THE GAP: FROM SASHA HARDING'S PAINTING ABOUT MOUSEHOLE...

The Gap

(from Sasha Harding’s artwork…)

The gleam of a Mounts Bay morning

Ekes through the gap to illuminate

Mousehole’s placid high tide, silently deep;

A trawler labours across the beam of light,

 A myriad buoys and an island to navigate,

Laden heavy with fish and heeding each warning…

High walls chilled by sea, gloom and shade,

 Provide for the gap granite bookends, mounted

By black-backed gulls, like figureheads or sentinels;

PZ 102 lands its meagre catch to be processed,

The skipper’s profit yet to be counted

And an argentine sky nags sunlight to fade…

Clouds like barrage balloons seem suspended 

High above the gap, exposed, open and vulnerable,

For its customary wooden defensive baulks

Perhaps lie on the quay, seasonally redundant,

But piled high and to giant steps comparable,

As they await the advent of winter, unattended… 

Pete Ray

April 20th 2020

This scene is so familiar to me and yet it changes dramatically from one moment to the next, obviously…

The winter baulks are huge and all seventeen of them have been on the western arm of the harbour, bound and rather like industrial building blocks.

The beam trawler in the image is  presumably one from the remarkably rusted Stevenson fleet…   

The boat actually registered as PZ 102 was once a 1st class lugger, built in 1880 at Newlyn and called the ‘Annie Harvey’, after the owner/skipper’s daughter…  

BELOW ARE SOME OF MY IMAGES FEATURING THE BAULKS, THE WALLS AND OF COURSE, THE GAP...