The Crew in a way was to blame for this tyranny. ‘Now’, she had said to him, ‘your job is to provide the boat with fish.’

‘That’s easy,’ he had smiled, in his element.

‘Accordingly,’ she had added, ‘if you don’t catch fish and I have to buy them, then you’ll have to pay.’

‘Pouf!’ he had agreed. ‘Turn out your whole stock of fishing gear.’

He evolved a scheme whereby his fish could be run over to quiet Port-na-Fraing, landed, and sold from door to door by me on a fifty-fifty basis. ‘All you have to do’, he explained, ‘is just to continue not shaving, and even those who didn’t want fish would buy them out of pity.’ I had often a very hard time of it.

However, beyond one or two negligible small codling, he caught no fish. And, in truth, many a time on our cruise did I regret not having a net. Never again, I vowed, would I go without one. How gladly often would I have sacrificed the Li-lo itself for that midnight apostrophe: ‘Maaakrill’ I explained this to the Mate, and got some small pleasure from seeing conflicting emotions tie him in a knot; for he is really pretty good with a net.

‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘For there’s no fish in this barren spot. And that’s the whole sum and substance of it. How would the bait on that night line be fresh and untouched in the morning if there were any fish about?’

‘There’s the salmon cobble anyway,’ I suggested mildly.

‘I’ll give you a sixpence’, said the Crew to him, ‘for each fresh fish you catch not under six inches.’

That rather staggered him. And I had my laugh there and then, before he could take it out of me.

We got to know that bay and the surrounding inlets very well. One side of the inner corner of the bay is built up into a pier with huge granite blocks, and we saw that granite quarrying had been carried on here in recent times. Now the steep shore, with its great boulders and outcropping rock, looked barren enough, yet when we came to examine it closely we discovered little pockets of fertility everywhere. For example, in the face opposite to us, we gathered ripe blaeberries and cranberries while the Crew carried off a bunch of honeysuckle, whose odd whiffs surprised us for days. The place was fragrant with bog myrtle and meadowsweet, and under the jagged stones we picked up young crabs and large winkles (for which the Crew concocted a special sauce, discovering in the process that any strong flavour is fatal). Beneath some boulders we exposed a world of hundreds of young sea anemones, their red nipples like blood spots of pain: an astonishing sight. In fact, if I made a complete list of each individual thing we saw in that small corner, it might well surprise the more curious. The Crew suggested a pastime: land for ten minutes, observe, return, and then in rotation have the usual knock-out game with the objects seen. ‘I think I’ll go fishing,’ said the Mate.