The sea stormed up the slipway as a motorboat was launched, only to be smashed against the inlet’s southern cliffs and turned around. Another went, with frantic shouts and bouncing lights, to save those in the first. Its engine a low roar, spluttering into smoke once it managed to regain the shore, where it tipped onto its side like a black clock beetle.

A half-hearted smur of sleet began, turning the rain into pins. I stood on the beach, full of that sour-tasting awe, my feet sinking and stuck as I watched those waving arms appear and disappear in quicksilver strokes of torchlight and sea. The fishermen’s shouts were distant enough to sound alien, overwhelmed by those on the shore and the storm raging over their heads. But I knew every man in those boats. Knew which village they came from, what family. Some were boys, only a few years older than me. Though none were my friend; both villages sought my father’s good will as if he were God. I wondered which of those arms were his – strong arms tanned like hide; it seemed incredible to me that he would ever wave for help at all.

The Acair was swept high and southwest, battered mercilessly against the cliff below Àrd Shiadair, until every part of it – every timber and metal beam; winch and drum; net and cage, buoy and grass rope – was gone.

Every boat launched after that, skiffs and dinghies, even the old wooden sgoths equipped with only oars and men, all had to turn back or be turned back, most often rescued. Until it seemed as though their efforts were mere distraction from those waving arms, those distant screams, those faces we knew but couldn’t see.

The wailing began when the night arrived. It came from those torches and silhouettes high above the beach, standing against the stars like angels in a nativity scene. Over them and the storm, and the desperate shouts of those still down on the shore, I could hear the bell out on the rocks begin to sing of high tide. The sand vibrated under my feet in a nasty hum as though I were back on the deck of the Acair, back on the edge of that underwater cliff into nothing but blackness. The air was filled with spume; it washed out my gaping mouth with salt. And the wind raged and raged against all of it – all of us – until it was too late to matter.

The storm blew itself out as quickly as it had blown in. By the time the tide bell had been muted by the sea, the rain had stopped and the wind had died. The wailing had stopped too, and those torches scanned the horizon and low waves in frantic searches. But there was nothing. Not even splintered wood or abandoned netting; the neon-yellow buoys and floats of the drag lines. No evidence at all that there had ever been eighteen men and three boats coming home loaded with catch. Until the gulls and gannets flew from clifftop shelters to gorge themselves on an unexpected feast, their greedy cries drowning out all that eerie silent hope.