Aleria's Adventures

How I would love my deck to look Dealing with boat projects in the spring has us stressing out over when and how we're going to cope with it all. It doesn't help that we chose a 57-foot "classic" that this year is turning 40 years old. While Alex replaces all the through hulls, I am dealing with brightwork and teak decks, miles of them. Every time I tackle this chore I think, "we should have bought a smaller boat." It is what it is. 

Book Review Calming Celtic Colouring Adult Colouring Book An amazing phenomenon in the book industry is the popularity of adult colouring books.  There’s a good article in Time magazine about how this whole trend got started. In 2013, Scottish illustrator Johanna Basford, who created elaborate black and white illustrations for corporate clients, had the idea to publish an adult colouring book when her clients kept saying they felt a need to colour in her illustrations.  Now, 16 million copies later, she is publishing her fourth offering, Magical Jungle .  Her other books, Secret Garden , Enchanted Forest , and Lost Ocean , are actually quite beautiful and thematically interesting.  A fifth book, Johanna’s Christmas is due later this year.  So it stands to reason that others would be jumping on the band wagon, including Game of Thrones originator George RR Martin, whose colouring book based on characters in the hugely popular book and televis...

Book Review Recipes and Stories from Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way By Jody Eddy Photography by Sandeep Patwal I loved this book right from the start. It features a compilation of stories about people and the ways of living along Ireland’s wild west coast, together with recipes that feature the local fare. It’s a fantastic complement to our own Cruising the Wild Atlantic Way.   I’ve often wondered what the story is behind a successful regional niche product. Who thought of it?  How do they produce it?  Who buys it?  Where are they heading with it?  Those types of questions are answered and explored in intriguing storytelling fashion.  I’ve even learned about my personal favourite cheese: gubeen!  They’ve even included short regional travel guides to tell you where the hidden gems are. And County Mayo features quite prominently.

Alex reinstalling winches on Aleria's main mast This year, we hauled Aleria out in the NW corner of Ireland in a town called Killybegs. Mooney Boats is our home for the winter and Alex has been very busy. Alex is servicing thru hulls and is finding serous issues. Alex is servicing all the winches to make it easier for me to winch. But with him doing all this work, the inside is all torn up and the outside needs to be dry so he can re-bed through hulls in rebuilt fibreglass. Gee, that means I haven't been able to paint inside, clean the teak decks with the oxalic acid I bought, or strip the varnish on the teak coamings and trim, yet again. I know. I buy into the need for serious safety issues to be dealt with, but that means that once again the cosmetic stuff has been put off and I can't live with that any more. I can't live aboard a boat that embarrasses me.

Every time I think I've got my apps all figured out and organized just the way I want them, new apps emerge from the depths of the oceans or sky or wherever. There seem to be apps for everything now. Apps for navigation, AIS, anchor alarms, marinas, anchorages, weather, tides, fishing, night sky, birding, whaling, cooking, reading and so much more. Tell me, how did we ever get along without apps. And what's app with this anyway?  They used to be called programs. Then they were web links accessed through browsers. Now they are apps. My laptop no longer has program files, it has apps. This has become the planet of the apps.

Irelandopedia A compendium of maps, facts and knowledge By Fatti and John Burke While we are on the subject of Ireland, a great companion book to have aboard for children when cruising in Ireland is Irelandopedia. What a delightful concept for exploring the rich history of this island nation. County by county, there are countless interesting factoids, cleverly illustrated to accentuate their historical significance.  Seriously oversized and in hardcover, it is an excellent resource to help make history come alive for children and adults alike.