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.