She endures. Despite the Harvest Moon tides and a variety of dinghies, assorted floats - although less sand shovelling and anchor realignment - our ghost ship remains, albeit listing a little more gracefully to the left, hunkering down perhaps, for a season of winter storms and a bit of a lashing. Nothing that she hasn’t weathered before though, criss-crossing the banks and troughs of the Irish Sea and the ins and outs of the Ards peninsula. Photos of the younger Day Dawn at work can be unearthed online (above @ J McPhee, 2009) looking stoic and purposeful, with the same spirit that is keeping her, against the odds, just about afloat. Fittingly enough, I sometimes see her at daybreak, when there’s a haar rising from the lough, a darkened, slumbering shape just before the sun breaks over the skyline to the edge of the bridge.
Later, if I’m out drawing, there are mammies and wains making their way down to see their ‘pirate ship’, all heads turning to the haunted waters. Have found a good spot to draw. Neither too visible on the path nor stuck out on the glar, but in-between, tucked into the grassy edge just above an upturned box belonging to the ‘Portavogie Fishermans’ Association’ warning of ‘no unauthorised use’. Here to sketch her I am distracted by the birds. Crows, curlews and gulls, one fastidously turning over a flat stone, another making little stomping steps in the mud to flush out something tasty. I haven’t seen them onboard yet, they know she’s still alive. No fish on the decks but no hulking carcass either, the birds are ordinary yet glorious, a bit like the Day Dawn herself.
In this month of two full moons - Harvest and Hunter - the fourth planet from the sun has already made a portentous and rare, rusty-red appearance. As coincidence slides into strangeness, the Hunter’s moon is also a Blue moon which will rise on the night of All Hallow’s Eve. On the ground, the city will feel and look different this year, with less Halloween bling, visitors and costumed crowds. But above and around us the world is shifting and sorting, restless, maybe revelatory. The in-betweenness of the time that’s in it, the gloaming and the ghost ship that has come as a gift to the city, who knows whether as warning or promise. Enduring. Just about.
Day Dawn, Portavogie NI82, Lough Foyle, ink and pencil on paper @ Mhairi Sutherland October 2020