Hello everyone - We're back in Kinsale where we'll be spending most of the next six months or so. The days are rapidly getting shorter and the frequency of gales has increased to at least once a week. But the weather's still very warm, and for the most part it feels like summer here while it already felt like fall in Scotland when we left there a month ago. I still find it hard to believe we're at the latitude of the northern tip of Newfoundland and I can wander ashore and see palm trees. Ah, the wonders of the Gulf Stream! The water's warm enough the bilge no longer serves as a fridge...

We've spent the last two weeks doing some very slow, very relaxed cruising getting to know this corner of Ireland. In contrast to the rugged, remote and depopulated Scottish islands, here thousands of years of careful cultivation have created lovely patchworks of fields separated by stone fences and high hedges across almost every square mile of land. Along the southwest coast of Ireland, small villages and towns lie scattered around anything approaching a cove, and in the large, well-protected anchorages we often find two fair-sized towns. This is very civilized cruising with a store always available ashore, a choice of pub meals wherever we drop our hook and phones and post offices a short walk away. In addition to some very pleasant sailing and easy exploring ashore, I've spent most of the last few weeks writing while Evans has been organizing winter boat projects. This has been a much needed interlude for rest and reflection between our Scottish summer and my upcoming trip to the States.

There's so much history here, no one seems able to keep track of it all. Ruined forts and watchtowers line the coast, and if we ask local sailors about them more than half the time they know no more than we do. We picked up a bit of history here in Kinsale last week, though, and in this case we didn't want to know any more about it. We were raising our anchor to go get fuel at the nearby marina. I was on the bow and Evans was on the helm. The anchor seemed to be coming up a bit more slowly than usual. We had an anchor float attached to it by a tripline, and as we came even with that Evans got the boathook and pulled it up deck. But the tripline was wrapped around something, most likely the anchor chain which often happens in tidal anchorages. I took the float and kept raising the anchor while Evans went back to the helm.

By the time our 110-pound Bruce was approaching the surface, I was certain we had something caught on it. The windlass was working too hard and the tripline was still wrapped around something. As the Bruce broke the surface of the water, in its claw I saw what at first appeared to be a large log. But when I looked more closely, I saw a corroded fisherman anchor some four feet long with a cross piece of two and a half or three feet. The Bruce had neatly snagged it between the shank and the flukes and brought it up to show us.

I won't go into the unpleasant details of removing it when we were being swept out the river mouth by a two knot current and hesitated to use the engine because we still had the tripline down there attached to something else (another anchor?) which we were dragging with us. Suffice to say it took two halyards, several pieces of line, some major muscle power and a few unkind words, only once or twice exchanged between the two of us. By the time Evans had wrestled it loose, we were no longer in an anchorage but in a deep channel, so we dropped it over the side. Later, when we got fuel, the dockmaster got all excited. "We've found anchors from when the Spanish Armada were here in 1601," he said. "That might have been an antique, a real relic." He actually followed us out in his launch so we could show him where we'd dropped it. He said his teen-aged sons would love to go looking for it. The thing probably weighed two-hundred pounds and would have holed our dinghy - so I'm not sure what else we might have done with it.

Hawk handled all this commotion with great aplomb and seemed quite proud of what she'd found down there. Not only did her windlass bring it up, but despite some rather nasty banging around when it broke the water and the need to swing it away from the Bruce and around the side where it dragged mud and slime along the hull, her topsides suffered nothing more than a small scratch. We both would have been in a panic (well, more of a panic) if we'd had to worry about gelcoat or paint. We suggested to Hawk that we preferred finding our history ashore, and I hope she understood!

I'm heading back to the States tomorrow and will be there until the middle of October. Evans is staying with Hawk and will continue to be in communication via this e-mail address. You can reach me by e-mail at my father's address - harseykng@aol.com or phone - 315-446-6775. I look forward to seeing many of you while I'm in the States.

Hope your sailing season still continues, Beth and Evans s/v Hawk