ROYAL CARBERY BOOKS

36 Beechwood Park, Ballinlough, Cork

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MERCIER PRESS

Unit 3B, Oak House, Bessboro Road, Blackrock, Cork

© The Estate of John M. Feehan

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ISBN: 978 0 94664 511 4

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 437 1

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 448 8

This book was first published in 1978 and reprinted in 1979 under the title The Wind that Round the Fastnet Sweeps. It was first published under the title The Secret Places of the West Cork Coast in 1990.

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

INTRODUCTION

Black Dan, a wild unruly travelling man from rich pasture lands far from the sea, was taken by surprise when I told him I was going to sail alone the full length of the West Cork coast, almost one hundred miles of water, in a small wooden boat not much longer than his own caravan. ‘Was there no passenger ship going that way,’ he wanted to know, ‘or why for couldn’t I get the bus?’ Dan had only seen the sea twice in his life and what he saw did not appeal to him. As luck would have it I was with him both times. The first was at Tramore on a wild blustery day in early June when the great waves were pounding on the golden strand and the wind sending cascades of sparkling spray high into the clear summer air. Dan gazed hard and long at what must have been to him a most bewildering and confusing sight, something he had never seen before, and then he turned to me and said:

‘By Christ, no matter what the Russians say, there’s’ a God.’ He had learned more theology in those few moments than many another in a lifetime at a seminary.

The next time, and the last by his express wish, was at Dungarvan. I had hired a small rowing boat and he nervously sat in the stern trying his best to hide his anxiety and fear. When we passed the calm water sheltered by the pier we met a very slight swell. His face began to turn a kind of grey as if the blood was draining out of it, and I asked him if he was alright but he seemed unable to give a coherent answer. There was no point in causing him further distress so I turned the boat around and rowed back to the pier. We were less than five minutes out and his relief was unbounded. He stepped unsteadily ashore and when I had tied up we made our way along the cobbled quays towards the nearest hostelry. As we were about to enter he turned around and looked at the harbour, the boats, and the slight swell outside. ‘By God ‘tis great to be back in Ireland again,’ he said with a broad grin on his rugged face.

The reaction of Dan to the sea was predictable. It was nothing more than the reaction of thousands of landsmen all over the country; a reaction of fear and mistrust of something they did not know or understand. The men of the land find it hard to understand the men who sail the seas in small boats; but for those of us who want to do this alone we must appear as stark, raving lunatics!

I opted to make this passage from Cork to Crookhaven alone in a small wooden sailing boat. Let me introduce her to you. First of all her name is Dualla, called after a little country graveyard in County Tipperary where all that is left of the woman who loved me and shared my life awaits the final hour of the Resurrection. Dualla is Bermudian rigged, has a large main sail and a series of smaller foresails. She is thirty-one feet long, eight feet across and draws five feet six inches of water. She can sleep four in reasonable comfort and has all the usual accessories such as toilet, gas cooker, wash up, etc. To push her along when there is no wind or when a strong tide goes contrary at the mouth of a harbour she has a 25 h.p. Volvo diesel engine. A nine foot collapsible rubber punt ferries me backwards and forwards, from wherever she is anchored, to a landing slip or pier. Those are her vital statistics.

Now let me introduce myself. I am a publisher by profession, a writer by inclination, a soldier by training and a man of the sea in the deepest recess of my heart. I am no longer young, indeed I am well beyond the canonical age. I make a special point of this fact for the benefit of the many undoubtedly sincere and well-meaning women who read my last book, Tomorrow To Be Brave, and who wrote to me saying that they cried so much when reading it, that I must be a very kind and understanding man, and that it is quite wrong of me to continue to go through life alone without the joys of female companionship. I do not apologise for causing their tears. Tears become a woman very much and are indeed an essential part of her whole personality; besides which I know that to cry bears witness to the greatest courage of all — the courage to understand suffering. I must however disappoint them in the little matter of their other assumption. ‘Far off cows have long horns,’ says the old Irish proverb, and I can assure them that I am not nearly as nice as they think. If they want evidence of this I refer them to John B. Keane who, in his role as matchmaker, has tried hard over the past six years to remedy this situation only to meet with failure time and time again. In the end he washed his hands completely of me and told me angrily to get to hell back to my cottage on the remote cliffs of Cork harbour, and stay there forever with my dogs, sea-gulls, kittiwakes and corncrakes since they were more fitting company for me than decent human beings. So there you are. You can’t win all the time, can you?

The coast of West Cork I know very well. I have sailed every summer for at least fifteen years and at one time or another called at each of the many captivating harbours, great and small, which abound on that picturesque and enchanting stretch of shoreline. In those days I always had one or two friends with me to lend a hand; friends with whom I shared the joys of the open sea, the comfort of a snug harbour and warm friendly tavern at the end of a hard days run, friends to whom I have dedicated this book. But now it was going to be different. I was going to sail alone without help or companions. I do not wish to give the impression that I am an anti-social crank with my hand raised against every man, or a snob who thinks his own company more pleasant than that of anybody else. Indeed no. I have a deep affection for all human beings; an affection, I fear, far greater than most of them have for me. But like all others I have my favourites and my prejudices. I cannot say that I have ever been particularly attracted by the high, the mighty or the very rich. I have known quite a lot of them during the run of my life and, behind the veneer of importance which they like to assume, most of them are extraordinarily empty and shallow. Bismark said that during the course of his life he saw three Emperors naked and the sight did not impress him.

I have mostly found that I have a great rapport with those human beings who are just themselves and nothing more, and who do not try by vulgar ostentation or loud talk to be that which they are not. One day, so an old Irish folk-tale goes, the Lord was walking in the Garden of Paradise and he came by a little forget-me-not growing at the foot of a massive oak tree. The little flower spoke to the Lord and said:

‘I wish I were like the oak tree here, strong, powerful and majestic. Then I could be of some use to the world.’ And the Lord answered: ‘If you tried to be an oak you would end up revolting and ugly. Your beauty lies in being what you are — a simple, lovely flower that has brought so much more happiness to the hearts of young lovers than any oak tree. Your simplicity and your loveliness is yourself.’ Thus spoke the Lord words of wisdom that have a message for us all whether we sail the seas, or climb the mountains or walk the leafy woodland paths. The most wonderful friends in life are those people who are just themselves; believe me, I know it, I’ve met hundreds of them and those who came closest were those who shared the perils of the sea.

My decision to make this passage alone was not based on my likes or dislikes of various human beings but it was connected in a very intimate way with the death of the one human being who was supreme in my life. When my wife Mary died I wrote a book called Tomorrow To Be Brave which had a twofold purpose; to tell the story of a remarkable and wonderful woman who knew she was going to die but who faced up to it with unbelievable courage and fortitude, and who turned her last terrible years on this earth into the greatest years of her life; and secondly to try to explain what happens to a man when he loses the woman he loves — the insanity that possesses him, the cowardice that besets him, the total darkness that engulfs every corner of his soul. I believe I succeeded in the first purpose and failed in the second. I was too close to it all — the raw gaping wounds of pain and sorrow had not nearly healed. Only now, six years later, can I look upon it with some calmness and common sense, and try to conceive a workable plan to rebuild my life, particularly my inner life, from the ashes and rubble of the past. ‘Life is a series of agonies which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees,’ cried Amiel. We all experience moments of great richness, moments of deep rewarding intensity, moments of supreme happiness; but they have no permanence.“Stay 0 happy moment, stay!’ was the agonising cry of Faust. The moment of happiness paves the way for suffering, the moment of suffering paves the way for hope, and the moment of hope prepares us for happiness again, and so round and round it goes in a vicious circle like the endless spinning of a roulette wheel. To help me to bring the threads of my life together again, in some meaningful pattern, was the reason I undertook this cruise alone. I hoped that the long hours at sea without telephone, without letters, without the necessity of having to make conversation would give me ample time to think, to face the enigma of my own self and perhaps to see some path of meaning, not only in the sad happenings of the past, but in the probabilities of the unknown future. When I started out on this cruise I believed that before it ended the silence of the sea would have given me some magic formula that would banish for ever the turmoil which had been my lot for six years. I know that all this will be hard for the ordinary person to understand, but we each have to go our own way, and this was my road in search of myself. ‘The heart has its reasons that are unknown to reason,’ said Pascal. For those who have suffered the pain of separation through death no explanation is necessary; they will understand every word I write. For those who have not, no explanation may be possible; but I will honestly try my best. No man can do more and with that we must all be satisfied.