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ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
wrack
@ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
64 followers 4 following 500 posts
vagabond. sea-dweller. diarist. wreck.

https://ccohanlon.tumblr.com/about

"So here is us, on the raggedy edge."

– from the film Serenity (2005)

#nobots

🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://merveilles.town/@ccohanlon, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Ho'i I ka piko ('return to the source'), a 2,700+ nautical mile voyage from California to Hawai'i in a 26ft wooden double canoe named ʻAʻā, a Wharram Pahi design, in 2024.

1/7 episodes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJyYIsEGtI
A small double canoe at anchor in front of a tangle of tropical growth, a painted sail being hoisted on its short mast.
December 20, 2025 at 9:56 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Why did my wife and I move aboard Wrack in old age?

Being homeless and out of options was part of it but I was also haunted by my own words in this 2021 interview for Anna Iltnere's When I Grow Up project, in which I described myself as a 'castaway' […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
Text: What inspires you? Unusual young people, like Hannah Lily Stowe, whom you’ve featured here, and the sea-going artists/programmers, Rekka Bell and Devin Lu Linvega. Also certain solitary, rarely remarked upon but rather extraordinary older people who live (and voyage) at the margins, like Kris Larsen and Nick Skeates. Also maps. Or, more specifically, nautical charts, maps of the sea. I have, maybe, a couple of hundred of them, many more than half a century old. I read them as I would a book. A chart is a wondrous artefact. At first glance, it’s just an annotated image of a stretch of water and its littoral, a repository of essential data. But a chart is filled with history, geography, oceanography, metereology and several hundred years of maritime lore and experience, all conveyed in a visual language that has evolved over centuries.
December 19, 2025 at 12:09 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
"Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about."

– […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
Text: Everyone converses with each other easily: there is commonality in our lives afloat. But there is also the impression that we are all untethered and adrift. The lack of individual fixedness (that word, again) is stark. We talk of boats, sea passages and ports of call but there is no sense of place, of belonging. None of us have a home in our heads to return to — maybe this last defines the elemental difference between recreational sailors and sea-dwellers, between the guests of high-priced marinas and the liveaboard outsiders moored here and elsewhere in the obscure reaches of other estuaries and tidal creeks around the British coast — but very few of us have been pressed into this circumstance. It is a choice, or sometimes a lawless inclination, driven only in part by a desire to feel free of some of the strictures and conventions of life ashore. Disappearance is an art and those drawn to a life on the sea are adept at it...
December 19, 2025 at 11:47 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Mary and George Oppen abord the small yacht that was their refuge (and means of escape) during late 1920s/early 1930s, sailing from Detroit, across Lake Erie to the Erie Canal, then down the Hudson River to New York City.
December 17, 2025 at 11:11 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
A couple of passage pictures.
Enough wind to fill a hungry headsail. Given on deck, framed by the sprayhood, waiting for a breeze to set in on a windless Mediterranean
December 8, 2025 at 10:35 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Me at the helm, as we set off aboard Wrack from Alicante towards Ibiza, a passage of 100+ nautical miles.

Photo by Finn O'Hanlon.
An old, bearded man in a battered straw hat and a black t-shirt, steering a small yacht away from a harbour on a boue-green sea.
December 8, 2025 at 10:07 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
My photograph of the Charente River at Chateauneuf-Sur-Charente, in south-west France, from early spring, 2012. My wife and I had bought (and restored) a 19th century cognac merchant's house there, after we left Sydney, Australia, with our three kids — 14 […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
November 25, 2025 at 4:22 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Anton Newcombe, leader of the The Brian Jonestown Massacre, was one of my more unlikely acquaintances in Berlin. His recording studio was just a few blocks from my apartment, north-west of Nordbahnhof, where affluent Mitte began to meld with the predominantly […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
A b&w photo by C.C. O'Hanlon of Anton Newcombe at work, mixing, in his studio, surrounded by ketboards, amps and other equipment.
November 24, 2025 at 7:08 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
My favorite non-fiction book, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship And The Canoe (1978), is a memoir of time spent with both Dysons, juxtaposing Freeman's dreams of manned rockets to the edge of our galaxy with George's ambitious voyages in fragile, traditional […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
A portrait of George Dyson as an older man, sitting by a carpentry workshop bench. A baidarka built by George Dyson running downwind with a Dyson-designed fan-shaped sail.
November 19, 2025 at 8:10 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
A good friend, Peter Stridh, is sailing 40 nautical miles from the Gulf of Teulada, in south-western Sardinia to join my wife and me in the port of Cagliari. He is, like us, a vagabond – a Swedish-born surfer, permaculturalist, and artist, who took to the sea […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
A view of low cliffs, blue sea and an empty cerulean sky from the deck of a 10-metre sailboat, Pinoseed.
November 19, 2025 at 3:19 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
The first works of my month-long guest editorship of Burning House Press (UK) have just been uploaded. New works will be added every couple of days until the end of this month:

Submissions around my loose theme of Journeys are open for one more week.

https://burninghousepress.com/
A sculptural collage inspired by the seashore, constructed around an old printer's hot type drawer, by Liz Cullinane.
November 17, 2025 at 7:17 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
"...with winter looming, and assuming successful outcomes of further cardiology (for both Given and me) in Rome, we will likely begin a fourth year aboard Wrack, ignoring the challenges of an old age without any assets and sustained income, and waning […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
Sunrise seen over the bow over a small yacht, flying a single headsail, as it motorsails over a slight sea,
November 16, 2025 at 12:22 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”

Rachel Carson, from The Sense of Wonder, 1965

*

Just before the first time I ever crossed an ocean under sail, I had to fly […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
Becalmed aboard a small sailboat in the Western Mediterranean, as the sun sets behind the islands of Ibiza and Formentera, at the beginning of a 320-mile passage to southern Sardinia, 2025.
November 14, 2025 at 7:21 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
At the rear of Dorotheenstadt cemetery, resting place of Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, Christa Wolf, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Berlin-Mitte, Germany, 2017.
Formal, somewhat brutalist buildings through the trees of a carefully manicured cemetery in Berlin-Mitte.
November 12, 2025 at 1:39 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
(From a Berlin notebook, 2016)

I am an inexperienced cyclist. As far as possible, I avoid Berlin’s main arteries and stick to the backstreets. Bike lanes constricted by car traffic, tram tracks and intrusion from roadworks and heavy construction make me […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
The exterior of an art squat in a 19th century building in Berlin-Mitte, 2015.
November 12, 2025 at 7:10 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
(From a Berlin diary, 2016)

Fehrbelliner Strasse intersects the indefinite, porous border between the old East Berlin neighbourhoods of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. Forming a T with the sloping green space of Volkspark am Weinbergweg, the street is lined with […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
Angels over Gartenstrasse: a b&w image of paste-ups on an abandoned building in Berlin, bicycles parked outside it.
November 11, 2025 at 9:57 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Another of my diaristic pieces about the sea and sea-dwelling has just been posted on the Azores-based Sea-Water Amplification project's substack.

https://seawateramplification.substack.com/p/unmoored-by-cc-ohanlon
A Mad Max-like harbour at low tide, the sea having retreated to leave rusted hulks oh old cargo vessels and small yachts lying on mud.
November 9, 2025 at 1:00 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Where we are now.

[A 1944 British Admiralty nautical chart — with depths in fathoms — of the Gulf of Cagliari, Sardinia, based on a 1920 Italian survey.]
An engraved, monochrome nautical chart.
November 8, 2025 at 2:06 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
So... Burning House Press has nominated me as the fifth guest editor of their return series of online special editions. As of today I'll take over editorship of Burning House Press online for the month of November.

Submissions are open from today 1st […]

[Original post on merveilles.town]
November 1, 2025 at 11:04 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
On one of our first long passages aboard Wrack, back in 2023.

Photo by Given Rozell.
In the foreground, an old, bearded man at the helm of a small sailboat. Behind him, the silhouette of a stretch of coast as the sun sets behind it, turning the sky and sea shades of orange and purple.
October 31, 2025 at 7:35 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
The Azores-based collective, Sea-Water Amplification (SWA), has been (re)publishing some of my old writing on the sea and seafaring.

Let them know what you think — and maybe support them too, if you're inclined.

https://seawateramplification.substack.com
October 29, 2025 at 11:21 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
"We're not sure what happens next."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/a-voyage-in-search-of-home
A small sailboat, with no sails, points towards an empty horizon at dawn on an empty sea.
October 21, 2025 at 10:31 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Thousands of dead fish strewn across the waters of Cagliari harbour, this morning, killed by toxic run-off from the city’s streets and storm drains after last night’s deluge.
Dead fish floating on still waters in front of a row of yachts moored in a marina.
October 16, 2025 at 10:06 AM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
This evening: lightning storms and torrential rain over Cagliari, where we and our old sailboat, Wrack, are berthed for the autumn.
Ominous dark clouds gathering over Cagliari harbour: yachts illuminated by a patch of garish orange as the sun sets.
October 15, 2025 at 10:13 PM
ccohanlon.merveilles.town.ap.brid.gy
Missing this.
September 12, 2025 at 1:20 PM