, Sydney, Berlin and Rome: “Where are you now?” our youngest asks. “How long will you be there?” We speak to each at least once a week. Not all of them long for fixedness but they do want desperately for us to have a ‘real home’, somewhere we can assemble occasionally as a family. We will be grandparents for the first time, soon. Like our few friends, our children worry that we might become lost — in every sense.

My wife and I are uncomfortably aware of our financial and physical vulnerability but at our ages, we can no longer cling to the faint hope that there’s an end to it. We have committed to an unlikely, reckless voyage. All we can do is maintain a rough dead reckoning of its course and embrace the uncharted and the relentless unexpected.

First published in The Idler, UK, 2023.

#life #living #poverty #sea #seafaring #memoir #theidler #uk #vagabondlife #liveaboard

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nando161mando · 26 days

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[London, UK]

River Nomads, Liveaboards, Canal-Dwellers and Other People of the Water, friends, family, and accomplices various gather as part of ongoing efforts to fight the gentrification of the waterways.

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sawafix · 1 year

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What do you think of this? #morning #underwater #redsea #deepsouth #jellyfish #season #summer #sun #sea #dive #diving #visitegypt #redseadivehub #fixphotoblog #padi #motivation #success #scuba #liveaboard #marsaalam #gouna #traveltheworld #aroundtheworld #nomad https://www.instagram.com/p/CmdaWaetA7B/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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tinyhouseexpedition · 1 year

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Couple live on renovated Tiny House Boat - 5 years & snowy winters!

Meet Joe & CeCe, who live on a tiny houseboat in coastal New Hampshire. They 1st wanted to build a tiny house on wheels until they found an affordable 1972 River Queen houseboat--about 200 sqft. They bought & renovated it for less than $25k and now live affordably in a marina. And they absolutely love it, despite the freezing snowy winters that cause extra challenges.

#tiny house #tiny home #houseboat #tiny living #tiny house tour #200 sqft tiny house #$25k tiny house #liveaboard

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sailingangel · 1 year

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Sunset at Rudder Cut Cay ☀️⛵️😎 #sunset #saltlife #catamaran #adventure #vibe #darkangel #youtube #liveaboard #cruiser (at Rudder Cut Cay) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoIyFX6r72i/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#sunset #saltlife #catamaran #adventure #vibe #darkangel #youtube #liveaboard #cruiser

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joyfuljetsam · 1 year

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Boat tip for the uninitiated!

Store appropriately sized soft wooden bungs near every through hull fitting.

Also check your frickin hose clamps regularly. Anything below the waterline needs to have two.

Many boats sink because people forget to check the hose clamps on their through hulls. The hose clamp rusts through and then it's only a matter of time till the hose slips off the fitting, and now you have a useless hole in your boat where there was once a useful one.

Now instead of scrambling around in the middle of the night trying to figure out where the water is coming from and then rummaging around trying to find something to stuff into the hole you can just ram a plug in there.

#sailorpark #liveaboard #oc #advice

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captainamorysailing · 1 month

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Time to Leave Mexico - Sailing to Belize - S02:EP11

In this blog, we embark on an exciting sailing adventure from Mexico to Belize, bidding farewell to the beautiful Riviera Maya coastline and setting our sailboat for new horizons. The journey begins as I am joined by my friend Cy, a fellow adventurer I met in Mexico, and together, we prepare to sail towards the enchanting destination of Belize.

Our departure from Riviera Maya marks the end of a chapter filled with white beaches and all-inclusive resorts as we set sail towards Punta Allen in southeast Mexico. Along the way, we rendezvous with friends on three other sailboats, creating a lively gathering filled with laughter and good times.

As the sun sets on our farewell night in Mexico, we eagerly anticipate the journey ahead as we wake up to the promise of Belize on the horizon. The tranquil waters guide us as we sail towards our destination, the wind whispering tales of new beginnings and exciting adventures.

During our voyage, the thrill of the open sea surrounds us, and our efforts are rewarded as we catch a fish, a testament to the bountiful waters we traverse. The day's activities leave us weary but content, prompting us to seek refuge behind a reef for a peaceful night's rest under the starlit sky.

Join us on this unforgettable sailing experience filled with camaraderie, exploration, and the simple joys of life on a boat. Our journey is a testament to the magic of sailing adventures and the beauty of embracing the unknown seas. Experience the freedom and tranquility of sailing firsthand as we navigate the waters toward new horizons, guided by the gentle winds and the promise of endless possibilities.

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klischeekuss · 6 months

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my heart screams to leave everything behind.

#fernweh #travel #liveaboard

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bouncinghedgehog · 7 months

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#liveaboard #boating

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widebeamandwellingtons · 7 months

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Hi you lovely lot, for your viewing pleasure our next vlog is out Revealing the Unexpected Lessons we've Learned on our Wide Beam Boat | 124

youtu.be/lWBi4z959Ds 😊

#boatlife #narrowboat #narrowboatlife #waterways #widebeamboat #widebeam #narrowboatliving #floatinghome #barge #liveaboard

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ccohanlon · 8 months

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Rusted or splintered hulks and cement-filled pontoons form makeshift breakwaters for Carbeile Wharf, a tidal boatyard and Mad Max-adjacent live-aboard community in Torpoint, Cornwall, 2023

#community #estuary #marina #haven #liveaboard #cornwall #england #sea #sailors #boats #englishchannel #photography #travel

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jandby · 10 months

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Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands

Eight days in the Galapagos on a liveaboard with six others: an Ecuadorian couple, a German couple and an Aussie couple – we were from four continents. Saw the island variations of their famous giant tortoises and the island’s equally famous blue-footed boobies. Snorkeled with the world’s only marine iguanas and with penguins, sea lions, and massive green turtles. Saw newborn and nursing sea lions and marine iguanas just out of their eggs/nests. Explored the various volcanic landscapes on five islands.

In Quito, enjoyed another delicious meal of cuy (guinea pig) and some outstanding Ecuadorian rum. Took day trips to see Andean condors, a bird sanctuary, and a cloud forest.

The most impressive part of the trip was seeing land and sea critters in their environment and unafraid of us. Most of them ignored us – some of them were curious about us – and some sea lions were even curious enough to come check us out when we were on a beach or swimming.

#ecuador #galapagos #liveaboard #islands #snorkeling

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