Lorna Siggins: Johnny Bailey was a young lad out with his father on a Galway hooker in Casla Bay when he saw the shadow of a giant fish under the rudder. It was long and large and it could have capsized the vessel - instead, it was licking the hull!
Johnny had never encountered a basking shark before so he didn't know what it was. And the same shark may never have encountered butter before, but it certainly liked the taste.
Young Johnny panicked and roared to his father, who was making tea below. "I told him there was a big fish eating the boat!" Butter, as Bailey explains, was coated on the hulls of "na báid mhóra" during low tide to increase their speed. And speed was of the essence when the working boats brought supplies out from Galway to the Aran islands and parts of Connemara, because the first out to Inis Mór always got the best price for its turf.
Johnny Bailey is the last Galway hooker skipper, still sailing, to have made a living from those sea journeys; his bad mór, An Capall, has been worked by six generations of one family.
A wonderful new documentary produced and directed by Eamon de Buitléar and filmed by his son, Cian, captures the competitive spirit of 67-year-old Bailey as he sits at the helm of An Capall during a race round the mark at the annual Cruinniú na mBád in Kinvara. The cruinniú, which almost became a victim of its own success in recent years, played a significant part in reviving interest in Galway hookers some decades after the economic need for such vessels waned.
However, all during that time when many hookers were sold off or were left to rot at the quayside, Johnny Bailey and his family maintained An Capall. It was in his blood; he sailed with his father, Peterín Báille, from the time he was at school, and was a skipper from the age of 17. Standing on the shore at low tide out at Béal an Daingin in south Connemara, he describes how the vessels navigated the channel out into Greatman's Bay and beyond, bringing seaweed or turf or porter and general supplies to the islands.
Not only did the communities know how to build the vessels with their distinctive "tumblehome" hulls - based on a Dutch design - but they made their own sails. Bailey borrowed the local school hall to make his sails out in Leitir Móir, where his mother, Máire Mhicheál Phatch, came from. It took 70 yards of cotton to fill the spars, and it could take a fortnight to make three sails. There was a precise formula for the stitching, he tells the de Buitléars as he works away with his neat needle on the calico canvas on his lap.
Although the racing hookers now use Terylene, Bailey is an adherent of cotton. These modern materials are dangerous when a boat is "hove to" in a storm, he says. Sure enough, they is very difficult to grip when trying to reef a sail in a bad blow. "If the sea goes into a cotton sail, that's OK, but if it goes into Terylene, you're finished!" he says.
Bailey isn't one for fleeces or other modern sailing gear either. One colleague recalls seeing him working on a deck in a bad shower, a sack draped across his shoulders and fastened with a nail to keep the weather off. In fact, there is hardly an oilskin or a lifejacket, let alone a harness, to be seen throughout the documentary; and the shots of vessels laden with seaweed would stop the heart of any marine surveyor or Irish Coast Guard officer.
The documentary shows how hooker sails were coated in bark tannin from the cashew tree, and butter was added to the heated tar mix to keep it supple. The coating preserves the cotton from the elements and predators. Fresh cotton has a sweet taste, Bailey explains; he remembers how a pile of untreated, new sail made a feast for some unexpected visitors. "The tar," he grins,"keeps the rats away." When fortunes changed for the professional hooker skippers, some, like Johnny Bailey, turned to fishing. The vessels had always been good for longlining for fish. He bought a trawler in 1959, while maintaining An Capall. At the time, no one knew what money was, he says. "If you had half-a-crown, you thought you were a millionaire." He and his crew did know what money was when prices dropped from time to time. He recalls sending 480 boxes of whiting up to the Dublin fish market, and getting 17 shillings and sixpence for each man. They would pray for easterly gales on the east coast: when the Irish Sea fleet was tied up, the prices would jump for the boats on the west.
In the documentary, his wife of 40 years, Baba Uí Bháille, describes more with her face than with words the life she had, married to a man who spent much of his time on water. The couple had 10 children - nine of them boys - and Bailey has a little fun with the camera as he tries to remember who was born when; Cailín, his only daughter, was always the pet. If there is one advantage to having a big family, he quips, it is that you never have a problem finding crew.
In his immortal poem The Last Galway Hooker, Richard Murphy describes a vessel owner's mind, "threaded with all "the marline of his days twined within that boat. . ." He could have been writing about Johnny Bailey.
The Islandman, by Eamon de Buitléar, is to be screened by RTE1 on Easter Monday
at 6.30 p.m.