Feasts, Festivals and Friends

Never let it be said that life in a seemingly fast asleep fishing village, content to sit out it's old age, can ever be boring or dull; with it's nocturnal wanderings and silent intrigue, where one persons drama becomes the vine of gossips delight. Sleep it may, but village life continues as each generation melts into the pot of yesterday; with the feasts and festivals of today remembered through the photographs and videos hidden in the drawers of tomorrow. We watch as we celebrate the life and colour of the village, its people, its traditions and its past; last week we enjoyed and endulged in the fish, fun filled Herring Festival with its smoked, soused, rollmop, baked, grilled, fried, bloatered and net fresh herrings, silver darlings, unrivalled kings of the sea. They come swimming down through the Irish sea year after year visiting our bay, their breeding bay, where they will spawn, beginning again the seven year life cycle that brings them back from whitebait to fully mature fish.
The festival was a day marinaded in atmosphere as people came to delight, taste and take home some fine fare, from fishcakes to fillets, from cider to cheese, even the local television came to cover the day. It is through events such as these that we learn to see the village built on fish by men and women brought up on fish; the lives of one dependent on the existance of the other. We know of some families still in Clovelly whose ancestors came here because of the sea and the
herring, stayed because of the sea and the herring and remain thanks to the sea and the herring. My own family surviving five generations as mariners and herring men. For over 20 years I have been a herring man. Today people make Clovelly their home for different reasons, having little understanding of the seasonal fishery, unaware of the night long boats drifting across the tide of the lantern lit bay, the shaking of the fishful nets in the cold, still air of the harbour, leaving the pebbled beach slippery and glistening with silver scales; where once donkeys laboured through the pannier and basket laden night. Boats no longer land the great shoals, picarooners don't line the shore, the smell of tanned nets no more hang drying from the wall. For most those days are long passed, for me it is a past still alive and will remain as long as there are still some herring being landed.
When I sit alone at sea in the cold, dark night, gently rocking with the Southerly swell, looking back at the Christmas lit village; I think of those fast asleep houses, unaware of their past and when it's time to haul in the nets, watching the fish come aboard, I think of all the men gone now and how hard it was for them as they often toiled with their heavy nets and I wonder will I be one of the last.
With the nets hauled, fish counted, customers supplied and satisfied all that remains to do is the most important part of the season; with fish and car I head into Devons hinterland, knocking, calling, visiting and surprising my most favourite people, those who have bought herring from me over the last 20 years, those who have eaten herring all their lives, who remember their parents salting in herring for the Winter, those who tell stories of herring for breakfast and herring for tea, whose lives are richer for the taste and goodness of Clovelly herring and my life shall never be boring or dull only richer for the knowing of them all.

Our first time

It had to happen eventually, the temptation was too great, you can't put it off any longer, it's obvious she's just been waiting for the time we can be alone, just her and me, together; of course I wanted things to be right, but I'm a fisherman, for us theres always something wrong, like the weather, it's rarely how we want it; for once though, there was no excuse, no choice but to do it. So, dressed for the occasion, armed with the knowledge that this was her first time and I would have to take things very slowly, we went out, together, "Little Lily," and I.
Oh! alright the "Little Lily," is a boat, but not any old boat, she's a Clovelly Picarooner, a herring boat, built by students at the Falmouth Marine College, from the lines of the "Little Mary," an 1898 original, now in the care of the National Maritime Museum at Falmouth, but what a boat, with her fine entrance and rounded bilge and a wine glass transom to die for; she's a little lugger, a dipping lugger at that, suntan sailed and herring scaled, there was a time this small harbour would have been home to many Picarooners and herring craft but following the shrinking of the shoals and the arrival of fantastic reinforced plastic, the traditional boats have disappeared, sold or left to rot in some disused, brambled corner.
With nets aboard we headed out onto the lazy calm water, with just enough teasing breeze to move her along, we cast our nets into the sea, Lily working as if she was born to it, like she knew the ropes, she felt like she had been here before, like she was home. With the nets set and tide still flooding we decided to have a play, and setting sails cruised effortlessly along the nets, a sight once familiar in the Bideford Bay, now a snap shot of the past as the "Little Lily," is the first new Picarooner to fish for herrng off Clovelly for over 40 years.
Did we catch any fish? Well thanks to the inevitable intervention, of a slippery, pleased with himself, blubbery seal! Not many. But it was a carefree afternoon, a pleasant escape from the half term village, with not a care in the world we drifted along watching the evening lights appear. The catch was small, but what's important, it was Lily's first, but not by any means her last.