"Take you down to the foaming brine and water
And show you the wooden tits on the goddess with a pole out
Full sail
They tempted away your pegleg father".
(captain beefheart orange claw hammer)
This is a rather long & rambling blog about a two week sailing trip I have just got back from with 13 others up to The Western Isles. There's fishing stuff in it though...
Into more serious seas, a dark horizon.
Yesterday was a jewel, a gift. To the west the Wicklow hills wore a ruff of soft cloud. We floated on an oily calm, anchored after the weak breeze dropped away and the tide had turned against us.
A wishful line with an otterboard trailing feathers surfaced with a mackerel. 16 more followed. We had been set by luck on a fishing ground, the Codling Bank.
A day of Sun and rest.
This morning the West holds proud dark hills, that stronghold, Ulster.
A sail flaps like stage thunder.
Rockall, Malin, Hebrides.
New, stormy territory.
Eigg.
Like an embryo floating, a curled dream child below Skye,
We approached from the South, from Tobermory. The ridge of An Sgurr like an old whale spine rises to a crescendo above the main slipway.
We rattled out the anchor, to wait for a wind to take us on to Lewis.
Diesel courses through all our doings. The price trebling in a year has shown our complete addiction.
A great cartoon bloated whale of a hull
hung fat on the quay at Tobermory.
It fishes sixteen hundred pots and goes out for week at a time. The tail ropes are 100 fathom, as they have to fish deep water to avoid the trawlers.
The deck is all housed in and they can fish any weather. They have to anyway to pay for the diesel, bait at £600/tonne, pots@ £30 each and undisclosed loan repayments. She is not a season old and has had two new engines.
I can't help but feel the skipper's dream sea chicken has turned out to be a banker’s cuckoo.
On the other side of the wall, two brothers were painting their old wooden boat. They dive for scallops for a living. In the Summer they head out amongst the islands, living on the boat and diving.
I know which fishing method I respect.
On Eigg, diesel is an issue too.
They don't slurp what they used to running their generators as they have a renewable energy grid, but transport and fishing get more expensive daily.
The islandiness of islands is ever-changing. Like planets wobbling in their orbit around the sun of Man.
There seems to be disproportionate effort and cost put to linking them into central supply systems. A neurotic need to be inclusive.
When the weather or the winter months close in, many islanders quietly enjoy their community's isolation and self reliance.
Eigg was where the pots and a net went out in earnest.
I got up at dawn and paddled across a gentle sea to check them.
Seals spurted and coughed all around, promising little joy from the net. It had caught only weed, a slimy, sludgy stuff that stuck every pore of it.
The pots held one good cock crab, and dozens of fiddlers. With fourteen crew to feed I kept them.
We caught little on the trip but relished every morsel.
The calm of Eigg was lost as we sailed North, into the Sea of the Hebrides.
I slept through a wild night that those on watch said they would never forget.
They managed to steer us safe into Tarbert on Harris in the dawn. It had a bleak, outpost feel, stark utilitary buildings wedged in a gap between smooth bare rock hills, that funnelled the wind from the West.
Again I wonder if settlements' carry the shadow of collective guilt for past misdemeanours against the nature spirits.
I felt a wretchedness of spirit every time I drove through a village near to where I live, which made some new sense when I discovered it had been the railhead and axemens' barracks during the clearfell of an ancient coppice forest in the First World War.
Perhaps it is not just the loss of purpose, but a sense of guilt that dispirits communities.
Tarbert had its full share of both I suspect. As if people were waiting for something to happen. But not on Sunday.
We approach Tiree. A few strings of pots are set close in. It seems quiet everywhere this season for lobsters, so everyone is rock-dodging.
Three beam-trawlers lurk together like sharks.
Tiree is flat.
It was the island of grain. Now it feels like a long golf-course.
I have to sweep the human living-blocks away in my imagination to feel a heaven of skylarks and waving oats.
So flat, the Northwesterly sweeps over the island onto our intended mooring.
We go ashore only for a couple of hours.
A dying fishing industry at least makes lots of space on the Wall.
I read an article by George Monbiot yesterday about how peasant farming is more productive than agribusiness.
The same holds true of smalltime fishing, but the inefficiency of BigTime Fishing is visibly expressed in waste.
Waste of fish and gear.
I saw a time when fishermen walked the beach to rescue their pots as they washed in. They untangled ropes and stripped down frames and nets to use again.
When there was a landing, the big boats seem to be slinging a wage's worth of lobsters out of their pots dead from being so close-packed.
The Tiree beach was a litter of salveable gear. It had probably washed off the quay, which was piled with abandoned tangle nets and broken creels. Beyond some fiscal trigger point, time and money cease to be dynamic partners in enterprise and become tyrants with their own callous volition.
We are in Mull. A wild loch grazed by feral goats and deer. The slopes of the loch stack up in steps, most supporting bracken and grass, but some of the usual rubbish Sitka.
A scattering of houses. There are prawn pots set in the deep centre of the loch, and strings of large black buoys supporting the ropes of mussel farms.
We go ashore and have a fire. There is a Crusoe in all of us.
The land feels so soft and still after the wind-governed sea.
There is no peace for the wicked or sailors.
I sleep ashore,, a breeze keeps the midges bearable.
A local fisherman, Jamie, is our host.
The next day, he directs us to Bunessan. A busy stopover on the "can" for small trawlers.
He crews on a lobster boat, fishing a thousand creels in strings of forty.. Five hundred are set around Tiree, but aren't fishing well enough to justify the diesel. Everywhere, fishermen are thinking of fishing closer to home.
A sailing boat like the Keewaydin is looking more like the future than the past now.
He brings us a feast of prawns, crabclaws, and cod. Enough to feed us all the way home. His generosity is staggering. It provides a parting banquet from these islands.
If we were to stay longer he would show us the best marks to set a net and pots in. The pollack here he says are huge.
We must come here again.
Our own fishing effort has proved pretty hopeless, so his gifts of fish are a perfect present.
Mull has everything I wished for from this voyage.
Only our time is running out. We start the long sail home tomorrrow.
I have finished "The Unnatural History of The Sea". It was a beautifully written but painful book to read, making the sea feel even more deep and lonely than before, robbed by fishing of most of its inhabitants.
He argues for large areas of the sea and ocean to be closed for all fishing as the only hope. His portrayal of the history of our devastation is so thorough and sen sitively expressed that I believe him.
Though like ever other fisher, hope such a solution will not close my particular patch.
We have landed.
So much stuff that we took and have to haul up the wall in what was once Milford Haven fish-dock.
I came here once at six in the morning with some barrel-loads of herring that an Aber boat had caught. It was my first trip over the Preseli, which is the realm where I now live.
We got next to nothing for the herring, which were near to pulp by then.
The lobster fisherman who had caught them had not experienced such a catch before. He didn't know how to sell or handle them.
In the Middle Ages, Aberystwyth had been the biggest Herring port in Europe.
They were a perfect gift for the subsistence economy then, providing a storeable wealth of protein in time for the hungry seasons of winter and spring.
Milford that first call remembered a boom time. An ornate cast-iron canopy covered the fish dock, where activity now crouched in the nearest corner.
There were three boats where there had been fifty. Behind the sales space were the railheads. Here skate had been loaded for London.
The skate has gone.
Trawled out.
So has the cast-iron canopy.
The few fishing boats in there are rusting reprobates. Pariahs. Foreign beam trawlers.
The chandler's sells more safety gear than fishing gear now.
There is a tinkling marina and some repro dockside buildings housing apartments and shops. A Plan.
The Keewaydin is welcomed there as a bit of local colour. There is someone whose salary derives from encouraging such things.
The rest of the Haven is now Smorgsville, where fossil fuel is pumped into our culture's open vein. The street price is going up. Sorry mate. Take it or leave it.
But we have smelled other possibilities.
Islands to sail trading between..
Stark and beautiful places where you wouldn't so easily forget the power of the world outside man's encampments and procedures.
Places outside that orange scum of frightened light that laces the Southern coastline.
Places to dream on..
