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Cruising the Wild Atlantic Way in Ireland

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It's been a very busy month. Spring has sprung and we've been doing boat chores as quickly as we can. Fortunately, the weather has been relatively amazing here, with the Azores High reaching its tendrils up into our latitudes, and we are not complaining.  Perhaps climate change is favourable, for Ireland at least. 

Saving sailing - by keeping the fun in sailing fundamentals

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Lessons in Optis start on dry land.  What's wrong with how sailing is taught?  For some reason, the teaching of sailing skills in many countries where sailing is an active pursuit has over the years changed from learning the ropes on a local body of water from an experienced friend to a rigorously structured multi-year racing-based certification process. How did it evolve this way, and who says racing is the only way to acquire the necessary fundamentals?  I say bring back the fun and watch the numbers grow.

Vanuatu and the Solomons need our help

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Cyclone Pam left destruction and death behind in the Pacific. It's up to us now to help the gentle people of these remote and vulnerable islands. The Ocean Cruising Club is coordinating efforts among sailors to get things done on the ground. Please do what you can to support those is position to assist.             Information for Immediate Release Contact: Daria Blackwell OCC Press Officer                                                                                PR@oceancruisingclub.org ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 17 th March  2015 Sailors band together to get relief to cyclone stricken Pacific islanders

Beware the tides of March!

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Alex with his pinhole camera contraption. It worked! Syzygy, aurora, eclipse, meteors and more! The Ides of March has a bad reputation but it passed unnoticed this year; and this month we also had a Friday the 13th, which some people are rather superstitious about. But that came and went without much ado as well. We got lucky with weather overall as St. Patrick's Day was dry and not too cold. The parades, especially in Newport, were great fun, and there were only two ankle injuries during the ritual sunrise climb of Croagh Patrick. No, I did not climb. Done it once. The highest tides in the spring are always around St. Patrick's, Day and this year they were a couple of days later. We live by the sea so we are used to tidal variation. I suppose that's an understatement in that we live on a one lane road by the sea which is under water during the big spring tides for an hour either side of the high tide mark.

Children's Books about Sailing

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Finding good children's books to inspire a love of the sea can be a challenge.  I've been keeping track of good selections for some time.  There is a listing of children's books on our website CoastalBoating . Recently, a graphic novel caught my attention.  Here is my review. Granuaile: Queen of Storms   Dave Hendrick and Luca Pizzari, Publication date: 16th February 2015,  ISBN 978-1-84717-671-4 PRICE €12.99/£9.99 PB, Format 259 x 168mm EXTENT 64pp, The O’Brien Press Ltd Tel: +353 1 4923333; Web: www.obrien.ie , Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheOBrienPress , Twitter: https://twitter.com/OBrienPress/ The first graphic novel presenting the story of Granuaile, the Pirate Queen, is set in s ixteenth century Ireland, a turbulent time when clans lived and competed under Brehon Law, the British were expanding ever farther from the East, and the Spanish plundered along the west coast.

Top 30+ Sailing Movies

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Wow, what a cool collection! Great ideas for a sailing movie club.  When I started to compile this list, I thought I'd come up with maybe ten movies. But as I got deeper into it, not only did I realize there were more than I consciously remembered over time, but also that the independent film production movement and digital technologies are causing an explosion of very interesting new entries. The work being done by young people is particularly inspiring and impressive and perhaps signifies that sailing isn't dying after all. No, it's actually becoming the saving grace of a generation pressured as none before it. Because it is just too difficult to rate these movies as each one ticks a different box, I've just listed them in chronological order. Enjoy, and please let me know about any I missed.

Top Ten Instructional Books on Sailing

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Want to acquire an exciting new skill that will last a lifetime? Try sailing.  Sailing can look daunting to people who look up and see all those ropes and poles, and sails. Sailing also suffers from the perception of it being expensive, and it can be, but it doesn't have to be. There are plenty of people who have boats and need crew and plenty of boats in people's back yards just looking for a new friend to take to sea.  So if you yearn for your own boat to mess around in, take the plunge and learn what it will take to acquire a good one and learn how to sail it.  If you'd rather not deal with the hassle of owning a boat, go down to your local sailing club and ask about learn to sail programs or crewing opportunities.  Chances are, you won't even have to know much to get started. But of course if you can show enthusiasm, pleasant personality, eagerness and some attempt at acquiring the skills, you will be in high demand.   So here are a few basic instructional ma

Top Ten+ Novels Based on Sailing (fiction)

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Sailing makes a romantic setting There are few novels with sailing as a background theme, which is surprising given how romantic sailing is considered to be. Images of sailboats appear everywhere and dreams of sailing off to an uncharted island abound, yet stories tend to be real, not fictional.  That's curious to me. I've scoured the pages of Amazon and Goodreads to find what I could as the question often comes up, "Are there any good novels with sailing themes."  The answer is, yes, but not many.  As I have not read these all yet, I am simply providing the publisher's descriptions here, mostly as they appear on amazon.com.  From Homer's Odyssey to Christine Kling's Circle of Bones, one thing for certain is that this is an eclectic collection, much like the collection of characters one is likely to encounter at sea. I'm also working on a listing of sailing movies, which of course might have been based on either novels or true stories, so perhaps w

Top 25 or so Reference Books for Offshore Sailing

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Fix it, replace it, or do without it.  When we were setting off to cross oceans, we wanted to have access to a library of books that would allow us to fix anything that was essential on board including ourselves, that would help us figure out what we didn't know that we didn't know, and then help us communicate it to someone else if all else failed. My mantra became "If it breaks at sea you have three choices: fix it, replace it or do without it." So we brought along spares for anything we couldn't do without, like an alternator and water pump. We brought spare parts for things we didn't want to do without, like the head. And the rest we figured we could fix, jury rig or learn to live without -- as long as we had someplace to look up what we needed to know. This is a listing of some of the most valuable books we brought along. It doesn't include cruising guides, only reference or instructional books. I'm certain there are some really great books mi

Top Ten Books about Sailing (non-fiction)

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Ocean adventures inspire the spinning of tall tales Sailing is one of those things in life that so many dream of and few pursue. Those of us who have sailed off across an ocean most often started out in our warm beds absorbed in a book of someone else's adventures on the other side of the world. Their yarns spun our own ambitions and fueled our thirst for the sea. So many authors have been inspired by the sea that there are hundreds of books to choose from. So why are these ten on my list? Because they were the ones that told the stories that I wanted to live or taught me lessons that may one day save a life - my own or a loved one's. And now that I have, I can honestly say that their yarns were well spun. There are few things better in life than reading a good sailing book while sailing! To go off watch, curl up in a secure spot and read about your favourite sailing adventure inspires the next adventure of your own. I always ask, where to next? And there's always s

Paraskevidekatriaphobia ... one fear in the sea of superstitions

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Last week, we experienced a Friday the 13th.  How many of you experience friggatriskaidekaphobia or a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th or more specifically paraskevidekatriaphobia, fear of traveling on Friday the 13th? The latter term was coined by therapist Dr. Donald Dossey, whose specialty is treating people with irrational fears.  Many sailors refuse to leave port for a long journey on a Friday, much less a Friday the 13th. Triskaidekaphobics, on the other hand, fear the number 13. For their benefit, hotels skip the 13th floor and some airports even skip gate 13.

When the weather is too awful to sail, go skiing!

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Fabulous restaurants on the mountain, just a slight difference from distance sailing. Skiers and Sailors - a lot in common? Have you ever noticed that many sailors are also skiers?  I suppose it's the allure of water - whether liquid or solid phase - that takes us off into the wild blue/white yonder. Or is it the natural beauty of the earth around us? Or the wild fury of nature that we need to respect and negotiate? Or is it about the adventure? The need to survive either a pitching boat on a wild ocean or a pitched slope on a wild mountain, and thrive out there against the elements and the unknown, could be the impetus.

Oceans on the brink of collapse...need the UN's help urgently.

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We could be on the verge of total collapse of ocean life or on the verge of a breakthrough to take the steps necessary to save our oceans before it's too late. From McCauley DJ et al. A front page story in the New York Times this week, " Ocean Life Faces Mass Extinction ," reported on a major study, a review paper for which scientists gathered data from an impressive range of sources. " Marine defaunation: Animal loss in the global ocean ,"1, published in the journal  Science,  presents evidence that our oceans are on the edge of a largely human-caused catastrophic extinction event. But there is also good news in the study...it may not be too late to fix it. These scientists believe the oceans still have the resilience to bounce back if we can provide the needed protection. But we have to act fast because the status quo is a path we now know is likely to lead to mass extinctions

A Boater's Christmas Wish List

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The hottest gear with which to ring in 2015 With technology changing at lightning speed, it's hard to keep up with the latest advances that make sense in an extreme environment like blue water sailing. But I managed to compile my wish list of

Dingy Dinghy Blues – Bar Keeper's Friend to the rescue!

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Our beautiful Trinka dinghy The stained hull. No boat cleaner made a dent.  There once was a beautiful, shiny new dinghy. We sailed her and rowed her and motored her happily. Then, we towed her behind our bigger boat while on a week-long cruise. On the way back, we stowed her hull side up on deck for a longer passage. It was a beautiful sunny day. The next day, the shiny white dinghy had turned brown and yucky. We tried washing and scrubbing and all kinds of boat cleaners with no success. The poor little dinghy was now dingy and dull, and an embarrassment on the deck of our shiny big boat. We had the dingy dinghy blues. We gave up trying to clean her and stowed her away in the garage for the next few seasons. But this year, we decided it wasn’t her fault and we should bring her out for some local fun. We took her out for a spin now and again. She did double duty as a ferry to our mooring. In fact she served us so well we decided to find a way to restore her to her true gl

Give a man a fish...

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GIVE A  MAN A FISH   AND   FEED   HIM FOR A DAY Give him a fishing lesson and  HE’LL SIT IN A  BOAT DRINKING BEER   EVERY WEEKEND © Copyright by Alex Blackwell, www.coastalboating.net,  All rights reserved. 

Sailing into the Shannon River Estuary

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The marina at Kilrush Kilrush has so much potential The River Shannon divides Clare from Kerry; it is Ireland’s longest and largest river. The mouth of the Shannon River is wide and inviting, stretching between Kerry Head on the Southside and Loop Head on the Northside. You really need time to be able to explore her lower reaches as there is little opportunity to find shelter before the town of Kilrush some 30 km up in County Clare on the Northside of the River. The Shannon is a powerboat paradise and a very popular tourist attraction for river boating. Consequently, there is a lot of information available about the River, especially from Limerick and beyond. The lower Shannon has Ireland’s only pod of resident bottlenose dolphins. More than 100 dolphins have been identified using the Shannon estuary. The success rate of seeing dolphins here is reported to be better than 98%.

Farewell to Onyx

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Onyx went to sleep and passed to the other side. Her pain is now gone, her frivolity magnified, I expect. Thank you, Killian, for your gentle kindness and generosity. We buried her on one of her favourite beds - a nautical one that I had made specially for her, with all her favourite toys (squeaky mouse, bitty mouse, crunchy crab, and feather dusters) and favourite treats including shrimp, choicest grass, and fish jerky for the long road.  We covered her with a fleece blanket and one of Alex's dark T-shirts which she always loved to hide in. We laid a rose at her nose as she loved to sniff them and climbed on top of tables to get the best whiff.

RIP Onyx ~8 August 2000-29 September 2014

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Onyx was a brave adventurous seafaring cat, crossing oceans to visit new lands, make new friends, and try new things - except when it came to food, as only seafood would do.  Onyx was a great friend and companion and the ruler of the house and the clan. She loved her humans and they loved her. She will be sorely missed.  Rest in Peace, Onyx.    8 August 2000-29 September 2014 Love and hugs forever, Your People, Daria and Alex

My heart is breaking for Onyx, the Cruising Kitty

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Onyx is a very special cat. For one thing, she is all black except for one white hair, which Alex likes to pull out (mean Alex!). That makes her rather difficult to photograph. Of course I have photographed her more than any thing else in my life. You see, Onyx originally came to me in a dream. I sat up in bed one night and shook Alex awake, "Alex, I dreamt we had a cat and she was all black and her name was Onyx."  "Yeah, yeah, go back to sleep," was Alex's response.