Seasons on Harris

by David Yeadon

  I kept my eyes focused on the horizon. On previous boat adventures in various parts of the world I found that I am by no means a natural-born sailor. Green-gilled nausea rapidly surges in, wavelike and stomach-churning, unless I have the horizon in view and blasts of ocean air that I can suck in deeply like cans of cold soda to settle my tumultuous intestines.

  “Y’okay?” asked Angus.

  “Me? Oh, I’m fine…thanks. Fine.”

  All three of them smiled together, like members of a club amused at the behavior of some errant outsider.

  “When we get to the first fleet, we’ll have some tea,” said John. “Tea always helps.”

  “Helps what?”

  “Well…y’know,” he replied, grinning wider now. “If y’feelin’ a bit…y’know…”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m fine,” I tried again. “But a cup of tea would be nice.”

  “It’ll ward off the Blue Men,” said John mysteriously.

  Angus Campbell’s Harmony

  “Oh, right—the Blue Men. I’ve heard all about them.”

  “Ah, y’ know the story? I thought m’be y’hadn’a heard.”

  “Well—it’s only an old folktale. Nothing to be fretting about, is it?”

  “Oh, no. Many did, mind ye. In the past. When boats were smaller, an’ all that. But not so much now. Things are much better, y’ken. Much better now…usually.”

  “How d’y’ mean—‘usually’?”

  “Well, it’s still best to keep y’wits ’bout ye,” said John, smiling that mysterious smile again.

  And, as if to emphasize his point, a sudden double-punch of waves moving in different directions caught us all by surprise. Angus gripped the wheelhouse door frame, John grabbed the anchor chain, Duncan slid a ways before hitting the rail, and I missed my handhold and ended up sprawled on the wet deck awash in wave spume, until I grabbed a leg of the sorting table and held fast.

  “Hang on!” shouted John. As if I had plans to do anything else.

  Slowly the boat righted itself and the surge diminished, and the now familiar bounce ’n’ buck rhythm returned.

  “Y’okay?” asked Duncan. Even he looked a little perturbed by his hasty skid across the deck, and I must admit I felt comforted by that look. They were all obviously experienced sailors, but they also knew, far better than me, that the sea is a pernicious companion whose friendship and felicitude can never be assumed.

  “Fine,” I lied again. This was my fifth “fine” in less than five minutes and I’d lied every time.

  “Gotta watch out fer those wee sneaky little bastards.” John was now only half smiling.

  “Och—it’s just the Blue Men playin’ a bit wi’ ye!” shouted Angus over the roar of the engine.

  “Okay! Enough about these blasted Blue Men. Isn’t it time for tea?”

  And so it was, and we sat bobbing about like corn in a popper close to the orange buoys marking the first fleet of creels, slurping on Angus’s strong, sweet tea. But the image of those demons of the deep waiting to lure us to a watery demise persisted and I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, watching out for more of those pernicious waves.

  When it came to the laboriously rhythmic process of hauling up the creels, I, of course, offered to lend a hand. And I assumed that such benevolence on my part would be met with good-natured gratitude and the promise of “extra rations” or something equally enticing for my endeavors.

  “Oh—no, no, y’re good jus’ where y’are,” said Angus, maybe a little too hastily.

  “Yeah, stay there and you’ll need to hang on tight,” agreed John, obviously a reflection on my prior inability to stand upright when broadsided by errant surf.

  Duncan just smiled. A trifle empathetically, I sensed, maybe because of his own lowly third-rung status as an “apprentice.”

  Now, I suppose I could indulge in a little artistic license and claim that eventually, as the grueling haul continued, they gradually turned to this big strapping individual (me) lolling by the rail and begged for the use of his muscular prowess. But truth must out and that didn’t happen. They were the very picture of perfect teamwork, with Angus operating the noisy, diesel-powered hauling winch, which lifted the heavy metal and nylon-net creels over five hundred feet from the depths of The Minch.

  Each “fleet” line contained a hundred creels, and up they came every ten seconds or so. Angus quickly removed the lead weights that had kept each creel firmly on the prawn-littered Minch mud; John flipped open the flap of the creel, poured its contents onto the sorting table that stood waist high on middeck, and tossed back into the waves the “junk” of small “brown” crabs, whelks, hermit crabs, and starfish (much to the frenzied delight of a host of gulls and gannets following in our wake). He threw, with remarkable accuracy, the larger “velvet” crabs (apparently very popular with the Japanese market), small octopus, and the footlong, sharklike dogfish—ideal as bait for velvet crabs—into separate buckets by the wheelhouse, and in a rare break of silence, he shouted to me, “Y’like octopus and suchlike?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Definitely.”

  “Okay, well this one’s for you, then.” He grinned, holding up a particularly large and gelatinous-looking specimen.

  Then came the key task—Duncan’s sorting of the langoustines, with their long flailing, lobsterlike claws—into three separate boxes, each box for a different size of langoustine and each slotted neatly, claws upward, into a grid of “tubes” within every box.

  And so it went—a robotic regimen of creel hauling, opening, emptying out, throwing back, and meticulous size selection of the scores of scarlet and white, knobble-shelled creatures. I’d been told that as soon as we docked at the end of the day, these would be whisked away in a special refrigerated truck bound for Stornoway airport, and within a few hours, they’d be the specialty of the day at the dining tables of elegant tourist-resort restaurants and hotels in Spain.

  The three of them worked silently and without pause until the first fleet of creels had been emptied and stacked in a rapidly growing pile at the rear of the boat.

  “Fantastic,” I gushed. “Looks like a great catch.”

  Certainly Duncan had managed to fill quite a few of his boxes and had never for a moment slowed in the rapidity and accuracy of his selection.

  “S’terrible!” grunted Angus.

  “No, s’not good at all,” agreed John.

  Duncan just smiled as usual and shrugged.

  “Normally,” Angus began to explain, “on a good run, we get anything up to twenty or thirty in a creel. Today we’re less’n three or four. Like a’ said—they’ve been down there too long because of the lousy weather. So the cheeky little buggers ate up all the salt herring bait and left.”

  “So why hasn’t someone designed a creel especially for langoustines,” I asked without thinking, “y’know, something with a narrower—maybe a more confusing—‘entrance’ or whatever y’call it.”

  There was a sort of hesitant pause until Angus stated the obvious: “Well, y’can get ’em if y’just a prawn man, but we do lobsters too and at a cost of twenty pounds plus a creel and twenty fleets—that’s two thousand creels total—well, you work it out. We’d have to have double the investment—two lots of forty thousand pounds! Far too much outlay for a three-man boat. Even now, what with the oil, replacement creels, ropes, tackle, and God knows what else—and all those damned taxes on top of everything—it’s amazing we keep goin’ even during the good months!”

  “Ah,” I said.

  More silence.

  “Well, okay, but—listen,” I started up again. “So couldn’t you just clip on a kind of extra escape-prevention net over the main entrance when you’re prawning and then remove it when you’re on the other side of the island going after lobsters?”

  Brilliant idea, I thought. But for some reason it didn’t seem to impress Angus and John, and before we had a chance to continue the discussion, along came another one of those mini Perfect Storm wave
s that caught us all unawares and flung us about the deck like flotsam.

  “Jeez!” shouted John.

  “Whoa!” agreed Angus.

  “Shoot!” came a third exclamation. From me actually. Not only had I collided scrotally with a particular hard and rigid bit of deck furniture but my bucket of precious octopi had just been flipped over and the delicious little darlings were off spinning overboard in furious spumes of spray. “There goes my dinner!”

  “Okay,” shouted Angus. “Two more fleets and then lunch. Got some of MacLeod’s sausage—goes great with slabs of cheese…”

  And so off we went, farther out into The Minch, to continue the haul, dump, and sort process all over again while the gulls screeched around our heads and gannets dive-bombed the ocean voraciously for throwbacks in vertical, wings-folded formation. And when they tired of being bird-torpedoes, they started attacking the gulls, making them drop their pickings, which the gannets then snatched up just before they hit the water. The gulls were understandably annoyed by such incursions but were no match for these huge seabirds with their stiletto wings, piercing black eyes, and facial markings that made them look just like the angry, take-no-prisoners predators they were. The gulls screeched and wheeled and some managed to fly off with tidbits of lunch, but the gannets invariably won the game and perched themselves on the rolling swell, complacently digesting their ill-gotten gains.

  Our own lunch came after another couple of hours of rhythmic hauling and sorting. Angus decided that he’d need to unload the empty creels that had been accumulating in their hundreds at the rear of the boat. So we headed out of The Minch swells and into a calm, cliff-bound cove where he kept a storage area on the quay.

  Angus was right. MacLeod’s sausage was indeed delicious after all those salt-spray soakings. It came in the form of thick, square slabs that turned brown and crisp in the frying pan on Angus’s small two-burner propane stove in the wheelhouse. A square of succulent cheddar cheese, a little mustard, and a spread of spicy Branston pickle on whole wheat buns and we were off, wolfing the “pieces” down along with more scalding-hot tea and, later on, fat wedges of Christina’s home-baked banana and raisin cake.

  After a sprawling period of recuperation on the deck of Harmony, bathed in a warm sun away from the ocean breezes, the men decided it was time to unload the empty creels.

  I, of course, offered to help again but realized that they were used to working to a strict, well-honed rhythm that would only be disrupted by an outsider, no matter how well meaning. So, leaving them to their labors, I wandered off up the cliffside and onto a broad sheep-dotted pasture. Wildflowers were scattered everywhere across the bright green grasses—daisies, sandworts, clover, lady’s bedstraw, buttercups, primroses, and tiny, delicately colored “frog orchids.”

  At the far side of the meadow a couple of croft cottages snuggled against a high bastion of exposed gneiss strata. Laundry was flapping in a gentle sea breeze and the faint aroma of something baking wafted across the grass. I followed the aroma toward the cottages until an elderly woman with tightly bunned hair and wearing a white kitchen apron emerged and stood staring at me as I loomed closer. Then she gave a quick laugh—a laugh of recognition. “Ah, I know you…I’ve seen y’face before.”

  I smiled (I was also salivating from the delicious smells now pouring from her open front door). “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, yes…I’m sure…Ah! I know. You were in the Gazette last week…or the week before. You’re that writer chappie.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. She was right. A young journalist, Iain MacSween, from the Stornoway Gazette had spontaneously interviewed me while I was interviewing him about island affairs. And—voilà—a week later, there I was, splashed on the front page (in color, no less) prattling on about our traveling life, with a photograph taken in their office of me sprawled on a chair, tea mug in hand, Harris Tweed jacket rampant, and looking for all the world like some rambunctious bearded laird down on the island for a few days to bag a stag or two on the castle estate.

  “You’ve got a good memory,” I mumbled, feeling rather bashful.

  “Och—a face like ’at y’dinna forget s’fast, d’y’ken!”

  “Ah,” I said, not sure exactly how to interpret that remark.

  “An’ wh’y’doin’ in these parts. Are y’hikin’ about a bit?”

  “Oh no—no. I’m just up from the quay. I’m on Angus Campbell’s boat. They’re unloadin’ some creels…we’ve been out in The Minch.”

  “Oooh—bit rough today, I’m thinking. Well—listen—d’y’have time for a wee spot o’ tea?”

  I rarely refuse such spontaneous invitations (islanders tend to be offended if you do), but I knew that Angus would be anxious to get back out to complete the hauling. There were still four more fleets to “service” and I had no intention of delaying them.

  “Ah—I’d love to but…well, y’know fishermen. Always wanting to be back out there…”

  “Well, how many are y’then?”

  “There’s four of us—three fishermen and this novice!”

  “Och, well y’just wait here a minute and let me see what I can find for y’all…”

  A few minutes later I was back at the boat bearing a foil-wrapped parcel for my friends.

  “Jeez!” laughed John, as I opened it to reveal an enormous square of just-baked fruitcake, still steaming from the oven and cut neatly into portions by the generous lady up at the croft. “Y’jus’ wander off and return with wonders like this! Y’must be our token of good fortune!” (This latter said while spewing crumbs from a mouthful of soft, warm cake.)

  “Ah,” added Angus, “so m’be y’ll be our token when we get back out there and try to haul up a better catch than this morning’s…”(more flying crumbs).

  Duncan, as usual, just smiled. But his silence at least enabled him to wolf down a second square of cake long before any of us had finished our first.

  I wish I could have indeed lived up to my status as a potential “token,” but—no artistic license allowed once again—the afternoon’s haul turned out to be even more meager. However, despite that, we still managed to hand over twelve boxes of langoustines to the refrigerator-van man and then we all sat together on the quay at the end of the day sipping drams from a bottle of Glenfiddich I’d brought as a thank-you gift.

  Angus finally became a little more talkative as the whisky washed away some of the disappointments of the day and told me about a “pet project” he was currently completing.

  “I think it’ll work out—I hope so ’cos it’s costin’ enough. Y’see I’ve designed this boat—a high-speed beauty—and I want to take people out on day trips to the island of St. Kilda.”

  “St. Kilda! I’ve been told that’s a nine-, ten-hour trip. One way. Fifty miles or so…”

  “Tha’s right. It is—or was. Until now. But a’ think I’ll be able to do it in a couple of hours if it all works out right. An’ a’ know I’ll find people who’ll want to do that—they’re always askin’ how to get out there. It’s a place that fascinates visitors. Fascinates me too when we go lobsterin’ out there. There’s nowhere like it…”

  “I know. I’ve read a lot about it. Strange stories about the small community that once lived there. So—when do we leave!?”

  “Och, soon—soon. It’s not quite ready yet…” Angus laughed. It was good to see him laughing again after his hard, and disappointing, day of hauling.

  “Well, sign me up. I want to be one of the first to go with you.”

  “Okay—consider yourself signed up!” and he spontaneously raised his glass in a toast. “An here’s a wee bit o’ Robbie Burns f’ye:

  “Fortune! If thou’ll but gie me still

  Hale breeks, a scone, and a whisky-gill,

  An’ rowth o’rhyme to rave at will,

  Tak’ a’ the rest.”

  I couldn’t quite understand all the broguish subtleties, but it seemed to possess the celebrate-what-you-have Rubaiyat
spirit of “a glass of wine, a loaf of bread—and thou.”

  There was a silence—a most companiable silence—and I rummaged through my brain for a toast-worthy response. “Ah—I’ve got it—I think it’s a translation from the Gaelic. Roddy MacAskill once said it to Anne and me and it kind of sums up my thanks to you all for letting me be a shipmate—if unfortunately not a token of good fortune—for today. It goes something like:

  “Would it not be the beautiful thing now

  If you were coming instead of going…”

  We all raised our glasses, chinked them together, and downed that silky single malt nectar. High overhead a golden eagle circled on the spirals while the setting sun burnished our faces.

  It had been a very good day—at least for me. And the prospect of another day with Angus on his St. Kilda project seemed even more enticing…

  5

  Cooking with Katie

  COMPILERS OF TRAVEL GUIDEBOOKS and “best hotels and restaurants” publications, complete with all those stars, rosettes, and purple-prosed accolades, have not had a particularly easy job when gathering tempting “must go” material on Harris. All, naturally, have celebrated the island’s long and fascinating history, its enduring Gaelic heritage, strict Presbyterian mores, and, of course, the dazzling array of earthscapes—from majestic mountains to wild, lunarlike wastes and those eye-candy arcs of gleaming golden sands along the west coast. But when it comes to the more pragmatic elements of accommodations and eateries, enthusiastic verbosity occasionally falters and certainly diminishes. For the simple reason that, despite the island’s increasing reliance on tourism, the options still remain rather modest here. To whit: three smallish hotels (Harris, Rodel, and MacLeod), four guesthouses (with a total of fourteen rooms), and twenty-three or so bed-and-breakfasts (fewer than forty rooms). For those looking for extended stays, there are admittedly around fifty “self-catering” cottages, plus a couple of hostels and scattered camping grounds, but no single serious independent restaurant outside the hotels and guesthouses.