When I heard that it was the first time in her long working life that she had been moored anywhere other than the harbour at Kilkeel, I thought perhaps she was trying to get home. Like a family Labrador, turned out and cast away from everything familiar - lost, owner dead, leapt from a car door or some such turn of circumstance that led to this bewilderment and being in this strange place - she used the stormy waters to rip up, turn around and head back to open sea. Her plan to sail up the Lough, turn to starboard and head for home in the east, ran aground at Madam’s Bank where her wooden hull cleaved into the glar and pebbles at low tide. Originally a native of Banff, Scotland, built in the yard of John Watt & Son around 1965, she was distinctively from a Scottish maritime fishing family, with a red-painted hull and the biblical name of ‘Day Dawn’ picked out in white on the prow. ‘Portavogie NI82’ was her passport and place of residence, not really so far from her cousins in Crail and Pittenweem. Not that many of them, if any, are still fishing. Even when I was photographing the bright red and dark blue wooden hulls of ‘Guiding Light’, ‘Spiritual Vessel’, ‘Forth Ranger’ and ‘Our James’ in the late 1990’s, they were more often in harbour than out at sea.
So it was a surprise to come across her in the neighbourhood, within walking distance at low tide from the Bay Road park. No longer fishing and now ignominiously termed a ‘pleasure craft’ she was both forlorn and proud, the exquisite depth and curve of her wooden hull on show, a muddied and analogue form. parked at a rakish and daring angle.
She became stuck fast during August 2020, but with the harvest moon and higher tides of mid September, perhaps this ghost ship shape will give up the haunting, shift and go. Until then I check daily, noting the tides and watching the sporadic preparations for sailing - new batteries, a McDonalds delivered to the three man crew, much walking, shovelling and back and forth at low tides - and wondering whether I actually want to witness any eventual refloating. There’s a rumour that Day Dawn has been sold for £1 to be converted as an AirBnB. She may have decided her own fate, preferring a ruinous sojourn on the high/low seas, ripping up her anchor and heading up the Lough, to that. Stubbornly resistant to profitable conversion, at the time of writing Day Dawn remains fast at Madam’s Bank.
Muster, Helensbugh MOD Housing, Not in Kansas project with Karen L Vaughan and Rachel Mimiec. Image Mhairi Sutherland, East Coast West Series