A few pots here, a few pots there, all baited and fishing pretty well: four size lobsters and a good cock crab. Not bad.
The parlours' have been best during this fickle summer. I will make more of them this winter.
Last time I set the net I had success too. I had a monster of a codling. I am useless at filleting, but a big fish like that I can cut to steaks, which rescues me from trying.
I had just set a Dublin Bay Prawn pot that I had picked up, encrusted in weed, from the harbour floor in Tobermory, expecting a few miniature marvels to interest my partner's daughter, and maybe some prawns. I used to get a good feed of them from close-in pots up in Llanrhystud, but had none down here. It's first catch was a size lobster. I hadn't thought one would have fitted through it's tight entrances.
The sea's moods change everything so fast. A week later and that pot is lost, my keep pot damaged, and two others wrenched out of shape. I'm used to pots washing in chafed, but not so ripped apart. The netting is unscathed, but the side-bars have been pulled out.
Savage sea onto a savage shore.
We had a northerly gale over 36 hours that left them with ropes strewn high on jagged rocks and the pots beaten up. Pots in the next bay were unmoved. None of the forecasts, even the doom laden BBC five day, had predicted it's violence.
There go half my pots.
I hadn't witnessed it, which made it's consequences once it calmed down even more shocking. I find gazing at a big sea a bit unsettling, as I keep imagining being out amongst those thunderous waves.
Chris, who fishes around the corner in Newport Bay, has two of his wedged tight in the rocks. He buys his pots, so it hurt him even more.
I see creel making classes are called for.
When we were on the Blasket this Summer I was amazed to see a pile of pots that were exactly the same as the kind fishermen made and worked in Aberystwyth thirty years ago. The pots that I make are a plastic equivalent of that design.
It was 'foreign' fishermen who introduced lobstering to the islanders. Maybe some of them were from Cardiganshire.
After that storm the beach was a thick raft of kelp. So there would have been little recompense from setting a net, though there was a codling in one of the surviving pots. I also came upon a macabre victim of the storm: a headless conger, half-floating like a large tentacle, in one cove.
What with that and the stale codling the remaining four pots that are left are bulging with bait.
I lick my wounds and dream of making new pots and of buying a couple of new nets.
My others are ripped to shreds by seals and spiders.
This time I'm inclined to buy strong mono, rather than multimono, and surface rather than bottomset nets, all to escape the spidercrabs.
One parlour this time had a hen spider inside with a cock crooning away and holding hands though the mesh on top of the pot. They actively fish for spidercrabs
in Fishguard and a couple of the fishermen will leave a hen crab in a pot to lure and catch her suitors.
Plague on them.
I have a couple of spare pots ready to go out once I put some concrete in them. Might as well. If I am going to set nets, it'll give me something else to do.
I MUST get to go out with someone-who-knows & learn to catch things on lines.
Listening to the wind howling again outside tonight, the only reliable fishing instruments to set in the sea for now though are Hopes and Dreams.
