It started with half a dozen gannets wheeling over the centre of the bay but rather that circle for a few minutes before making their dive to the water they flew back up to the appropriate height and came straight back down again a quick white flash and splash. Black shapes heaved in the water around their dive-bombing. It was a school of about thirty porpoises and it was obvious that the gannets and the porpoises had come across a feast of mackerel and sprats. The number of gannets grew to a dozen and the porpoises rolled and turned in the sea heads surging up out of the water and then back down with a flick of the tail churning the water.  Some of them breached their whole body rising up out over the surface and slipping below the waves. The feasting lasted about ten minutes before the gannets separated and moved further up the bay followed by the porpoises showing themselves just by the arc of their dorsal fin cresting the waves.  They left behind with the remains a collection of cormorants that bobbed like so many black sticks in the water.

In a good year the days will dissolve into a blur of light, sea and air. Slow mornings waking up and testing the weather. Opening the curtains to see how the tide has shifted from the previous day and to check the scud and slip of clouds across the bay. Downstairs to open curtains and make tea ready for breakfast, either on the plastic green table and chairs outside the yellow door or on the table inside watching the rain and wind scuff at the concrete on the pier. The unpredictable cut of the weather makes making plans a nonsense and most days breakfast ends with our deciding to see how the weather plays out before we make a decision on what to do and of course that is no decision at all. There will be a chance to jump off the pier, to go crabbing or to root around the seaweed, book of wild seafood in hand to catch what lurks there. And if the weather and tide is right a chance to ride out to the point off Owen’s Island to see if there are mackerel about for lunch. At this point it clear there is no time for us to be going anywhere for lunch and so this meal is going to be had at the Cottage. There will be a small mental tick to make sure there is enough bread and perhaps some sausages to make do. If mackerel are caught then that is all to the better. Turning to the early afternoon then if it is dry a fire should be made on the beach.  There is always a vague hope that a child will bend to the task, but children turn so quickly into unyielding teenagers it is a hope that goes unanswered so there is a chase for driftwood to make up kindling and 10 minutes or so patiently spent with screwed up pages of yesterday’s Guardian and matches to get the fire alight. Once alight it needs to be carefully constructed to be capable of cooking food. We have a good grill now but this is not always enough and if the wind is on the beach there is a need to construct a wall of bricks around the fire so that sufficient heat is directed at the grill to cook the food.

Five days later we could see more than fifty gannets circling the sea just off Owen’s Island. I had not seen so many in the bay before. As one went down two or three others would follow and there would be a silent thump as each hit. Sometimes the movement of the fish under the surface caused them to swerve at the last moment careering off at an angle before breaking the surface. Moving closer we could see that after they went under there was another small eruption of glittering foam as they came up again shaking their feathers. After a moment on the surface they would pick up their wings and go back to their natural element the air pattering the water to get sufficient lift. Some of the mackerel we caught were the largest we have had out of the water at the Cottage. They had also been gorging themselves and their bodies were still and bloated with the sprats they had eaten. Some were vomited out as we removed the hooks. As we gutted them on the black rocks at the garden they seemed to deflate slightly as the knife moved up their belly and out with the guts would spill sprats that had been swallwed whole their skin maked with small abrasions made by the makerels teeth. We threw these sprats to the gulls along with the guts and there was of course an irony in the small fish being eaten twice in the same day.

Last night we had a nineteenth birthday party in the house. So at 3.00 o’clock this morning I found myself being rude about Pink Floyd (“God, I love Pink Floyd”?!) and looking out obscure Velvet Underground tracks in order to impress the teenagers. I tried them out with a bit of Goat but they weren’t convinced.

And so that took me back to me being nineteen and the parties I used to go to where there would be a DJ with a couple of record decks and a box full of records and there would be a time for sitting on the floor and pretending to row to The Gap Band singing ‘Oops  Upside Your Head’ and then sidling up to the DJ and trying to get him to play something good – mostly either Jimi Hendrix or The Doors.

After all that. today has been a slow day. Most of the bottles were cleared away last night and there was not much mess to clear up. There were, however, a whole bunch of stragglers here for breakfast who managed to eat most of the bacon I cooked before I was able to get to it.

The sun came out this afternoon so I took the time to go outside and start on the tidy up of the greenhouse. This involved sweeping up all the old bits of soil from the floor, re-stacking the plastic pots and throwing away the collection of seeds packets that has been mouldering in there for the last year or so.

From Kettner’s Book of the Table.

A great authority, Grimond de la Reynière, says: “The mackerel has has this in common with good women – he is loved by all the world. He is welcomed by rich and poor with the same eagerness. He is most commonly eaten à la maître d’ hôtel. But he may be prepared in a hundred ways; and he is as exquisite plain as in the most elaborate dressing” (au maigre coome au gras). This immense praise, and is a complete justification of the common English method of serving him  – plain boiled, with fennel or with gooseberry sauce. Nevertheless I give my vote to those who assert that there is but one perfect way of cooking a mackerel – to split him by the back, broil him, and serve him with maître d’hôtel butter. Still better, take his fillets and serve them in the same way.

The name of mackerel is supposed to be a corruption of nacarel, a possible diminutive of nacre – from the blue and mother-o’-pearl tint of skin. In one of the dialects of the south of France he is called peis d’Avril, the April fish – or as we should say, an April fool, both because he is a fool coming easily to the net, and because he first comes in April. He is not only quickly caught, but he spoils so quickly that the law accords him a peculiar privilege: he is the only fish that may be hawked from the street on a Sunday. For the same reason he is the only fish besides the salmon that is much soused or marinaded in the country.

The mackerel which comes to our shores is a great puzzle to the philosophers. He has no air-bladder, yet he is as buoyant and lively as fish can be. What then is the use of an air-bladder?

Read any book on fish and mackerel come a poor second to the herring. Although they swarm in unimaginable numbers they have never created boom towns in the way that herring have turned obscure fishing villages into small versions of the Klondyke and at times generated industries that for their time and place compared to the importance of North Sea Oil.

Mackerel spoil too quickly. Its price has depended on its ability to get from boat to shore and then to market in time for it not to have lost the freshness and taste that make it potentially the best of fish. Otherwise it has to be salted and there has only been a limited market for that. There has also been an unpredictability in its whereabouts. Although it might always be there year in and year out its surges have been more susceptible to the vagaries of the wind and weather.

Its lack of staying power has set it apart from other fish. When Billingsgate was declared a free fish market six days, a week, permission was given, by William III in 1699, for the selling of mackerel on a Sunday leading to complaints from John Gay, writer of The Beggar’s Opera, that Sundays were being profaned by the cry of mackerel sellers.

On the coast of Ireland, the Mackerel is taken from the county of Kerry in the west, along the southern shore, eastward to Cork and Waterford; from thence northward toAantrim, and north-west to Londonderry and Donegal.

The same article from a magazine called The Saturday Magazine describes the number of fish caught from Brighton and Dover and describes how in June 1808 the shoal of Mackerel was so great, that one the boats had the meshes of her nets so completely occupied by them, that it was impossible to drag them in. the fish and nets, therefore, at length sunk together. At that time the boats engaged in fishing, are usually attended by other fast-sailing vessels, which are sent away with the fish taken. The magazine dates from August 1835 and describes how the fish were taken up overnight to London in vans.

Twelve years later a similar article appeared in The Illustrated London News describing how the mackerel were taken in great abundance from every part of the coast in spring and early summer. They are conveyed by rapid land journeys from the coast to London for sale; and, for the encouragement of the Mackerel and other similar fisheries, the carriages in which the fish are thus conveyed are exempted from post-horse duty. However, this measure is now almost nugatory, from the greater rapidity of railway transport.

Contrast these two articles with what was going on in Ireland at the time. The methods of fishing as described by Yarrell and the quick journey to town for the fish to be sold. The boats available in Ireland and what must have been the difficulties with transport – go to the Somerville book and its description of the isolation of a wife coming to outside of schull and the difficulties with transport.

As the first shoals move inshore they are a harbinger of spring announcing the imminent arrival of other species moving to the shallow warm soup of sea fat with food. They have even lent their name to garfish that were once known as ….so common was it for the arrival of the spring mackerel to be followed by the garfish.

In 1819 the land West of Schull was entirely cut off from the rest of the world.  Sir John Moore had desribed it as “wilder than anything I have seen out of Corsica”. There were no proper roads. When Pococke had toured in 1740 he had found that the only reliable way to travel was on horseback with outriders tp protect him from dangers. In 1819 there was one boggy track connecting Ballydevlin with towns to the east, and this was so bad that very few carts made the journey.

Compare with the south coast of England and the roads and shortly to be built railways that allowed for the fast transport of the fresh fish to their ready market where there was an eager population prepared to pay for their fish.

Ireland was still struggling to rise above a sort of subsistence living and the increase in population and the dehabilitating system of land tenure pushed people back to only being able to look for themselves and their master or landlord. Fishing was there to supplement the diet when available.

The mackerel of the Mediterranean, however, are poor and tastless, compared to those of the Atlantic, and though Apecius wrote many receipts for sauces to dress them in, and to pour over them at table, it is certain that the ancients hardly considered them fit to eat fresh, but preferred them salted, as the Spaniards do to this day. The physician Celsus, eighteen hundred years ago pronounced them very heavy food, – gravissimum alimentum. Oppian, a Greek of the second century, who wrote a long poem on fish and fishing, compares the mackerel’s fondness for brilliant colors and his readiness to bite at a bit of red rag, to the rashness of the infant playing with fire:-

“Just so the little smiling boy admires

The candle’s painted blaze and curling spires;

Extends his hand, but dear experience gains,-

The greatest beauty gives the greatest pains.”

As the fish soon become unfit for food, the mackerel dealers have been allowed, since 1698, to cry their commodity for sale through the streets of London on Sunday.

In May, 1807, the first Brighton boatload of mackerel sold at Billingsgate market for forty guineas a hundred, or nearly two dollars for each fish. On the other hand, they were so plentiful at Dover in 1808 that sixty were sold for a shilling. At Brighton in June the same year, the quantity of mackerel in the water was so great that the fishermen of one boat could not drag in their nets, but had to let nets and fish sink together

We may further remark of the Mackerel taken early in the spring, that they often differ in quality according to the season and place, a circumstance which may with much probability be ascribed to the variety of food they chance  to meet with in their widely-extended excursions. In some parts of the Mediterranean they are described as being always small and dry; and such appears to have been the case in ancient times at Rome, where, in their fresh condition, they were disregarded. As they were sold by fishmongers wrapped up in paper which was fit for no other use, a sarcasm was directed against inferior poets, that their works would be applied to the use of wrapping up Mackarel. Risso, on the other hand, praises the Mackarel taken at Nice for its superiority of size and flavour; but we believe that in no districts will any be found to excel, and few to equal those which visit the west coasts of the Britsh Empire.

In the 19^th century mackerel was of considerable commercial scientific importance but by 1926 the importance of mackerel had declined. Why?

As herring stocks in European waters went into decline in the 1960’s commercial interest in mackerel started to revive. This interest intensified as declining stock abundance led to am almost total ban on herring stocks by the mid – 1970s. exploitation of the European mackerel stocks intensified further as distant water demersel trawkling fleets were displaced from their traditional fishing grounds following the universal adoption of 200 milw fishing limits throughout the N Atlantic.

In the 19^th centuary the mackerel was a highly valued species. The first of the season landed at Brighton in May 1807 were sold in Billingsgate Market, London, for seven shillings (£0.35) each, which is about £30 in 1885 value!