B - Bluster, Borealis, Breaker, Brine

Our girl, a bit like lockdown, is still with us. A little worse for wear, having been tossed and turned to face the head of the Lough (Landfall Leeward Low Tide Lunar Bow) rising and falling with higher tides but still holding fast. There have been calls for tractors and chains - apparently fifty tons is a trifling weight to pull from the glar (Gleam Glint Glitter Gloaming) of the Foyle - to set her on course for the east, to be profitably clustered around the mythology of that unsinkable ship, gone unheeded as yet. The hauntology of the Day Dawn (Dayspring Daybreak Drizzle Dusk) her inbetween-ness, fluid and solid, river and mud, vessel and wreck, local and visitor, is perhaps what makes heads still turn, absentmindedly checking the waters (Wavelet White Horses Whirlpool Windward) for a tilting mast and now familiarly solid yet ethereal shape.

Day Dawn from Portavogie is a biblical name in the Scots maritime tradition. Alternating with family names, and when the Admiralty sequestered fishing boats in the wartime past, alphabetical terms describing weather, climatic and atmospheric conditions were used. The name Day Dawn, fittingly enough straddles both traditions, acknowledging day’s beginning as spiritual wish and earthly movement. The institutional naming is perhaps unintentionally but deeply poetic, resonant and concise as the Shipping forecast, sparky and tumbling as a nonsense verse. A taxonomy of over 200 words conjure up pictures and sensations of the air (Afterglow Airpocket Astral Atmosphere) the sea (Scintilla Seabreeze Squall Stormwrack) and the sky (St Elmos’ Fire Sunburst Sunspot Starlight).

We have just passed the paused time of the Solstice, marking the astrological beginning of Winter and the final full, Cold Moon of the year has risen in a clear sky. Also known as the Long Night’s Moon, the 13th full moon of this year and the last of the decade. The New Year (Neaptide Nebula New Moon Nimbus) is almost here, this Hogmanay night that faces backwards and forwards. In this year, perhaps unlike any other in our lifetime - although plague and pestilence have been a feature of many others - there is a sense, and hopefully a growing understanding and care, towards just how much our lives are still intertwined with the worldliness of earth, sea and sky.

So here’s to wonder and worldliness - Waterfall Watershed Watersmeet Whitecloud Windhowl Windshift Will O’ the Wisp

The Haar, the Sunrise, the Birds and the Boat

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