The weather has been all or nothing. Blockbuster episodes. A serene Autumn that seemed to last for ever, rubbing balm into the wounds from a typical Shambles of a Summer.
Then a continual swathe of rain and violent winds, a prolonged emotional outburst, that nearly got to that magic number of forty days before shifting into a cold quiet frost.
I got out on my kayak last week, with salmon heads for pot-bait from Doug the Fish.
A heron sat hunched in venerable stoniness on a crag, seeming to ignore my passing until I looked away briefly, and he was gone.
I paddled to where most of the pots had been. It wasn’t looking good. Then I was distracted by a strange movement through the water. A small determined head, trailed behind by a raggediness, almost like feathers; like a dwarf cross between a seal and a cormorant.
It was so intent that I could follow it towards a jagged outcrop of rocks without being noticed. Then it was there, with low winter sun icing its whiskers and outline: a large, ravenous dog-otter chewing furiously on a fish. There was a low, boiling swell, that I let take me closer every minute, until I was one pulse of wave away, before I pulled seawards.
He saw me and was gone.
I turned back to the task of looking for prodigal pots. A sad realisation was dawning.
Most were gone.
There is a pair stuck in that patch of gloup that still clings onto a set from last year. Then close in towards Pwll Gwaelog, a rope that I recognised was slung over a patch of razor-sharp rocks. Even on a day when the sea is like glass, getting whatever is left on the end of it back will be a feat.
I picked my way back in a close as I dared. No sign, but then, near where the otter had been, I saw the bent remains of a pot crammed inside the back of a cave.
Oh well. At least I don’t have to worry about them anymore!
One of those testing years.
Losses on all fronts.
But then with amazing, unexpected encounters.
Gifts and opportunities.
On the brow of a hill looking out over a new emotional and creative landscape.
46>Checking the Meshes
There’s been one pot this year that has caught nothing.
Well, to be fair, one undersized lobster.
What’s worse, the other pot on the fleet is not much better, so I begrudge putting precious bait in either of them.
Have been setting the pair in more and more suicidal places, partly hoping they will land in some rich alley, by some hidden apartment, full of lobster elders, partly because I don’t care if I ever see them again.
I’ve only got eight pots out, not counting the two that have been stuck in some gloup of mud and shells since last Autumn, so it hurts.
I’ve studied that pot countless times, looking for a broken mesh the bait could be stolen through.
Nothing. The entrances look sound too: a bit open in design maybe, but pots like that might not catch so often, but when they do it’s something big: a huge cock crab, say. Even the Spidercrabs shunned it.
They are my only one compartment pots left, and are the final declaration of the supremacy of parlour pots.
The majority of my pots were this design, in the days in Ceredigion when I was fishing 140 or so, and worked well. They are easier to make and bait than parlours.
Perhaps the Pembrokeshire lobster is a wilier creature, sneaking in and out of such a simple device with nonchalant ease.
There is a brand new parlour pot I made floating around in the yard that only needs a lump of concrete to be ready for sea.
I keep moving it. Why don’t I just finish it and put it out?
My screen saver keeps putting up pictures of grey, piled, snarling seas. Of last Autumn.
That’s why.
Spring cleaning is nothing compared to the Great Clear-Out inspired by such a mellow Autumn. All these spare, dry days! They are unheard of in Wales. That’s one of the reasons things always look a little disorderly here. No spare Weather for such niceties.
Living in a place with ill-defined domestic territory such as this soon leads to unclaimed stuff accumulating in corners. Black Holes of “Useful” things. Tat.
Now, I have a hard, sling-it attitude to such stuff, but there are at least two hoarders of the Broken for repair or plunder for parts here.
One is our Fixer of Things, a Smith of Old, so it’s hard to argue with him, but he’s also a Virgo. And slightly sentimental about The Days when Things were made to Last.
The energy in Fachongle seems to swirl into those whirlpools that form and then vanish down themselves, like you see in sleepy streams.
Only in this case, it leaves a person standing in the middle of the yard, trying to remember where they were going before they got caught up in one.
Or it leaves some discarded thing.
Children here abandon their bikes in the yard’s midstream with annoying regularity. Leaving in a car means weaving between them.
Leaving at all gets hard. Upstream.
At least one squashed child’s rapid response vehicle ended up in the Fishguard crusher last week.
I’ll miss that one.
A seemingly immortal blue plastic tractor. The older kids had adopted it and would charge down the steepest slope, legs spread, at great speed. It made an unforgettable Thunder.
Someone else didn’t miss it though...
-I braved a trip to the “Amenity Site”.
What a euphemism! A Death Camp for the Discarded. The Disposable.
Braved, because the staff who run it often get callous pleasure in arbitrarily refusing to accept an item.
It is a Temple to the negativity of the Council Worker.
Luckily they were all in a good mood. The plastic tractor, God bless its plastic soul, was accepted into the generous arms of the Crusher. No one it seems, understands which plastics can and cannot be recycled. It could have been reborn as a kayak next moulding.
Hero of a blog.
Instead its Landfill.
I remember the Golden Age of Dumps. You’d drive on through the dust or mud, unsupervised and sling it out, whatever it was.
I saw two men throwing a dead Alsation out of their boot onto the pile once. It shocked me.
What next. A granny or two?
I leave Fachongle in good working order. Am off to the woods for a few days, to prepare my saw, the Hexer, for the Winter that must come eventually. To venture to make some things to sell for Christmas. To be with my own thoughts.
That’s the scary bit.
Sorting out the useful from the tat in myself. Working out what is worth saving.
Feeling the support of myself in myself , and not in my role; in my busyness.
Checking my meshes.
That I am catching and holding what is offered to me.
May the gift of inspiration creep in through my blindeye.
Well, to be fair, one undersized lobster.
What’s worse, the other pot on the fleet is not much better, so I begrudge putting precious bait in either of them.
Have been setting the pair in more and more suicidal places, partly hoping they will land in some rich alley, by some hidden apartment, full of lobster elders, partly because I don’t care if I ever see them again.
I’ve only got eight pots out, not counting the two that have been stuck in some gloup of mud and shells since last Autumn, so it hurts.
I’ve studied that pot countless times, looking for a broken mesh the bait could be stolen through.
Nothing. The entrances look sound too: a bit open in design maybe, but pots like that might not catch so often, but when they do it’s something big: a huge cock crab, say. Even the Spidercrabs shunned it.
They are my only one compartment pots left, and are the final declaration of the supremacy of parlour pots.
The majority of my pots were this design, in the days in Ceredigion when I was fishing 140 or so, and worked well. They are easier to make and bait than parlours.
Perhaps the Pembrokeshire lobster is a wilier creature, sneaking in and out of such a simple device with nonchalant ease.
There is a brand new parlour pot I made floating around in the yard that only needs a lump of concrete to be ready for sea.
I keep moving it. Why don’t I just finish it and put it out?
My screen saver keeps putting up pictures of grey, piled, snarling seas. Of last Autumn.
That’s why.
Spring cleaning is nothing compared to the Great Clear-Out inspired by such a mellow Autumn. All these spare, dry days! They are unheard of in Wales. That’s one of the reasons things always look a little disorderly here. No spare Weather for such niceties.
Living in a place with ill-defined domestic territory such as this soon leads to unclaimed stuff accumulating in corners. Black Holes of “Useful” things. Tat.
Now, I have a hard, sling-it attitude to such stuff, but there are at least two hoarders of the Broken for repair or plunder for parts here.
One is our Fixer of Things, a Smith of Old, so it’s hard to argue with him, but he’s also a Virgo. And slightly sentimental about The Days when Things were made to Last.
The energy in Fachongle seems to swirl into those whirlpools that form and then vanish down themselves, like you see in sleepy streams.
Only in this case, it leaves a person standing in the middle of the yard, trying to remember where they were going before they got caught up in one.
Or it leaves some discarded thing.
Children here abandon their bikes in the yard’s midstream with annoying regularity. Leaving in a car means weaving between them.
Leaving at all gets hard. Upstream.
At least one squashed child’s rapid response vehicle ended up in the Fishguard crusher last week.
I’ll miss that one.
A seemingly immortal blue plastic tractor. The older kids had adopted it and would charge down the steepest slope, legs spread, at great speed. It made an unforgettable Thunder.
Someone else didn’t miss it though...
-I braved a trip to the “Amenity Site”.
What a euphemism! A Death Camp for the Discarded. The Disposable.
Braved, because the staff who run it often get callous pleasure in arbitrarily refusing to accept an item.
It is a Temple to the negativity of the Council Worker.
Luckily they were all in a good mood. The plastic tractor, God bless its plastic soul, was accepted into the generous arms of the Crusher. No one it seems, understands which plastics can and cannot be recycled. It could have been reborn as a kayak next moulding.
Hero of a blog.
Instead its Landfill.
I remember the Golden Age of Dumps. You’d drive on through the dust or mud, unsupervised and sling it out, whatever it was.
I saw two men throwing a dead Alsation out of their boot onto the pile once. It shocked me.
What next. A granny or two?
I leave Fachongle in good working order. Am off to the woods for a few days, to prepare my saw, the Hexer, for the Winter that must come eventually. To venture to make some things to sell for Christmas. To be with my own thoughts.
That’s the scary bit.
Sorting out the useful from the tat in myself. Working out what is worth saving.
Feeling the support of myself in myself , and not in my role; in my busyness.
Checking my meshes.
That I am catching and holding what is offered to me.
May the gift of inspiration creep in through my blindeye.
45> This Blessed Coast and Other Matters.
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the nature of this coast.
Technically I suppose it’s due to aspect and depth and enclosure.
Basically it’s a right-royal, powerful, and generous bit of space.
The shoreline faces the North, whilst the energetic blast of a gale usually starts in the South and then swings clockwise, often losing vigour by the time it veers to the NorthWest & then the North.
We have had more Northerlies in recent years, but this Summer its gone back to old ways.
-Now any wind with North in its name is shocking in the fury it awakens in this sea.
The fetch here sweeps straight down the Irish Sea.
However, they don’t usually last long.
but I stillI dread them.
The depth here means pots can be close in and don’t seem to shift much. Also there seem to be glutinous patches of shell and sand and mud that suck onto them.
The sea I fished before was a rock strewn plain, with nine fathom of water as far as the eye could see. Pots move for miles, often ending up resembling a giant football of rope bristling with remnants of netted metal.
Finally, to the West of me is Fishguard Head, and to the East, Dinas Head, and inland to the South, the Preseli and Carningli Hills, all of which take the steam out of most winds.
New Quay Head used to shelter me a little in Llanrhystud, but up from there North, fishermen are afforded no shelter but their wits.
So they are a hard bunch.
I am starting to feel that different domains/locales acutely influence the behaviour & philosophy of the people who live and work there.
Now come on Spikes, don’t be coy, that’s not how it is; It’s more like we know something deep in our body’s know-ledge, but don’t often dare to formulate it into thought or voice.
Now the weather has settled into a gentle reflectiveness.
The robin sings a wistful blues outside my cabin door
With all the wild stuff I have been presented with this stormy Summer, I had a Season ticket on a long ghost train of old fears & pain, and came out stronger, wiser, but reckless in my directness.
A new and exciting daring.
But with that comes an urgency to getting on with my Thing, which seems mainly to be about communication.
The subject: that you can have a relationship with the Earth which is loving and sensitive, and without guilt- that you can reclaim your life’s power, take it back from the Planners, and Health&Safety and Normal Procedures, and our entire culture of tweaked neuroses and fears and guilt and blame we call Civilization.
If fact you have NO excuse not to.
Your Planet Needs You.
The hunger for both connection to life and energy beyond the human, and the challenges you meet at sea, shows you are near where I am now already.
But our first task is to acknowledge our own pain.
You have to own yours. It is your own, special ticket on that ghost train, to meet your ancestors, to make friends with that lonely child inside you, to come to some accord with those monstrous looming grown-ups and events in your life.
Don’t give it away by indulging in blame.
That way leads to victimhood and there are too many procedures in this society ready to encourage you down that path.
It is your gift; your journey.
Don’t externalize it into political righteousness or despair either, at what ‘they’ are doing to the planet.
You can’t have a truthful, loving connection to the Sea, this Land Place, with its damage and glory, or its people until you have one with yourself.
Go and ask the sea. Or the trees. Or your nearest hill what they think.
There.
That’s said.
Now the Fishing Results....
Nets, quiet. Seals, active.
(had some nice pollack though).
Pots, patchy. Bait, rationed.
(still had two out of ten today, so not complaining)
Sea, tranquil, World, perfect.
(am enjoying the now in all its glory)
and the
spiders
have gone.
44>Back to Life
The kids go back to school today, so Shape will come back on things.
During August an increasing, confused noise and chaos fills our group subconscious,
Some is the fruit of the often aggressive, urban visitors, aimless, starved of shops, and depressed by the lack of beach weather; some comes from bored and unengaged children; some from the keeling, fruit-heavy, overgrown squalor of the Earth in late Summer.
At night in Newport, it is the Season of pissed and bellowed brutishness. Queues in the Spar reach back beyond the biscuits.
The crescendo usually comes like that last rising note on Sargeant Pepper, on August Bank Holiday.
And order starts to prevail once childrens’ heads are bent over desks and people stop waiting hopelessly for a “Proper Summer”.
Now, let the Welsh Summer begin.
Still, blue days when you can hear a dry Sycamore leaf slowly clatter through the canopy to the ground. Fishing on a welkin bay without a jetski in site. A warmth to the sun that your body drinks in thirstily.
No sign of it today though.
The Earth is still having a great emotional wobble, with streaming tears of rain pulsing across the valley from the South and SouthWest. Great gusts of anger, and sobs that soak you in seconds.
Luckily I have just about made my new living space homely, so can lie cosy on my imperial bed, typing this. The Morso stove is popping away as it heats up, ready to make my toast.
There are advantages to aloneness as well as choking hurt.
Now, this really should not be the stuff of a fishing blog. But then, I argue, the sea has obviously not wanted company recently.
I probably could have got out and checked my pots, but what I really want is some fish; to set a net. This is the time of squirrelling away a harvest, and I want some mullet and occasional bass in the freezer.
And Life and its Dramas go on.
It has felt here lately that the soap opera I live in has a new script writer determined to raise ratings with painful, fast-moving story-lines.
Someone sack her please. Soon.
There’s a time to look away from the sea.
I cannot imagine huddling on some storm blasted beach, half-drowned by rain and spray, hopelessly watching a rod. The art is to know when to go back, and not get too stuck in lubbery routines.
Last time that I got out, it had been a month since I’d been to my pots, and they still held lobsters and a mob of spiders. Parlour pots are the best ones for us ‘casual’ fishermen.
I must work on and standardize the doors though, as mine are ridiculously fiddly when there are six spidercrabs to extract.
When I have a pot-making session, I will take a set of pictures as a visual aid to making your own, and blog them.
Someone tore out & gave me a copy of an article by George Monbiot about sea fishing with a kayak recently, entitled “How fishing saved my life”. It’s well worth reading. It should be available on the Guardian website. It’s good to know we are in such good company.
I can hear the car off to meet the school bus.
Hooray.
That tabloid fraud called the British Summer is over
Now lets’ get on with some proper weather...
During August an increasing, confused noise and chaos fills our group subconscious,
Some is the fruit of the often aggressive, urban visitors, aimless, starved of shops, and depressed by the lack of beach weather; some comes from bored and unengaged children; some from the keeling, fruit-heavy, overgrown squalor of the Earth in late Summer.
At night in Newport, it is the Season of pissed and bellowed brutishness. Queues in the Spar reach back beyond the biscuits.
The crescendo usually comes like that last rising note on Sargeant Pepper, on August Bank Holiday.
And order starts to prevail once childrens’ heads are bent over desks and people stop waiting hopelessly for a “Proper Summer”.
Now, let the Welsh Summer begin.
Still, blue days when you can hear a dry Sycamore leaf slowly clatter through the canopy to the ground. Fishing on a welkin bay without a jetski in site. A warmth to the sun that your body drinks in thirstily.
No sign of it today though.
The Earth is still having a great emotional wobble, with streaming tears of rain pulsing across the valley from the South and SouthWest. Great gusts of anger, and sobs that soak you in seconds.
Luckily I have just about made my new living space homely, so can lie cosy on my imperial bed, typing this. The Morso stove is popping away as it heats up, ready to make my toast.
There are advantages to aloneness as well as choking hurt.
Now, this really should not be the stuff of a fishing blog. But then, I argue, the sea has obviously not wanted company recently.
I probably could have got out and checked my pots, but what I really want is some fish; to set a net. This is the time of squirrelling away a harvest, and I want some mullet and occasional bass in the freezer.
And Life and its Dramas go on.
It has felt here lately that the soap opera I live in has a new script writer determined to raise ratings with painful, fast-moving story-lines.
Someone sack her please. Soon.
There’s a time to look away from the sea.
I cannot imagine huddling on some storm blasted beach, half-drowned by rain and spray, hopelessly watching a rod. The art is to know when to go back, and not get too stuck in lubbery routines.
Last time that I got out, it had been a month since I’d been to my pots, and they still held lobsters and a mob of spiders. Parlour pots are the best ones for us ‘casual’ fishermen.
I must work on and standardize the doors though, as mine are ridiculously fiddly when there are six spidercrabs to extract.
When I have a pot-making session, I will take a set of pictures as a visual aid to making your own, and blog them.
Someone tore out & gave me a copy of an article by George Monbiot about sea fishing with a kayak recently, entitled “How fishing saved my life”. It’s well worth reading. It should be available on the Guardian website. It’s good to know we are in such good company.
I can hear the car off to meet the school bus.
Hooray.
That tabloid fraud called the British Summer is over
Now lets’ get on with some proper weather...
43>Not a Lot of Fishing
I hate the rain. I admit and don't actually like swimming.
Wet has been too actual in my life to seek, unless it's a deep, hot bath.
Having spent most of the time with wet knees, from picking winkles in rockpools and moss in dripping forests, it's a wonder that I have evaded arthritis.
Most of the lobster boats in Aber were share fishermen, with two crew but there was one full time loner called Keith Stone who I respected above the rest.
He ventured into stormy seas that glued most of the others onto stools in the Castle Bar, unless,that is, it was raining.
I suppose this aversion develops amongst fishermen as a defence mechanism. Being wet robs your body of heat and vitality, tiring you and slowing responses.
I notice generally that urban visitors seem to wear far too few clothes to allow for the fickleness of the weather. (the conditionality of it is expressed in the words similarity to 'whether').
Old country dwellers on the other hand look swaddled in their entire wardrobe on the hottest July day.
The summer was ever thus. At the end of June the weather breaks.
Fine Julys are a rare thing. It was ever so; I remember many determined wet holiday walks as a boy.
July is the Month of The Welly.
An old farmer pointed this out to me. Then, long grass laden with seed flops over pathways. Thigh-high opportunities to get soaked are everywhere..
The rain accompanies Wind as a Summer pack of Lows scour the land looking for dry humans to soak.
Branches, heavy with leaves, are ripped by savage gusts from the trees.
Even the beach starts to stink as heaps of storm wrenched seaweed heat and rot, hopped over by hundreds of thrips.
It is as if the Summer heat stirs the Earth's emotions into a wild and tearful Wobble. Great hammerheads of cumulo nimbus pile up in the sky.
Why do we pretend otherwise? 'Scorchio' Climates, yearned for by the tabloids, must be so boring.
We have been honoured by a Classic British July.
Yet this makes the clear, fresh sunny days a welcomed blessing.
It lets us appreciate the flavour of every day.
Relish those fleeting bursts of sun .n a rain-washed Earth.
Wait a minute, it's stopped raining.
Guys are swimming.
Guys are sailing.
Playing baseball,
Geee that's better...
Mother, Father,
Kindly
Disregard this letter.
42> The Sea Is A Fine Mistress.
The sea has settled into a deep Summer sleep.
We have been to the west coast of Ireland for two weeks, ostensibly sailing, but beset by weak or contrary winds. Sligo and Knocknarea will have to wait.
The calm weather was there too, and regarded as a rare event. It allowed us to anchor off the White Strand on the Great Blasket, and kayak along her steep cliffs, exploring the deep, sucking caves.
The far end was a blush of seapinks.
Very Heaven.
If you haven't read any of the Blasket books, look them out. They are about a time when a peasant community lived on this six mile long island, fed on fish, milk, and potatoes. A diet enriched by sealmeat and the spoils of wreckage . They fished with skin boats, canoes, curraghs, kayaks; call them what you like. The landlord had seized their larger boats to cover rent arrears.
The Islandman, or "Twenty Years A'growing" are a good start.
The trip was tarnished for me by witnessing my partner being drawn increasingly to another member of the crew. I started to feel like a jealous and wounded old man and didn't like that role.
I am 15 years her senior & I think she has been constricted by my ways.
On our return, we parted.
Hopefully we will work something out... .
I have felt like I have just been in some horrendous car accident, shaky and shocked.
All that happens to us we can learn from and grow from. I have not spent eight years in the company of two amazing New Age women without learning that. Anyway, the other way leads to victimhood and emotional close-down, and they both lead nowhere.
The initial gain from this is that I have been sleeping in my van, in the forest where I have more work than I can handle.
Trees are a parliament of sense in any social or emotional turbulence. They really want to help.
-Remember that in these last days of the Age of Stupid.
Head for the woods.
Millions of refugees in a century of wars would agree.
The other haven has been my parkup overlooking the sea. Allt Tabor.
The whole of Fishguard Bay with it's ferry and fishing traffic to pace my day; cutting chest-high bracken that has overwhelmed the trees that I planted this Spring.
After the forest it feels fresh and free. For years I have lived in a valley noisy with great tribes of trees and their birdchoir, overlooked by a mountain outline of a sleeping goddess, who jealousy blocked the glory of the setting sun in all seasons.
Now I can gaze out at that golden pathway to the end of the day. The road to a new day.
We have been to the west coast of Ireland for two weeks, ostensibly sailing, but beset by weak or contrary winds. Sligo and Knocknarea will have to wait.
The calm weather was there too, and regarded as a rare event. It allowed us to anchor off the White Strand on the Great Blasket, and kayak along her steep cliffs, exploring the deep, sucking caves.
The far end was a blush of seapinks.
Very Heaven.
If you haven't read any of the Blasket books, look them out. They are about a time when a peasant community lived on this six mile long island, fed on fish, milk, and potatoes. A diet enriched by sealmeat and the spoils of wreckage . They fished with skin boats, canoes, curraghs, kayaks; call them what you like. The landlord had seized their larger boats to cover rent arrears.
The Islandman, or "Twenty Years A'growing" are a good start.
The trip was tarnished for me by witnessing my partner being drawn increasingly to another member of the crew. I started to feel like a jealous and wounded old man and didn't like that role.
I am 15 years her senior & I think she has been constricted by my ways.
On our return, we parted.
Hopefully we will work something out... .
I have felt like I have just been in some horrendous car accident, shaky and shocked.
All that happens to us we can learn from and grow from. I have not spent eight years in the company of two amazing New Age women without learning that. Anyway, the other way leads to victimhood and emotional close-down, and they both lead nowhere.
The initial gain from this is that I have been sleeping in my van, in the forest where I have more work than I can handle.
Trees are a parliament of sense in any social or emotional turbulence. They really want to help.
-Remember that in these last days of the Age of Stupid.
Head for the woods.
Millions of refugees in a century of wars would agree.
The other haven has been my parkup overlooking the sea. Allt Tabor.
The whole of Fishguard Bay with it's ferry and fishing traffic to pace my day; cutting chest-high bracken that has overwhelmed the trees that I planted this Spring.
After the forest it feels fresh and free. For years I have lived in a valley noisy with great tribes of trees and their birdchoir, overlooked by a mountain outline of a sleeping goddess, who jealousy blocked the glory of the setting sun in all seasons.
Now I can gaze out at that golden pathway to the end of the day. The road to a new day.
41> Prodigal Pots
There is still a cold edge.
Once the sun is not visibly in attendance, or there is any breeze, the warmth is gone.
The cold fingers of the winter still have a hold.
Last month the back of my workshop was becoming the messiest bit of the yard, with bits of rescued alkathene and scraps of net and beach-gleaned buoys surrounding the Autumn’s bruised pots and rope tangles.
We chase chaos and accumulated mess round the yard here like a persistent and evasive shadow.
I took a pair of pots out, and finished two gleaming new ones. Parlour pots.
This added a feeling of 'things in progress' to the disorder. At least it did to me.
The week those old pots were out, a fiend of a northerly blew up, just at the peak of the equinoctal spring tides.
I went down in the midst of it towards the peak of the morning tide to pull my kayaks away from its grey, foaming anger. If I'd had a cloak and long hair, they would have been streaming behind me as I raced along the coast path.
I didn’t dare think where the pots were.
The next day, we walked the cliff-path and saw the rope first. The pots were draped over a thirty foot pyramidical rock.
Other fishermens’ gear I’ve heard had suffered a similar dramatic and surreal fate.
As if the Sea God had vomited them out.
I lowered the kayak back down the cliff the morning after and climbed the rock.
The sea had put on a look of peaceful innocence that made the storm of the day before unimaginable.
One pot was undamaged. The other was slightly crushed, but held a small lobster; Somehow, after 48 hours suspended of a cliff facing the sun, still alive.
I slipped her back into the water and hoped the best.
Paddling round the corner, I found another pair of pots I’d lost in the Autumn. They were stuck in the silt and the buoys almost submerged under the weight of weed the ropes had grown. I had set them a mile to the East, so they had gone the wrong way, even within the perverse logic of this coast, as far as I had seen it work so far .
Will I ever understand this coast?
Later that week Paul from Fishguard hauled them for me. That was five months since I lost them.
One of them contained a live lobster.
This sea is a strange place indeed.
Whatever you expect gets capsized...
Once the sun is not visibly in attendance, or there is any breeze, the warmth is gone.
The cold fingers of the winter still have a hold.
Last month the back of my workshop was becoming the messiest bit of the yard, with bits of rescued alkathene and scraps of net and beach-gleaned buoys surrounding the Autumn’s bruised pots and rope tangles.
We chase chaos and accumulated mess round the yard here like a persistent and evasive shadow.
I took a pair of pots out, and finished two gleaming new ones. Parlour pots.
This added a feeling of 'things in progress' to the disorder. At least it did to me.
The week those old pots were out, a fiend of a northerly blew up, just at the peak of the equinoctal spring tides.
I went down in the midst of it towards the peak of the morning tide to pull my kayaks away from its grey, foaming anger. If I'd had a cloak and long hair, they would have been streaming behind me as I raced along the coast path.
I didn’t dare think where the pots were.
The next day, we walked the cliff-path and saw the rope first. The pots were draped over a thirty foot pyramidical rock.
Other fishermens’ gear I’ve heard had suffered a similar dramatic and surreal fate.
As if the Sea God had vomited them out.
I lowered the kayak back down the cliff the morning after and climbed the rock.
The sea had put on a look of peaceful innocence that made the storm of the day before unimaginable.
One pot was undamaged. The other was slightly crushed, but held a small lobster; Somehow, after 48 hours suspended of a cliff facing the sun, still alive.
I slipped her back into the water and hoped the best.
Paddling round the corner, I found another pair of pots I’d lost in the Autumn. They were stuck in the silt and the buoys almost submerged under the weight of weed the ropes had grown. I had set them a mile to the East, so they had gone the wrong way, even within the perverse logic of this coast, as far as I had seen it work so far .
Will I ever understand this coast?
Later that week Paul from Fishguard hauled them for me. That was five months since I lost them.
One of them contained a live lobster.
This sea is a strange place indeed.
Whatever you expect gets capsized...
40> Lost in Winter
That was a long Winter
There was a gale, ferocious. Middle of November I think. Northerly of course, that effectively erased fishing effort from my map of the knowne groundes and reefs adjacent to Hescwm, near the Port of Fishguard, for the Year 2008.
Larger boats with more gear lost, and more to lose, pulled what was left in this winter.
When it let up, the sea no longer seemed such an attractive place to be. There was a cold, cruel edge to it. No doubt huge shoals of bass swam past the bay chuckling at their luck. Lobsters must have gone into some close crevice or deeper water.
I set to land tasks. What fills the short days in the winter months is good essential stuff, mostly to do with keeping warm and dry and fed.
Of course I had gazed out for lost buoys and peered into coves for familiar bits of pot before I had turned away.
One valiant red buoy hung around off the main rock in a place where a fleet had got so stuck in the silt, that I had got Paul from Fishguard to tease it out with his hauler the summer before.
That meant I’d probably lost the other six pots. I sent for some cheaper, twisted net, rather than black braided, on the wisdom that pots on this coast don’t roll up in a ball on a beach, chased in by the prevailing wind, worn but OK, but get lost, presumed dead.
I started appreciating the different designs of bakery tray stacked outside local shops for their pot-base potential in a misery, gollum sort of way.
There is a rush of creative relief for a trapper when all his gear is accounted for, whether it is safely home or lost in action.
There is something idyllic and pure about the Season ahead. Unsullied by Real Life.
Man has always indulged in virtual reality. Its called the Future.
The Winter went into a quiet long before it warmed up.
Often a Welsh winter has been pulse after pulse of wet, warm, ocean soft storms. No frost, or sun, instead mud everywhere.
Now a cold, clear dry, stony Spring seems more usual.
Its great for getting out on the sea and land. For farmers to play at tractors, and lobster men to put out gear. Calm seas and dry land.
But nothing’s really happening.
The sea feels like it has lost its breath.
The farmers’ nitrate granules sit on the hard ground.
The birds sing conditionally.
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