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...

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.