Season's end on the Uadi Ana.

Some people don't like going anywhere twice, for without the factor of novelty, they cannot vividly appreciate a place. Well, a place does indeed feel different the second time you go there, and I was in a way fearful that I would find the fairy kingdom of the Guadiana (from Arabic Uadi Ana) had lost some of its magic, with its fancy new metal perches all up along it. But we soon settled in, and five weeks whistled by there as we pottered about in great contentment.

The moon waxed and waned, as it sent the tides pulsing up and down the river; the bright stars circled overhead and the birds went about their business up and down the river, all in the same old dance together. They twitter and sing blissfully in the riverside trees at dusk, giving way as night falls to the chorus of crickets and tree-frogs, with the odd heron screeching and owl hooting. In late October there came some rain and wind to ruffle our feathers, then high pressure reasserted itself and chased the clouds again, as the hills turned green and the sun turned less fierce and more smiling!

The morning mist is often slow to clear, giving us time to say and sing some prayers and even browse the web for a while before the sun comes over the hill, chasing the mist, drying the night-time damp and calling us to work. 

I chip away at the lists of jobs-to-do; the worst was to replace the rusty exhaust manifold that I found to be caput. We are slowing down, as another year dies, but thoughts are turning to the new one, and personally I feel good for another ten years or so of sailing, with the help of God! Fiona too is enjoying the life, and her company is very good. She however feels the sense of being in a kind of no-man's-land less positively than I do.

As well as being on water and between two strange lands, at this season, between one year and the next, one is in a bit of a temporal void. Memories well up from the past. A converted Irish fishing boat, the Ros Alither, has pulled into the river. She was built in Killybegs, the classic BIM (Irish Sea Fisheries Board) build, like all the Ros boats and our old Eiscir Riada, of which I became the proud skipper/owner in the late 1970s. 

When those little ships were being built with pride and joy in the BIM boatyards in Killybegs, Arklow, Dingle and Baltimore, and owned and crewed in the same tight-knit communities, with a sense of purpose and optimism, feeling themselves effectively supported by the State, what a different scenario was presented by the Irish fishing industry to the grisly scene evoked, exaggerated as it may be, in the recent Guardian article Revealed: trafficked migrant workers abused in Irish Fishing industry!

Of course the fish stocks were much better than now and the markets improving too.The white-fish boats in Killybegs had a fine time of it, even a fairly steady routine, fishing Monday to Thursday, servicing boat and gear on Friday, Saturday about the house, Sunday, going to Mass and a Gaelic football game in the afternoon. I vividly recall one crisp winter's day when I went out with 'Forty' Murrin on the Ros Alainn, for a day's seining at the back of St John's Point. We were back in Killybegs with a hundred boxes of fish before nightfall!

A Leprachaun postcard of Killybegs in the 195/60s.

Too good to last, you may well say! Once the bankers and the Government start to smell money, there's trouble ahead, especially in the context of an explosion of technology. Big loans were handed out to the select few. A class of millionaires emerged, while the majority of fishermen had to find work in factories or whatever. Not that they were able to make a steady living there. The women of course had to become wage-slaves as well.... Wonderful liberation!

Small boats were practically eliminated, markets rocketed upwards and then collapsed, places like Donegal Bay became fish deserts. The BIM yards were first nationalised and then mostly closed, while the big new trawlers were built abroad. Those fishermen who survived seemed to be serving the bankers and the machines, rather than the other way round. Needless to say, they mostly no longer found time to go to Mass on Sunday; perhaps that constituted some kind of 'tipping point'?

What conservation measures there were proved ineffective, while politicians collaborated in the process, with the odd brown envelope thrown in to encourage them. Some of us had dreams of doing things differently - Small is Beautiful and all that. Were we just impractical utopians? Maybe. Humanity, it seems, has to learn the hard way; but can we even be bothered to learn at all? Just how hard does it have to be? Well, I did not prevail with my ideas, but maybe I should be thankful for that too; it's hard to see how life could be better for us right now!

Delivering supplies

So long as the politicians manage to keep those pensions coming, it is hard to complain; but let us just remember that many of our fellow human beings have little or nothing coming; they have nothing to lose and are in danger of inheriting a bombed out world. If they rise up and try to destroy us in their anger, it is not good enough to respond in kind. I am writing this in the wake of the latest outrage in Paris, and I am distressed at much of the response as well of course at the murderous acts themselves.

Those crazy Moslems also have a story that must be listened to, and if we want Western civilisation to prevail, we must firstly attend to our own very serious shortcomings, and secondly make the effort to understand them. Maybe we just might be then able to make a wonderful new civilisation together, that will enhance the world rather than destroy it. Indeed there are many traces in the landscape and the towns of Andalucia (Al Andalus) of an Islamic culture worthy of considerable respect!

Fiona in Castellejos.