Return to Ireland

We touched down at Cork airport in the early evening. A taxi was waiting to take us to a guest house near Crosshaven Boatyard. We dropped our bags and bee-lined to Cronins, Crosshaven’s only decent pub, for a pint of Guinness. The first swallow validated our return to Ireland.

Early the next day, John and I started in on the spring commissioning punch list. Jet lag slowed us, but we pushed through and Windleblo was launched on schedule a day and a half later.

Afloat again, we moved on board and continued spring commissioning. Running rigging was installed; sails hanked on; fresh water system flushed; battery water topped off; ground tackle assembled; engine serviced; navigation lights tested; safety equipment checked and rechecked, to name just a few of the myriad tasks.

We took a day off from our labors to attend a Personal Survival Training course at the National Maritime College of Ireland, a new state-of-the-art facility at Ringaskiddy, just a few miles from Crosshaven. There, we were lectured by a very learned sailor with a Deep Cork accent on the Four Vital Actions necessary to increase your chances of survival if, God forbid, you ever ended up in a life raft at sea. In case you’re curious, these are “Cut (the painter), Stream (the drogue), Cover (the life raft), and Maintain (bail and/or check inflation).”

As the day began, he asked if anyone had any special requests, and as I could barely understand him, I asked if he could please speak more slowly. He said, yes, of course he would, and proceeded to lecture at the same pace as before. But soon my ear adjusted and I started to catch most of what he was saying. I rationalized that my difficulty understanding him was actually of benefit as it forced me to listen more carefully than usual. Chalk it up to another case of a common language separating two peoples.

After morning lectures, we donned dry suits for afternoon practicals in a specialized pool. We deployed self-inflating life rafts – something I had never done – and learned how to right them if upside down, haul ourselves into them, and then haul ourselves out of them to swim to a hoisting sling for retrieval from the water. The finale came with a simulated nighttime abandon ship drill, complete with lightning, thunder, rain, wind, and waves, every bit as good as a Disney World ride.

One more punch-list-filled day later, we moved the boat 12 miles west to the Trident Marina in Kinsale, where Jocelyn and I ended the season last year. Kinsale’s dozen or so pubs made for a far more attractive staging location than Crosshaven. As luck would have it, we arrived on Saturday afternoon just in time to start a determined pub crawl.

John and Moya O’Riordan helped get the crawl off to a good start at the Spaniard, a pub dating back to the days when the Spanish helped the Irish lose the Battle of Kinsale in 1602. John crewed on the sail down from Crosshaven as a way to get familiar with the boat in advance of joining us for the Biscay crossing. The fish and chips at the Spaniard were to die for, especially when washed down with another Guinness, or a Murphys, a Corker’s version of Irish stout and every bit as good as Guinness. As the evening wore on, we sampled as many pubs as we could, sticking mainly to stout but sampling broadly from the musical acts offered at most of the venues.

The next morning we vowed to go on the wagon in the hope that a detoxed body would be less prone to seasickness. I even bought some decaffeinated tea to avoid both alcohol and caffeine in the run up to departure. The next few days evaporated with a continued assault on the pre-departure punch list.

From the barkeep who gave me special keg tubes to use as a kind of lifeline chafe protection to the marina manager who let me use their Laundromat on the honor system, and from so many others, we encountered extraordinary good cheer and helpfulness by the Irish throughout our time here. We are particularly appreciative of Hugh Gibson’s good service as Windleblo’s winter guardian, of James Lyons’s arrangements for us to lie at Trident Marina, of Harry Lewis’s expert inspection of our rig and patience with all my questions, of Victor Fusco’s assistance allowing us to use the Kinsale Outdoor Education Center kitchen to cook our passage meals, and especially of John O’Riordan’s help in so many ways, including carting us around Cork to buy provisions and serving as “sous chef” during our cooking marathon.

Chris Adams arrives in Kinsale tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, May 26^th. The Biscay Crossing crew will then be assembled. As soon as a weather window opens after that, we will cast off for Spain. The next blog entry will start with “Ola!”