Baileys Int’ Wild are a family of three who have long been outdoorsy types and who know the outdoors helps us to remain sane, but who have been struggling the last few years with physical health problems. These issues have been exacerbated time and time again, especially when we have tried to make recoveries, and this has then led to us having mental health and anxiety troubles (which we want to be honest about).
Personally I (Emma), have climbed multiple mountains in the UK (Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon over 40 times), camped, run, hiked, canoed, abseiled etc. I have water-skied on Windermere, done charity drives in the Lake District, cycled 20 miles (32.19 km), to swim in Yorkshire lakes, and spent not only a significant proportion of my young adult life outdoors, but I worked outdoors and spent most of my childhood outdoors too. You know the type, bin liners over my socks, so I could play in the snow blizzards in the Pennines a little longer, swimming in the canal, hide and seek in ferns and making dens everywhere. I even started to learn to fly.
My children grew up similarly. We used to go to local forests to splash in puddles and hunt for faeries (you can see funnelled spider webs in the rain), and we went to the beaches in terrible weather to see dramatic surf, play in the wind and enjoy having the beach to ourselves. We used to paddle and cycle for miles, and we’d pick up tree dead fall in the Autumn to do home crafts with.
Then I ended up in a wheelchair because of lung problems. For about a decade I have been struggling to move, and my daughter Cerys has been doing what she can to take care of me. Our family as a whole stopped being able to be outdoors, and ultimately we all suffered. We had lost our happy place. Wheelchairs are not particularly nimble when it comes to mountain trails, fine sandy beaches and sand dunes, and even gravel tracks with the slightest of inclines.
My arm strength has withered to nothing, and I can barely even move myself about on anything but a perfectly flat surface. Cerys and Jacob usually do all the work to get me to the ends of breakwaters, or into forests. Something I am thankful for. Powered chairs cost many thousands of pounds, and only a rare few I’d be able to take with me in the car (if we can get them in).
Luckily, we think we found a way to solve what we felt to be an endlessly hopeless situation. In 2022, we stumbled on a charity called SEAS Sailability that operated in North Wales, on the Menai Straits, and so we went along to have a look. SEAS offer a range of activities that allow people with physical impairments, and their carers and family, to come along and experience being out on the water. Having someone come up to you and ask, “what would YOU like to do”, blew me away. They have teams of people lifting and supporting people onto and off of a range of watercraft.
So, we tried some Canadian canoes, and their Wheelyboat (think D-Day landing craft for wheelchairs), and Cerys played on a Kayak for a while (actually I’d love one of those). But, it wasn’t until I asked if we could go on one of the 20ft (6.1 m), sailboats I could see, did we find our passion.
Quite simply, it blew us away. Wow.
We motored out the first time, the engine was cut, the sails hoisted by the volunteers, we picked up the wind, and they handed me the tiller. From that moment on, we knew it was the solution. Cerys and I that day, came away smiling ear to ear. Unfortunately, as wonderful as SEAS is, they are volunteers and are obviously subject to staff numbers, and the tide. We could only get onto the pontoon when the ramp was at its least steep, which meant high tides. That combination meant we might get out only three times in the year.
It wasn’t enough to satiate our cabin fever, so we needed another solution. In October 2022, we bought our very first sailing boat, called Firefly. She was moored in Conwy harbour at the time, and is in not just in a dire state of repair, but has an interesting history too.
So now we are restoring her, and our ultimate aim is to sail from North Wales, up the west coast of the UK, into the Caledonian Canal, through Loch Ness, and on to Inverness. Where we go from there, we have no idea, but there are bound to be smaller trips before and after, in and around North Wales, over to Ireland and the Isle of Man.
Firefly has given us a sense of purpose. She gets us outdoors, even if we’re just pulling barnacles from her, and it allows us to use some of our skills as we restore her. When she’s done, we’ll learn to sail her, and we’ll be exploring perhaps the only outdoor space left for us all to enjoy together.
Hopefully that explains our motives for rebuilding her, what we gain from her now, and what we hope to gain from her in the future. She gives us hope.
We are creative types too, so we have decided to film the progress, and you can see that presented by Cerys over on YouTube.
Written by Emma