IGNOMINIOUS was the word for it, but the resonance wasn't quite right. "Naireach!" growled the acquaintance on hearing that the last Galway hooker was a beached, but not abandoned, hulk down in Co Wicklow. And he wasn't one for regular outbursts in the first official language.
Well, not that Ave Maria was the last. As soon as poet Richard Murphy had immortalised the "leath bhad" in verse, he set something off. Not only has there been a hooker revival, but the east coast skippers and turf boat builders behind events like last weekend's Cruinniu na mBad in Kinvara have bent tradition a bit.
Cork born Paddy Barry has crossed the Atlantic, sailed to the Arctic, and this summer both he and fellow skipper, Mick Brogan, set sights on the north's Mediterranean - the Baltic. Barry reached Latvia in his bad mor, Saint Patrick, and returns now to prepare for an Antarctic adventure early next year, recreating the epic Elephant Island rescue by Sir Ernest Shackleton and Kerryman Tom Crean...
Boatbuilding Programme
Over west, Tomas Mac an Iomaire of the Galway Hooker Association talks enthusiastically of a training programme for boatbuilders in Carna and Lettermore, supported by the EU and Udaras na Gaeltachta. His calendar lists several more hooker and currach regattas in Galway this summer, including Feile Chaladh Thaidhg in Carraroe this coming weekend and Feile na nOilean in Lettermore on August 23rd to 25th.
And last month, another three hookers left Irish waters, bound for the classic boats festival in the northern French port of Brest, and Douarnenez. Accompanying two big brothers the Morning Star and the Lady Mor, the baby of the fleet - Star of the West, owned by filmmaker and cameraman, Clan de Buitlear and spouse, Baitre - took a mere 60 hours to sail from Poolbeg on the Liffey. In so doing, it set a new record as the first leath bhad to have ventured outside these territorial limits.
Johnny Healion, the Killiney boatbuilder who constructed the vessel, describes it as a "major achievement". Healion won an award for the longest trip by his Morning Star eight years ago. The Irish nation should know," he says. "We're talking here about something akin to Atlanta and Ms Smith."
If his understudy is blushing, Healion can afford to take some of the credit himself. The lines of the craft were taken from the Ave Maria...
Vernacular Boat
There is a logic to this phenomenon, known in the US as "the cult of the vernacular boat". With the rapid deterioration in world fish stocks, and the consequent change in life's texture in many maritime communities, new forms emerge to express local attitudes about this, according to David Taylor at the American Folklife Centre in Washington, DC. The vernacular boat is a strong cultural expression, "an artefact that often reflects a good fit between peoples' needs and their local environment". Put simply, a link with a long distant past.
It might be a Great Lakes fish tug, or a double ender from Maine. It might be a Portuguese moliceiro, or a crab scrapped from Chesapeake Bay. In each case, it is a "vehicle for escaping the mundane", chasing adventure. And "a little floating world that one can control".
Weather permitting, of course. John Maddock, author of a recent Irish coastal history, must have been close to despair at times during the course of his work. Researching the background to the Wexford port of Rosslare, the Irish Independent High Court reporter found himself recording disaster upon disaster - the south east being a notorious graveyard for so many Irish bound ships.
Take the Pomona, owned in New York. It set sail on April 27th 1859 from Liverpool with 448 people on board, according to Mad dock. Most of the passengers were Irish farmers and labourers, seeking to escape post Famine poverty and make a new life elsewhere. Heading into a force nine south south easterly gale, it mistook a new floating light on the bank for the Tuskar, some 12 miles further south. It foundered on the Blackwater Bank off the southeast, and all but 24 people were lost.
Death was desperate, confused, slow. The ship was seven miles offshore, and the Freeman's Journal reported that crowds rushed onto the decks, many people partially clothed and others in nightgowns. An attempt was made to launch the lifeboats, but they were "stove-in" and the crew perished. The remaining terrified crew and passengers remained on board as the ship slipped off the bank by the stern and into deep water. A lifeboat based at Cahore tried in vain to approach the wreck, but was beaten back by the running sea.
Small Flotilla
News reached Wexford, and a steam tug took two lifeboats in tow. By the time the small flotilla reached the bank, only the ship's mizen mast could be seen above the water. For months afterwards, bodies and wreckage were identified by beachcombers. The jury at one of many inquests noted that it had no proof of drunkenness" but "most heartily" condemned those crew who "deserted their passengers, occupying the boats to the exclusion of the women and children".
There's far more. Tuskar itself involved much loss of life. During the autumn of 1812, when the light was being built, a "hurricane" swept the area.
Only months before, the workmen had pulled many British military personnel to safety when their own vessel foundered near the rock.
Entitled Rosslare Harbour: Sea and Ships, Maddock's work spans the period from the Tuskar construction and the development of steamships and railways in the early 1800 to the present day. Though legislation was passed in the 1840s, construction of a new port, with connecting railway, at Rosslare harbour had not materialised two decades on. When it eventually began, in the 1870s, there was a constant struggle for funds.
As a result, Maddock's painstaking research is a catalogue of disaster. If not at sea, in the air. There is still much speculation about the cause of the Aer Lingus Viscount crash while on a flight from Cork to London in 1968. On a "fine, sunny and clear Sunday in spring", 61 passengers on board "disappeared into the sea" just over eight miles south east of Rosslare Harbour. The Isle of Man based Celtic League organisation believes it was an unintended victim of British military training off the Welsh coast. Maddock is more circumspect. He quotes from the official investigation, which said that firing ranges in Britain were closed on that Sunday. Collision with another aircraft or "airborne object" was not ruled out.
If there is much unremitting disaster, there is also the Rosslare lifeboat to boast about. Up to mid 1996, the craft had been launched some 701 times on service, and had saved 977 lives. Or 978, if one includes a dog picked up by coxswain James Wickham from the Liverpool steamer, Brereton, in January, 1934.