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  Discharged into the harsh white glare and blast-furnace heat of an August afternoon in Rome, I took my wife for a late lunch at an osteria on Via dei Cappellari — but my body insisted 'too soon'. We cut it short so I could collapse into bed under an air conditioner with a large bottle of water.

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  #RIP William Orbit, music producer, aged 69

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  "The world’s seas were hotter last month than in any July on record, scientists have said, as devastating heat struck western Europe. "Sea surface temperatures hit record highs for July on the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, the EU’s Copernicus climate change service found, with severe marine heatwaves roiling Europe’s seas. Globally, the average sea surface temperature outside the cold polar regions was the highest on record for the month, beating the previous July...

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  This is the last place There is nowhere else to go... – Lew Welch [from The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings]

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  [from six months ago] In his 1987 book, The Songlines, the British author and traveller, Bruce Chatwin wrote, “A journey is a fragment of hell.” My wife and I have been journeying together for nearly 38 years. Except for eight years in Australia, in the early ‘00s (during which we lived in seven different houses in Sydney and its northern suburbs), we haven’t settled anywhere for very long. Indeed, the longest we’ve stayed in any one 'home’ has been the three years we’ve lived aboard W...

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  An Inughuit hunter paddling a kayak off the mountainous, ice-bound coast of northwest Greenland. Photo by Kiliii Yuyan.

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  I wake to my wife's kisses as she reminds me, gently, that I'm another year deeper into the eighth decade of a misspent life. I try not to dwell on the wreckage strewn around it.

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  We have been staying with our son in Rome for the past week. We were driven off the boat by extreme heat — In Cagliari, as in Rome, temperatures have rarely fallen below 30ºC, even at night, and have occasionally risen to the mid-40s, which made walks even to the grocery store, 1.6 shadeless kilometres from the marina, something of a risk for us. I have also been struggling with my health; I was often unsteady and in pain whenever I moved around the boat. Given put some of this down to deepenin...

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  My wife and I are *this close* to finalising a long-term lease on an apartment in Palermo, Sicily, and securing a home for the first time in eight years (not counting our ill-fated attempt to restore and live in a 16th century stone ruin in Puglia, five years ago — only to be refused residence permits). Please read our latest update. We have to raise around 2,500 Euros quickly, for the first month's rent, moving costs, and basic furnishings (a bed, a table, and a small fridge will do it)...

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  "Wisdom comes by disillusionment." – George Santayana

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  At dusk, rolling thunder, lightning, and rain, driven across the Gulf by a hard sou'easterly. Wrack yaws in the strongest gusts and tugs against her doubled bow lines. Below decks, unbothered, I listen to Cecil Taylor as I read Raymond Horricks' The Importance of Being Eric Dolphy.

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  On Wednesday, this week, a possible new custodian for Wrack is flying to Cagliari from Northern Italy to spend a couple of days aboard, to view the boat, and discuss the 'nuts and bolts' of a transfer of ownership. As I've written before, we intend to 'gift' the vessel, paying forward the generosity that we have experienced from this community. We continue to work on the boat to prepare her for at least one last passage. Despite her age and sea-worn appe...

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  Having fallen overboard from Wrack in a Cagliari marina a few weeks ago — ending up with a couple of fractures and huge, purple, Rorschach test-like contusions all over my body — I fell on the foredeck yesterday and broke half a molar (and no, I can't afford to repair it).

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  A pleasant morning with Leo, who flew from Verona to Cagliari to inspect Wrack, before considering whether to become her new custodian. He arrived just as a strong mistral was setting in, which made boarding the boat something of an adventure. After an hour or so of going through the boat and its gear, we talked about the logistics of the ownership transfer and re-flagging over pasta at a local swimming club. We're going to meet again on Thursday.

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  "Resist much, obey little." – Walt Whitman

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  Woodcut from La Petit Histoire Bretonne: ‘On the Open Sea’ by Rene Quillivic, 1921 [via @Sardonicus]

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  Wake at 3.30am to light rain and an eddy of cold air through the open companionway hatch.

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  Passing Es Vedra at sunrise, an uninhabited, limestone island, 413 metres high, off the south western corner of Ibiza, at the end of a passage from Alicante, last summer.

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  "Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free." – David Graeber

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  At sunrise, the air below decks is gelid and damp. I pull the duvet over my shoulders and head. A school of flathead mullet bumps along the hull, feeding.

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  A dry scirocco has set in, gusting 20 knots over the deck under a cloudess sky. Given is preparing a simple Greek vegetable soup (peas, potatoes and carrots) while I make to-do lists for next week's maintenance push.

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  A day of leaden skies and a 30-knot scirocco, Wrack dancing like a marionette between bow and stern lines.

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  Grocery shopping in a hard scirocco: a walk of about a kilometre, each way, to the nearest supermarket, then the acrobatics of passing shopping bags along a narrow 1.5-metres-long gangplank, between an agitated dock and Wrack's after-deck. Rain and thunderstorms, maybe, in the graveyard hours tonight. Right now, the sky is the color of stale milk.

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  A late afternoon thrill: a flamboyance of flamingoes flying low, in formation, over our boat, en route to the salt marshes at the north-west corner of the Gulf of Cagliari.

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  Early evening and we're working on Wrack's electrical system, isolating batteries, checking alternator connections. At sunset, a 'hail Mary' press on the ignition button, and our Volvo Penta 20hp immediately chugs into life followed by the alternator. My wife: "The African Queen is back!" The diagnosis? One dead lead battery in the series of three.

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  An opportunity for someone you know? "If Given and I were looking for a more persuasive argument — we weren't — that our water-bound life is at an end, we've found it, writ large, in the last few days. We have decided to sell our boat or (our preference) gift her, fully equipped, to younger, fitter, adventurous people who might want to take her on and sail her further. "Wrack is scruffy but sea-kindly and sound; with little work, she'd be a strong, rel...

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  A week that went from bad to...just as bad: On Monday, our first day aboard Wrack in four months, I fell overboard, sustaining a couple of fractures, severe bruising, and a few nasty wire abrasions; yesterday, Wrack's entire electrical system failed, bricking the engine, lighting system and our modest suite of electronics (a dead battery, for sure, but also an unknown, as yet untraced power drain). Our hoped-for departure on a relatively long passage to the mainland, late next week,...

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  @oblomov @tend2wobble I'vev spent too much time in them over the past 6 months.

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  @tend2wobble Aargh. A sensible suggestion but... I can't really afford it. C'est la guerre.

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  Strangely diffident about being back in Cagliari, in southern Sardinia, upset by the state of our boat, and fretful about our youngest, who is now in Australia, Given and I are holed up in a borrowed apartment just two streets back from the harbour, catching up on three straight nights of lost sleep in Rome. Wrack looks so forlorn, it's heartbreaking. On Sunday, we'll start clearing her decks and drying her out below decks. A diver is coming next weekend to scrape the hull below...