Hello everyone! We're sitting in Blacksod Bay, a huge, empty sandy bay with half a dozen anchorages in its various arms. Mullet Peninsula - ten miles long and no more than 100 feet high - forms the western side of the bay and offers what shelter exists. In contrast to the mountain ranges of Connemara, this land seems open and bleak and flat - fields of peat bog, without a single tree to be seen. Houses dot the shore, and a few farms with cattle grazing on the bog, but all of them seem small and toylike under the big sky in a big bay.

We arrived here two days ago after a magnificent 45-mile sail from Killary Harbor, touted as the only fjord in Ireland, around Achill Head and under what are supposed to be the highest sea cliffs in all of Europe. Achill Head felt more like a corner than any we've rounded in Ireland, yet on the map and the charts it doesn't really look that way. The point on the westernmost corner of the island stands proud of the island which stands proud of the mainland, so rounding it in haze that cut visibility to a couple of miles made it feel as if we were rounding the tip of a continent - all we could see were the cliffs on either side of the point and way back in the distance the vague outlines of the mountain range we'd left behind when we left Killary. As we approached from the south, the mile and a half of sheer cliffs along the coast just before the point slowly revealed themselves from the haze. They appeared first as blue-gray smudges on the horizon, then their outlines hardened into dark lines. As we sailed closer, the blue-gray area began to develop ridges and contours and subtle changes in color. When we were finally within a half mile or so, the cliffs towered over us, looking like the gnarly toes on the feet of some mythic beast cut off at the ankles. Gorges and ravines separated saddleback ridges and canted plateaus, and ended in rounded toes complete with toenails of shattered rocks at the base of each ridge.

We rounded the head, where three miles of cliffs rose to 2,500 feet sheer from the sea. On this face, the ridges or rock plunging down from the top of the cliff and separated by ravines and gorges were truncated about halfway down in flat faces of shattered rock. A huge rock slide about halfway along the sheer wall must have been a hundred yards wide, a gray waterfall of scree and loose rocks starting as a narrow line at the top and widening until it met the sea in a broad band. Unlike the Cliffs of Moher (near Galway which we didn't get to see), these are not "stacks" - horizontal slabs of rock one atop the other - but totally chaotic upthrusts and landslides and fractured surfaces. We sailed under the cliffs, at close-hauled in 20 knots of apparent wind, heeled over about 20 degrees, bounced around by the swell that raced past us and crashed spectacularly on the cliff faces, spray flying over the windward bow and the occasional rainbow flashing in the water tossed up to leeward...

As the last of the cliffs receded into the haze, Evans grinned at me and said, "You see? I take you to all the best places!"

We're now getting close to the northwest corner of Ireland, and the clock has started ticking on our short summer season. We finally sat down and did some serious planning, working backwards from when we want to arrive in Chile - and decided we need to leave sometime in the next ten days for the Faroe Islands. Once we leave this coast, we'll be out of cell phone range, and we're not yet sure whether our cell phone will work in the Faroes or whether we'll be limited to cyber cafes. In any case, we'll be back in touch when we're able, and in the meantime, enjoy the spring. We know it has been a long time coming for many of you this year, but hopefully the time has come to start putting the boats back in the water.

Here's to sailing adventures - wherever we can find them! Beth and Evans s/v Hawk Blacksod Bay, Co. Mayo, Ireland