I am such a landlubber now.
Well I did decide that this would be the Year of the Land. No trips on the Keewaydin, all spare money going to the garden.
True to my intent, I dug a garden and planted an orchard, and nearly two thousand other trees
I did make some pots & bought two nets, but spent more energy wondering when I'd get out there than actually fishing.
Last time I went out was so unplanned that I had no bait.
I HATE putting a pot back in the sea without bait. The next time out feels pointless. There was one shred of a fish-head left in one, but the other three were bare.
I got out there last night. It had been a hot, jetski sort of day, but by the time I got down to the beach, a sea mist was creeping in.
A mist at sea is magical. The sea is always a dream-space, but a mist crowns it. A bright halo, the mist equivalent of a rainbow hung over the rocks. Everything loomed, loomed large. Birds lingered long on their cliff perches.
Strange globular jellyfish bobbed up like large dead eyes.
I set a net. Then went to pull those pots and bait them.
A lobster! What an undeserved gift.
I cooked her for supper, with broadbeans and potatoes from the garden. The Strumble fog-horn sounded into the night.
Went early to retrieve the net. One mackerel in a sargasso of summer weed. That rubbish of summer. Oarweeds and twine and bleached bladderwrack.
Next time I will try one of my bottom-set nets. Will risk the curse of the Spider.
Back to the land. The certainty of the land.
Holding the magic of that misty evening in my heart.
Deaded
I thought that this blog had run its day.
I gaze down now on Aberbach, pausing from the garden or scything around the trees. I have tried a few desultory attempts to reconnect to fishing but seemed ever thwarted.
I started well, buying two surface nets, which this time were surface nets: I don't know what happened last time I ordered. I set them and caught mullet & bass first shot. The next three attempts were empty. As their white floats are so apparent, I am loathe to leave them out too long.
Also I bought twine and rope for new pots. The winter had been a clean sweep, so I was starting from scratch...
Made four. Lovely blue braided rope. They looked very pretty. Like tents from an Arthurian joust.
I set them, and immediately lost one pot. - I hadn't tied it properly. Then, when I went to check them, it was spiders, spiders, spiders, and two of the pockets were fouled up where they had got caught.
The garden was a more receptive arena for my attention.
Last week I noticed gannets diving. The sea looked more alive and hospitable, after weeks of tiring westerlies. It has been cold too.
Today I got my rod out and went down to the sea again.
The first pot had four lobsters in it. Three were size, but in my insane haste, I threw one of those back. Still, two is a blessing.
One for me and one to share.
The next held spiders.
Then I noticed deep-sunken buoys out to sea. I paddled to them, and they were mine, from last year, shrouded in seaweed. I pulled them and there was a pot, still holding a lobster!
There was a breathless, offshore breeze today, but I must do a grand tour of this coast in case more have survived...
Too windy to hang about dangling a rod. I never really believe I'll catch anything like that anyway.
What a perverse coast. Paucity to plenitude.
My forearms are white with salt and my hands smell of fish.
Maybe the garden can get along with less attention for a bit.
I gaze down now on Aberbach, pausing from the garden or scything around the trees. I have tried a few desultory attempts to reconnect to fishing but seemed ever thwarted.
I started well, buying two surface nets, which this time were surface nets: I don't know what happened last time I ordered. I set them and caught mullet & bass first shot. The next three attempts were empty. As their white floats are so apparent, I am loathe to leave them out too long.
Also I bought twine and rope for new pots. The winter had been a clean sweep, so I was starting from scratch...
Made four. Lovely blue braided rope. They looked very pretty. Like tents from an Arthurian joust.
I set them, and immediately lost one pot. - I hadn't tied it properly. Then, when I went to check them, it was spiders, spiders, spiders, and two of the pockets were fouled up where they had got caught.
The garden was a more receptive arena for my attention.
Last week I noticed gannets diving. The sea looked more alive and hospitable, after weeks of tiring westerlies. It has been cold too.
Today I got my rod out and went down to the sea again.
The first pot had four lobsters in it. Three were size, but in my insane haste, I threw one of those back. Still, two is a blessing.
One for me and one to share.
The next held spiders.
Then I noticed deep-sunken buoys out to sea. I paddled to them, and they were mine, from last year, shrouded in seaweed. I pulled them and there was a pot, still holding a lobster!
There was a breathless, offshore breeze today, but I must do a grand tour of this coast in case more have survived...
Too windy to hang about dangling a rod. I never really believe I'll catch anything like that anyway.
What a perverse coast. Paucity to plenitude.
My forearms are white with salt and my hands smell of fish.
Maybe the garden can get along with less attention for a bit.
47>Pots to Make
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.
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.
39>Off to the Bakers
I went for a walk along the coastpath today, full of a stubborn cold, feeling like an old Cornish wrecker, peering out into the surf for familiar buoys.
Somehow it was good to see no trace.
The bit of coast I fish seems swept clean of pots.
There was a big bunch over towards Dinas Head, but I don't think mine could have been carried that far by the undertow, though this coast has some strange ways. They look like Fishguard pots, shot there ahead of the storm by the more organised fraternity.
I was curled up in bed at the onset of this blessed cold then, but admit that I probably wouldn't have paddled my pots far enough out to do more than delay their loss.
I hope in a way they are gone without trace. Though there was one newish parlour that I will sorely miss, the rest of them were getting surprisingly ragged. Sit-on kayaks are not ideal creel repair workstations.
I was shocked at the damage the ones that came ashore suffered last month. They sat in a pile in the yard for a fortnight before I could bear to sort the repairable from the terminally trashed.
In this new social regime of recycling, its hard to know what to do with the broken bits of bread basket and mashed twine and rope. We need advanced lessons in plastic technology to know what should go in which bag here.
The definition of 'domestic waste' is unlikely to include fractured bread tray, so I will have to secrete bits in amongst bonafide consumer debris... .
So it's off to the Bakers to beg some old bakery trays.
Scavving them one at a time from the street is disproportionally stressful, when they could probably get 'retired' on food hygiene grounds by the dozen if I went to the right industrial estate door on a Friday afternoon.
I ordered net & twine last week, deciding on twisted rather than braided net, as it's cheaper, and a pot's life working close-in on this coast seems brutally short.
Have also ordered a couple of surface nets to replace the spider-shredded bottom ones.
I have a good supply of oak from a forest that I work in, and am seriously considering inserting a frame of it in to stiffen up the next lot of pots, like in my early fishing days.
Pots used to wear out at Llanrhystud rather than smash up.
Also am wondering whether to run to stainless steel screws to fix the hoops to the side-bars.
The galvanised nails were wrenched out. Perhaps though screws would be too brittle and just snap.
Also need to ponder whether grapnels' would be a help or a hindrance; as I get more pots stuck in silt and sand than get moved by big seas.
I certainly need to rethink and adapt my pots though to survive this coast next year.
When this set of hoolies, and my cold has abated, I will put out a couple more, and concentrate on setting a net or two when the sea looks right.
Where did I put my wetsuit gloves?
The Season is Dead.
Long live the Season.
Somehow it was good to see no trace.
The bit of coast I fish seems swept clean of pots.
There was a big bunch over towards Dinas Head, but I don't think mine could have been carried that far by the undertow, though this coast has some strange ways. They look like Fishguard pots, shot there ahead of the storm by the more organised fraternity.
I was curled up in bed at the onset of this blessed cold then, but admit that I probably wouldn't have paddled my pots far enough out to do more than delay their loss.
I hope in a way they are gone without trace. Though there was one newish parlour that I will sorely miss, the rest of them were getting surprisingly ragged. Sit-on kayaks are not ideal creel repair workstations.
I was shocked at the damage the ones that came ashore suffered last month. They sat in a pile in the yard for a fortnight before I could bear to sort the repairable from the terminally trashed.
In this new social regime of recycling, its hard to know what to do with the broken bits of bread basket and mashed twine and rope. We need advanced lessons in plastic technology to know what should go in which bag here.
The definition of 'domestic waste' is unlikely to include fractured bread tray, so I will have to secrete bits in amongst bonafide consumer debris... .
So it's off to the Bakers to beg some old bakery trays.
Scavving them one at a time from the street is disproportionally stressful, when they could probably get 'retired' on food hygiene grounds by the dozen if I went to the right industrial estate door on a Friday afternoon.
I ordered net & twine last week, deciding on twisted rather than braided net, as it's cheaper, and a pot's life working close-in on this coast seems brutally short.
Have also ordered a couple of surface nets to replace the spider-shredded bottom ones.
I have a good supply of oak from a forest that I work in, and am seriously considering inserting a frame of it in to stiffen up the next lot of pots, like in my early fishing days.
Pots used to wear out at Llanrhystud rather than smash up.
Also am wondering whether to run to stainless steel screws to fix the hoops to the side-bars.
The galvanised nails were wrenched out. Perhaps though screws would be too brittle and just snap.
Also need to ponder whether grapnels' would be a help or a hindrance; as I get more pots stuck in silt and sand than get moved by big seas.
I certainly need to rethink and adapt my pots though to survive this coast next year.
When this set of hoolies, and my cold has abated, I will put out a couple more, and concentrate on setting a net or two when the sea looks right.
Where did I put my wetsuit gloves?
The Season is Dead.
Long live the Season.
38>Savage Seas
The last time I went fishing I felt pretty sorted.
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.
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.
37>OK
Well Is It?
Fishing can be pretty shit.
Too often after my back aches and I'm on edge. Ratty.
There are probably loads of cultural and practical and domestic reasons for Exhausted Fisherman Spikes Syndrome.
-After Callum Robert's book, The Unnatural History of the Sea,(The price of a lobster from Amazon), showing how we have taken 99% of the sea's abundance. Something we already sensed.
-And does anybody value and want your surplus and do they expect to pay a respectful price for it?
-After checking tide and wind speeds and the state of the gear and if there is sufficient bait.
-Does it have a place between other commitments. You know those. Too countless to list.
-Oh, and is it worth it?
Last time the pots were empty and the net held one mackerel, two undersize spiders, and an array of marine vegetables.
And it rained.
-I drive seven miles there, and then seven back, often with only a wet and smelly wetsuit as a prize.
Just wonder sometimes.
You know.
The wind went West this morning.
A Great Freshness.
I decided to check & bait & move all my pots with no other expectation.
A twinkly sea.
Enough life in it to enjoy the moment: a freshening of the breeze would have made it difficult. A fine splashy place to be.
There were small sailboats braving it out far off Fishguard.
I juggled the pots about a bit. Mended a gaping pocket and tied two singles into a pair on a clean buoy. The weed-growth on untended pot ropes and markers is heavy enough to make them invisible. Measured out my bait. Housework.
There is a plague of winds forecast on Metcheck, so the rule was to move everything offshore a bit.
Two lobsters out of seven pots. (It should be eight, but one is stuck). Just size.
Nothing spectacular.
No gold medals.
Not Olympic, frontpage record catches.
Those have long been caught and eaten.
Lobsters are immortal. If they aren't attacked or caught or inflicted by disease, they can live for ever.
"Because, as best scientists can tell, lobsters age so gracefully they show no measurable signs of aging: no loss of appetite, no change in metabolism, no loss of reproductive urge or ability, no decline in strength or health.
Lobsters, when they die, seem to die from external causes. They get fished by humans, eaten by seals, wasted by parasites, but they don't seem to die from within. Of course, no one really knows how the average lobster dies. There are no definitive studies."
....... Maybe I have been catching and eating Gods!
Yfory.
The Welsh for Tomorrow. It is hopeful and dynamic.
There are always glorious moments. Twenty minute bits of Heaven.
That was one today.
It was OK.
In between you tend your gear and work your grounds.
That feeling of affinity, of connection
not medals, is what you are fishing for.
Fishing can be pretty shit.
Too often after my back aches and I'm on edge. Ratty.
There are probably loads of cultural and practical and domestic reasons for Exhausted Fisherman Spikes Syndrome.
-After Callum Robert's book, The Unnatural History of the Sea,(The price of a lobster from Amazon), showing how we have taken 99% of the sea's abundance. Something we already sensed.
-And does anybody value and want your surplus and do they expect to pay a respectful price for it?
-After checking tide and wind speeds and the state of the gear and if there is sufficient bait.
-Does it have a place between other commitments. You know those. Too countless to list.
-Oh, and is it worth it?
Last time the pots were empty and the net held one mackerel, two undersize spiders, and an array of marine vegetables.
And it rained.
-I drive seven miles there, and then seven back, often with only a wet and smelly wetsuit as a prize.
Just wonder sometimes.
You know.
The wind went West this morning.
A Great Freshness.
I decided to check & bait & move all my pots with no other expectation.
A twinkly sea.
Enough life in it to enjoy the moment: a freshening of the breeze would have made it difficult. A fine splashy place to be.
There were small sailboats braving it out far off Fishguard.
I juggled the pots about a bit. Mended a gaping pocket and tied two singles into a pair on a clean buoy. The weed-growth on untended pot ropes and markers is heavy enough to make them invisible. Measured out my bait. Housework.
There is a plague of winds forecast on Metcheck, so the rule was to move everything offshore a bit.
Two lobsters out of seven pots. (It should be eight, but one is stuck). Just size.
Nothing spectacular.
No gold medals.
Not Olympic, frontpage record catches.
Those have long been caught and eaten.
Lobsters are immortal. If they aren't attacked or caught or inflicted by disease, they can live for ever.
"Because, as best scientists can tell, lobsters age so gracefully they show no measurable signs of aging: no loss of appetite, no change in metabolism, no loss of reproductive urge or ability, no decline in strength or health.
Lobsters, when they die, seem to die from external causes. They get fished by humans, eaten by seals, wasted by parasites, but they don't seem to die from within. Of course, no one really knows how the average lobster dies. There are no definitive studies."
....... Maybe I have been catching and eating Gods!
Yfory.
The Welsh for Tomorrow. It is hopeful and dynamic.
There are always glorious moments. Twenty minute bits of Heaven.
That was one today.
It was OK.
In between you tend your gear and work your grounds.
That feeling of affinity, of connection
not medals, is what you are fishing for.
36>Tale of the Unexpected
I felt sick last week, shaky and sick.
I had come back from our last great social foray of the Summer, desperate to get back out there.
The sea seemed gentle, in a steady Southerly pattern that looked to last for days. I had begged some mackerel heads from Doug the Fish, but nothing like enough to get the pots back working for long in such warm and hungry waters.
Weeks of South and SouthWesterlies have pumped some Caribbean vigour back into things after those sterile Northerlies.
So I set a net that morning. I went down in the afternoon to that frightening roar that is a big surf, piling into the cove. I had forgotten my wetsuit anyway, but saw few gaps in the sets of waves that reared up at the mouth of it and crested in that attracted me to venturing out. My energy and with it my courage definitely fade with the day's lengthening.
I spent the night one ear open for the wind to change. It had only shifted from South to the South-West to invent that pile of surf; a thing I just didn't know about this coast. In Aber, it was a SouthEasterly that could raise a crashing swell from nowhere.
It came back round about 4am, so I went down after breakfast, ready I thought for all worst scenarios.
There is always one you hadn't thought of though.
The surf was muted, but the net was balled up close in on the rocks. The buoys were feet apart. I risked the boil there to try and pull it, but it was stuck tight.
I Hate Waste.
Of a net, and whatever fish had got in there, and whatever shellfish had gone in to feed on them.
That most sickening nightmare for a netsman.
I went the next day, and climbed out onto the rock to drag at it with better leverage. No way.
I will try again on the big low tides that will follow tonight's full moon.
I set another net. A more definite calm prevailed. I was listening more closely to the mood of the sea.
I met Paul from Fishguard at sea who said that most of the Spiders were gone.
But there no Bass around. He had taken a mate out with untold wealth of fishing contrivances who just just succeeded in losing some of his more elaborate lures.
I decided to sleep over in the van near the beach, and set another net. I wanted to be on the spot, determined not to be caught out again.
On the way out, my heart sank, as a young cow-seal was playing in the bay.
Sure enough that morning's net was empty, well-rolled and tossed into a tangle.
Having gone out there I just carried on to reset it and lay the other one. I put them just off the outer edge of the rocks.
The morning was rewarded with three good bass, a mullet, some small pollack (bait thus sorted) a size lobster, mackerel, and a big wrasse. The bass were in the closest end to the shore.
Persistence had prevailed.
That's not the first time going out early has beaten the seal to a catch.
I feel back in tune with the sea.
For now.
Until the next tale of the unexpected.
I had come back from our last great social foray of the Summer, desperate to get back out there.
The sea seemed gentle, in a steady Southerly pattern that looked to last for days. I had begged some mackerel heads from Doug the Fish, but nothing like enough to get the pots back working for long in such warm and hungry waters.
Weeks of South and SouthWesterlies have pumped some Caribbean vigour back into things after those sterile Northerlies.
So I set a net that morning. I went down in the afternoon to that frightening roar that is a big surf, piling into the cove. I had forgotten my wetsuit anyway, but saw few gaps in the sets of waves that reared up at the mouth of it and crested in that attracted me to venturing out. My energy and with it my courage definitely fade with the day's lengthening.
I spent the night one ear open for the wind to change. It had only shifted from South to the South-West to invent that pile of surf; a thing I just didn't know about this coast. In Aber, it was a SouthEasterly that could raise a crashing swell from nowhere.
It came back round about 4am, so I went down after breakfast, ready I thought for all worst scenarios.
There is always one you hadn't thought of though.
The surf was muted, but the net was balled up close in on the rocks. The buoys were feet apart. I risked the boil there to try and pull it, but it was stuck tight.
I Hate Waste.
Of a net, and whatever fish had got in there, and whatever shellfish had gone in to feed on them.
That most sickening nightmare for a netsman.
I went the next day, and climbed out onto the rock to drag at it with better leverage. No way.
I will try again on the big low tides that will follow tonight's full moon.
I set another net. A more definite calm prevailed. I was listening more closely to the mood of the sea.
I met Paul from Fishguard at sea who said that most of the Spiders were gone.
But there no Bass around. He had taken a mate out with untold wealth of fishing contrivances who just just succeeded in losing some of his more elaborate lures.
I decided to sleep over in the van near the beach, and set another net. I wanted to be on the spot, determined not to be caught out again.
On the way out, my heart sank, as a young cow-seal was playing in the bay.
Sure enough that morning's net was empty, well-rolled and tossed into a tangle.
Having gone out there I just carried on to reset it and lay the other one. I put them just off the outer edge of the rocks.
The morning was rewarded with three good bass, a mullet, some small pollack (bait thus sorted) a size lobster, mackerel, and a big wrasse. The bass were in the closest end to the shore.
Persistence had prevailed.
That's not the first time going out early has beaten the seal to a catch.
I feel back in tune with the sea.
For now.
Until the next tale of the unexpected.
35> Back a Week Now..
Back nearly a week now
Justine is still dreaming of being on board the Keewaydin,
She woke to find we were anchored close inshore. There, luxuriant ash foliage swayed in the breeze. A beautiful land . It was a long time before she realised she was looking out of the bedroom window .
I am out of contact with my fishing effort. I am sitting on a wind-wild headland above the bay where I last set my pots.
I have identified enough weed clumped buoys to know they are still there.
I left them unbaited, so going to them willl be a chore without hope of reward.
There is something in my bait tub, but I can't face looking in it until I have to.
This South-Westerly has stirred up a mocha, but I've seen a seal and a lot of weed in my favoured netting spot.
However, I'll go for it tomorrow if the swell has died down.
I need to reconnect with this place.
We are going to Ireland with the kayaks next week, so I haven't long.
How did I used to do it before?
So many distractions on Land
I don't want to turn into a Captain Birdseye. Or like one of those old harbour-flies who used to lace the quay in Aberystwyth, talking a mixture of rubbish and misery.
There are folk who walk the walk & others who talk the talk.
I want to feel part of that magnificence the sea by fishing it.
The sea temperatures are still way down though. Has the Gulf Stream wobbled and nobody had the heart to tell us?
Jamie on Mull said it was a quiet lobster year up there too. A Crab Year.
I like that combination of observation and acceptance. They are starting to get a few spiders. And recently octopus: if an octopus shares a pot with a lobster for long, there is an empty blue carapace instead of the lobster.
To be an effective fisherman you have to be an obsessive, selfish, monomaniacal, reckless, brave and lucky bastard,
When I fished that "punt" off Llanhystud beach ohso long ago, I was pretty much on the case.
The sea is a demanding mistress.
I must have been pretty unbearable as a partner. And sorry kids, for all those summer holidays you never had!
Justine is still dreaming of being on board the Keewaydin,
She woke to find we were anchored close inshore. There, luxuriant ash foliage swayed in the breeze. A beautiful land . It was a long time before she realised she was looking out of the bedroom window .
I am out of contact with my fishing effort. I am sitting on a wind-wild headland above the bay where I last set my pots.
I have identified enough weed clumped buoys to know they are still there.
I left them unbaited, so going to them willl be a chore without hope of reward.
There is something in my bait tub, but I can't face looking in it until I have to.
This South-Westerly has stirred up a mocha, but I've seen a seal and a lot of weed in my favoured netting spot.
However, I'll go for it tomorrow if the swell has died down.
I need to reconnect with this place.
We are going to Ireland with the kayaks next week, so I haven't long.
How did I used to do it before?
So many distractions on Land
I don't want to turn into a Captain Birdseye. Or like one of those old harbour-flies who used to lace the quay in Aberystwyth, talking a mixture of rubbish and misery.
There are folk who walk the walk & others who talk the talk.
I want to feel part of that magnificence the sea by fishing it.
The sea temperatures are still way down though. Has the Gulf Stream wobbled and nobody had the heart to tell us?
Jamie on Mull said it was a quiet lobster year up there too. A Crab Year.
I like that combination of observation and acceptance. They are starting to get a few spiders. And recently octopus: if an octopus shares a pot with a lobster for long, there is an empty blue carapace instead of the lobster.
To be an effective fisherman you have to be an obsessive, selfish, monomaniacal, reckless, brave and lucky bastard,
When I fished that "punt" off Llanhystud beach ohso long ago, I was pretty much on the case.
The sea is a demanding mistress.
I must have been pretty unbearable as a partner. And sorry kids, for all those summer holidays you never had!
34> Skye and Beyond
"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..
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