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over with powdered glass and sanded by hand, but you can make fantastic shapes: eighteen drawers in the galley not one the same size, two rudders – you could sell them to the Tate
    Checkmate Knot Shore
    now if this was a wooden boat you’d have to steam the planks, they used to peg them on the tide line to get salt into the timber; you can still see grown oak boats, where you cut the bilge beams straight out of the trees, keeping the line sweet, fairing it by eye, it’s a different mindset – when I was a boy all boats leaked like a basket, if you were sailing you were bailing
    Merry Fiddler Music Maker Island Life Fiesta
    but give us a couple more years we’ll be out of here, in the Med, soaking up the sun, lying on the netting watching dolphins, swapping a boatnail for a fish, we’ll be away from all these cars, all this rain, that’s what the dream is that’s what this boat is – for twenty years now our only way out’s been building it
    like a ship the shape of flight
    or like the weight that keeps it upright
    or like a skyline crossed by breath
    or like the planking bent beneath
    or like a glint or like a gust
    or like the lofting of a mast
    such am I who flits and flows
    and seeks and serves and swiftly goes –
    the ship sets sail, the weight is thrown,
    the skyline shifts, the planks groan,
    the glint glides, the gust shivers
    the mast sways and so does water
    then like a wave the flesh of wind
    or like the flow-veins on the sand
    or like the inkling of a fish
    or like the phases of a splash
    or like an eye or like a bone
    or like a sandflea on a stone
    such am I who flits and flows
    and seeks and serves and swiftly goes –
    the wave slides in, the sand lifts,
    the fish fades, the splash drifts,
    the eye blinks, the bone shatters,
    the sandflea jumps and so does water
    Back in the days when I was handsome and the river was just river – salmon netsman and poacher
    not all these buoys everywhere that trip your net so that you’ve
    got to cut the headrope and the mesh goes fshoo like a zip. Terrifying.
    And there was so many salmon you could sit up to your knees in
    dead fish keeping your legs warm.
    I used to hear the tramp tramp tramp under my window of men
    going down to the boats at three in the morning.
    Low water, dead calm.
    You don’t know what goes on down there.
    You go to bed, you switch out the light.
    There’s three of us in the pub with our hands shaking:
    Have a beer mate, you’re going out …
    We daren’t say anything, they can guess what we’re onto
    because the adrenalin’s up and we’re
    jumping about like sea trout eeeeeeeeeee
    I haven’t calmed down since a week ago,
    I was standing under a sheer wall
    with a bailiff above me flashing his torch over the river.
    I put my hand up and touched his boot
    and it’s making my hair fall out remembering it.
    Drink up now. Last orders. Low water. Dead calm.

    When the sun goes down the wind drops.
    It’s so quiet you could fall asleep at the paddles.
    That’s when you can hear them jumping –
    slap slap – you’ve got to be onto it.
    I had a dog once who could sense a salmon.
    That’s your legal fisherman, he’s watching and listening,
    he’s got a seine net and he hauls out from the shore and
    back in a curve, like this.
    But more than likely he’s got a legal right hand and a
    rogue left hand and when he’s out left-handed,
    he just rows a mesh net straight across the river – a bloody wall.
    In twenty minutes he’s covered the cost of the net,
    in an hour he’s got a celebration coming.
    That’s where the crack is, that’s when fishing pays.
    Or if it’s dawn or nightfall, the river’s the weird colour of the sky,
    you can see a voler as much as two miles away.
    That’s the unique clean line a salmon makes in water
    and you make a speckle for which way he’s heading.
    Your ears are twitching for the bailiff,
    the car engine, the rustle in the bushes.
    Bam! Lights come on, you ditch the net –
    stop running, x, we