Friday morning and the sun was out and some of us made the drive to Bantry Market. More of us were going to go but the clear blue sky and light persuaded some to take advantage and stay behind. Last week the market had been grey and shrouded in rain and there had been plenty of places to park. By way of contrast yesterday the car park was full and we had to drive out to find somewhere to leave the car.

Outside the car park a man was admonished by his wife for parking on the pavement in such a way so as to block off half of the entrance. Another car, a battered green Vauxhall seemed to be struggling to find enough room to make it through the blocked entrance. Shamed the driver of the first car drove off to find somewhere more convenient to park only for the green Vauxhall to back up into the space he had just left and to block up even more of the entrance.

We timed the shopping so it was all done and back in the car by midday ready for when Ma Murphy’s opened. We piled in for a quick pint before heading back to the Cottage and the sunshine. Murphy’s was ordered and then the barman said those magic words, “Would you like Guinness instead – it’s free?”

We didn’t quite catch what he was saying and said we were happy with the Murph’s.

“Are you sure? The Guinness is free. There is a man there cleaning the pipes and I have five pints here that I’ve poured and if you don’t want it I am throwing it away.”

There were five us so we had the Guinness. Just to make it even better they were playing Dr John’s Gris Gris over the music system – one of my favourite albums.

Back at the Cottage we sat outside in the garden and ate our lunch – a collection of meats, cheeses and olives picked up from the market.

We then attempted to catch mackerel. Although it was the right time of day – late afternoon – we were doing it on a falling tide. There were seven of us on the boat and three lines. We dropped them in the just off Owen Island and spent a happy fifteen minutes catching no fish when there was a shout. “What is that!?”

A hundred hards or so ahead of a great black shape heaved itself out of the water and then slid back down a small fin showing just as it disappeared under the surface of the water.

“That was a whale,” we agreed.

We then spent 15 minutes stalking it around the bay.Every time we motored towards where we had seen it it came up again either a hundred or so yards in front of us or sometimes behind us. It came out of the water every couple of minutes always a slow curving black shape coming out of the water with the fin following at the end. Sometimes the head came out as well and we could see the open mouth and baleen and then a puff of water up into the air.

So that was a good day. Sunshine, free Guinness and a thirty foot Minke out in the bay.

It is two years since we have eaten at Manning’s Emporium but yet again we have come away thinking we should go more often. We went there for lunch today following a walk through the hills in the small forest park up the valley from Gougane Barra.

We decided on the walk following a wet evening when a combination of high tide and storm wind had driven an angry sea high up the bay so the water was high enough to wash over the top of the pier and bring waves crashing against the pier patch and throw seaweed onto the grass. As best we could tell the weather forecast for today was not much better so a walk through some hills seemed like the best option for the day.

It is ten years since we have made the drive to Gougane Barra. It is only 45 minutes away but the place seemed a whole world away from the Cottage and its raging sea. We spent five minutes walking around the lake and then took the car into the forest trail. There were a number of walks laid and as were under some time constraints we decided on what appeared to be a good short walk. Unfortunately we had not looked at the estimated length of walk and so were disappointed to find ourselves back where we had started ten minutes later. Fortified we set out on a more ambitious walk that was described as strenuous.

This took us on a steep climb through woods and past waterfalls until we got close to the lip of the valley and could look clear across to the other side. It was then a steep clamber back down to the car and we were done in just over an hour.

On the drive back we stopped in Ballylickey (which the adolescent son took great enjoyment in mispronouncing) and managed to find ourselves somewhere to park outside Manning’s Emporium and nine of us the squeezed round a narrow table. We ate plates of ham and cheese, crab claws in chilli, beetroot tortilla, confit of duck legs, molten croquets and a beef and beetroot pie washed down with Fino sherry.

I came away with a bag of pappardelle, some smoked salmon and a bottle of the Fino sherry. Apart from the sherry I am fairly sure I came away with the same things last time we were there with a view to making the same thing for supper.

We stopped off in Bantry to pick up some feta cheese and cream and cherry tomatoes and I cooked them with the pappardelle and smoked salmon.

We spoke very briefly about food as we ate and I was asked if there was a recipe that I had made up for myself. I pointed out that I hadn’t followed any recipe to make what we were eating. There was no doubt a recipe for it but all I had done was fry some garlic in oil, add the halved cherry tomatoes and allowed them heat through and then stirred in the cream and brought it to a slow boil before adding the smoked salmon, which had been cut into thin strips, and the crumbled feta and some chopped parsley and tarragon. All the while the pappardelle had been cooking.

Once the pappardelle was done, it was drained and put in a dish and the creamy salmon sauce was poured on top.

The only shame was that I had forgotten to put the sherry in the fridge so we had to put off having a glass of that until another day.

The evening became most exciting whenever one of the questions took on a religious theme as this provided our famous neighbour, the host of the Pub Quiz, with an opportunity to pit the wits of the two members of the clergy who were sat with their teams to the front – Protestant one side, Catholic the other. They were each required to put up their hand if they knew the answer to the question be it the name of the shortest of the four gospels or the number of chapters to be found in the New Testament.

The evening took on such a consistency that looking back the following day it was difficult to recall who had won.

It is no great secret that the famous neighbour is Graham Norton and this was the third year running he has hosted the Ahakista Pub Quiz and the second time we have attended. Calling it a pub quiz does not quite do the occasion justice. There were more than three hundred contestants squeezed round small tables in a large marquee on the flat land to the back of Arundel’s Pub. Each table was tastefully decorated with a pineapple and a note with suggested uses.

Facilities had been laid on including posh loos from Cork although walking past it was difficult to explain the picture of David Niven on the wall in the ladies. I never made it to the gents and am still trying to guess what pictures they had on the wall in there.

Our host was resplendent in a sky blue jacket and a mysteriously bandaged finger. The colour of the jacket was the nearest thing to blue sky that we have had over the weekend. There was a steady queue of eager contestants to have their photo taken with him and as someone said the following day – he never had a smile off his face.

The quiz started at about 8.30 and went on for about three hours. We were disadvantaged from the start in being over twenty and coming from Birkenhead, although it was reassuring when our host confessed that even he could not remember the name of the winner of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

Needless to say we did not win the competition – we did not even come in the top three but then we also failed to make into the bottom three. We were just somewhere in the middle.

We celebrated by losing our pineapple in The Tin Pub.

The following day was a grey limpid day with the sun trying to find its way out from behind a thin veil of cloud. We took out the boat late in the afternoon to go fishing for mackerel more in hope than any great expectation.

We spent a fruitless 45 minutes drifting off the point near Owen Island and did not even manage to get a snagged line. This was despite the bright new feathers I had rigged that morning. The only excitement was a visit from a seal and the brief glimpse of a fin through the water a few hundred yards away.

There was little wind and I had heard that mackerel had been caught off Carberry Island so we decided to motor out there to see if we could get some better luck the other side of the bay.

Halfway across we saw another fin break the surface of the water a few hundred yards in front of the boat. It broke again as we got closer and then the whole animal hauled itself out of the water and suddenly we were slowly motoring through a school of about twenty porpoises (or maybe they were dolphins – there was some debate over the issue). They were a dark blue black on top with pale underbellies and a clearly defined snout. We slowed to a dead crawl and could see them barrelling under the boat and then breaking through the water in front of us. One of them smacked its snout in the water just next to the boat as if it was telling us to move away. And then as suddenly as we had found ourselves amongst them they were gone and we were back by ourselves in the middle of the bay with a weak sun trying to break through the thin veil of grey cloud above us.

Ten minutes later we were amongst them again and they stayed with the boat for three or for minutes before moving up down the bay.

We stopped the boat there for a while and tried fishing again but still with no luck.

As a final throw at it we motored back to Owen Island and threw in the lines for the final time that afternoon. The sea was calm now with there being almost no wind. Almost immediately all calm was shattered as mackerel were caught on two lines and the third line tangled around the second and having caught just the four fish over the previous week we suddenly had six good sized ones in the green bucket. The lines went in again and after fifteen minutes we had another dozen mackerel.

We took them back to shore and I gutted them down on the slipway. We gave some of them away and we ate four of them that evening.

I cooked them in a hot oven with a splash of olive oil, garlic and lemon juice. They weren’t too big and the small fillets pulled away easily from the bones. They were very good and I was left to thinking what had been more exciting the three hours of the quiz night with Graham Norton or the five minutes or so spent in the company of school of porpoises (or dolphins) out in the bay. I suppose there is no real answer to that except to say Ahakista is probably the only place in the world you might experience both things in the space of twenty four hours.

We have had many lunches in Hackett’s over the years and the food has always been good but now it seems to have got even better.

My eye was first caught by the place because the blackboard sign hanging by the door included on the menu of sandwiches a Gubbeen Bacon BLT. Then the kids were too young and wanted to be sat outside for lunch, in the sun with a plate of fish and chips from the French place. So I had to wait a few years before I was able to gain entrance. Invariably when I go there for lunch I will have the Gubbeen Bacon BLT or whatever new version of it they are making. However yesterday I decided on a change and had an open topped crab sandwich with garlic mayonnaise.

It came as described. A thick slice of brown soda bread smeared with an equally thick dollop of the mayonnaise on which was piled great chunks of white crab meat. There was some salad but that was a side show to the main event. We also had garlic bread. This was proper garlic bread, a hunk of white bread heavy with butter and flecked with crushed garlic. It all went down very well with a couple of pints of the IPA they had on tap.

Whilst we were eating nine lobsters were delivered by Tommy Arundel to the Cottage and were left to doze in the salad tray of the old fridge in the garage.

Back home we went out fishing. Having thought that the closest we were going to get get to a freshly caught mackerel would be the stains left over from last year on my pink shirt we caught two of them in a 45 minute drift along the back of Owen Island. We ate them later. Fried for a few minutes and on small pieces of toast.

I decided to do something different to them this year. Our large pan wasn’t big enough to cook them all at the same time and if I did them in batches then the fist lot would be cold by the time I finished them all. Kristen had told me that in The Good Things Café they split them in half before roasting them in a very hot oven. The oven in the Cottage is neither big enough nor hot enough for that but I figured there was just about enough room for 9 split lobsters on top of the BBQ.

The hard part was splitting them in half. They are alive at this point and to kill them I took a heavy sharp knife and put the blade against the cross that is marked at the back of their head. It was then a question of driving the knife down hard and then cutting through the shell until the lobster was split in half. This should kill them instantly and many fish cooks will say it is quicker and more humane than putting them in boiling water. It was still dirty hard work.

A bit like a mackerel that continues to twitch even after it has been tapped on the back of the head there was still some movement in the lobsters even after they had been cut in half. I felt that I still had to be careful of their claws as I cut off the elastic bands that kept them out of harms way.

Once they were all split in half I smeared them with olive oil and then laid them across the rack on top of the BBQ. They just fitted in. I put the lid on and left them for fifteen minutes and hoped for the best.

After that fifteen minutes I took off the lid to see how they were doing. Pleasingly they had started to cook – the deep dark blue of their shells turning to red. There was a good heat coming from the coals driven by the breeze coming in off the sea. Before putting the lid back on I poured some melted butter and garlic over them and left them for another fifteen minutes. By then they were done. To finish them off I sprinkled some fronds of fennel over them and then flamed them with the dregs from a bottle of Pernod that was lurking in one of the cupboards in the Cottage.

The lobsters were then hoisted onto a large dish. More melted butter with garlic, salt and pepper was poured over them and they were then taken to the small crowd around the fire on the beach. We ate them huddled around the fire. It had been cool on the beach. The same breeze that had helped stoke the BBQ had had a cold edge to it. But as we ate the breeze lightened.

There were clouds in the sky but they were thin and we could make out behind them the glow of a full moon as it rose up above Mount Gabrial.