Travels thru Life: 8/22 -- Weaving and Fishing in the Donegal Area

We traveled a bit south to St John's Point and a local weaver, Cyndi Graham. Rather than going to college, she spent 5 years as a weaving apprentice and now is quite accomplished in her own right. She and her husband run the shop -- he and his father set up the loom and made modifications to it and now are working on fixing up another old loom. The one she is using now is probably from the 18th century.

Her shop is in a thatched cottage and one of their jobs there is to renew the thatch every 4-5 years. They used to grow and prepare the reeds, but now buy them. Thatching here is tricky as you need a calm, dry day, so you have to get all the materials ready and abandon all other plans the day the weather cooperates.

She showed us how to use the loom, and after all the other demonstrations we have seen, I think I finally have a decent understanding of it. If you are creating any kind of pattern, it can take 2 days of work to prepare the machine so you can start. It looks like VERY precise and detailed work. She did a short demonstration, and it no time, had added two inches to the piece she was working on. She says she needs to weave four to six meters a day to support herself and needs to take a break every hour and a half to stretch. She is looking forward to having the second machine functional: not only will she be able to work on 2 different projects at once, the other machine will require a different combination of muscle action so she will be able to work more continuously.

Cyndi's primary loom, which was modfied to have six foot
peddles instead of four, which increases pattern options.

Her current project is multiple panels separated
by plain warp which will become the fringe. There
is already a large roll of them on the bottom.

This is her other old loom which she hopes her husband and
his father can put back into working order.

Some of her work, like scarves, is basically complete when it comes off the loom. But she also makes fabric that her sister turns into pillow covers, hats, vests, jackets, shaped shawls, and purses.She only sells out of her shop because consignment shops take too much of the revenue to be useful, similar to the problem I would have if I tried to sell my stained glass panels from a shop. Several of us took advantage of her work and added to our collections of Irish crafts.

Back on the bus, after a pit stop, we drove to Mullaghmore, a fishing village, to hear from a local fisherman and explore the harbor. Peter Power grew up in a fishing family and was advised that there was no future in fishing, so he got a civil engineering degree and worked in places like Colorado. After his second heart attack at age 45, he decided come back to Ireland and started a commericial sport fishing business. It must have been good for him, because he is now 73 and going strong.

Mullaghmore town

He was very critical of the way commericial fishing is regulated in the EU. There is a board of nine appointed commissioners who make the decisions, and apparently the ones that appoint them are also not elected, so they are not responsive to the concerns of small fisherman and seem to be in the pocket of large commercial operations that operate 24 hours a day, bringing in 450 fish each hour and tons a day. He is very concerned about the impacts of overfishing and farmed fish. He says wild salmon returning to spawn are caught by the fish farms, milked of their eggs, and the resulting fingerlings sold to the salmon farms, which feed poor quality food, result in large volumes of fish waste in the water which hurts the wild salmon, and have little of the food value of wild salmon.

Peter, holding an American made reel, which
he much prefers to the cheaper Chinese versions,
which are not nearly so sturdy. Plus he can
get repair parts and keep the American ones
going for decades.

On his boat, he traps and tags female blue sharks and tuna, and also measures them before releasing them for tracking. He says they are getting smaller. Sharks can live 120 years and start breeding only after 20 years, but if they are harvested before they can breed, there is no future. It was quite a sobering view of today's worldwide fishing industry.

This the 'ruler' he uses to measure fish length.

After lunch, he took us out to the harbor and his boat. Back in the 1800s, it took 1400 men 18 years to build the harbor. It was here that Lord Mountbatten, his wife, and four other people were blown up in their boat by the Irish Republican Army in the 1979. He also gave us the opportunity to board his boat and see how he and his crew would capture and release the tagged sharks and tuna.

The harbor seems narrow to me, and boats tie up along the
rock sides with no piers available. In the winter, boats are
moved to other storage as the waves will toss boulders
over the wall like bombs.

This was the high tide mark in 1942. Now the king tides (the
highest ones when the moon is full) can be more than a
foot above this more, above the top of the harbor walkway.

The hole in the harbor wall was caused by a boulder tossed
up by the winter sea. You can understand why the boats
on the other side would be a risk even if the boulders were
smaller.

The spit of land off the point here is where Lord
Mountbatten's 30 foot boat was blown up while he and
family and friends were crabbling.

The back of Peter's boat. The little pink things behind him
are tuna lures that look kind of like squid. The lowest one
has a serious hook in it.

Peter is holding the lure with the hook.

The gaff is used to hook the tuna or shark through the open
door in the back. It is detached from the rod and a rope is
used by multiple men to pull the larger fish aboard. The
biggest one they have tagged is is 986 lb. tuna.

A big collection of rods and reels in the main boat cabin.

Mullaghmore

I found the thin layers of uplifted rock interesting. At first
I wondered if they were abandoned boat ramps.

Above and below: abandoned castle. Bombow??

We had a short break at the hotel before walking into Donegal, just over one half mile away. Jim and I explored, bought some snacks, and headed back to the hotel for the evening.