Three Boys in a Borrowed Boat: Schooner Days MCCXXXIX (1239)

by C. H. J. Snider

YOU should have been to the finals of the national corragh races in Galway Bay last Tostal.

"An Tostal" is when Eire celebrates spring, with golden harps on crimson flags mingling with the green, white and orange trim-colors, and everyone, even we blackmouthed Presbyterians, welcome a hundred thousand times to Ireland's best.

That best is the corragh finals. All the seagoing counties south of the customs barbwire have elimination contests, and the champion crews come to the Tostal an Gaillime to row out in prizewinning heats and a red hot final.

The corragh may be ugly as sin, but she is sweet as a saint in the water. Light as tarred canvas stretched on laths can make her, she rides the waves like their own foam bubbles.

She is the taxi and truck and tramcar for the western islanders of Eire, their pleasure boat and workboat. Schooner Days has traveled miles and miles and hours and hours in corraghs, through rough and smooth water, without once getting wet. But three young men, brothers, were drowned in their corragh last year when they were coming over to mass in the church nearest their home.

They lived in the high wild island of Inishark. The church was only a mile away in Inishbofin, isle of the White Heifer - but a mile across then raging Atlantic. Their family thought they had reached Inishbofin and were waiting for the storm to abate before returning. They did not known they were drowned until the tide brought the empty corragh back, days later.

All Galway poured forth for the Promenade at Salthill on the sea when the national corragh races were scheduled. The exodus started at 2 o'clock from Eyre Square in the heart of the city, where little Padraic O'Connaire, the mighty poet of the countryside, broods in stone over another pleasant ballad (Call him not Patrick. The name is Porroch in the Gailtach). The outpouring was headed by a monster industrial parade of decorated float, the Guth na n'Og pipers band and Killimor Ceili band, choirs, dancers and Liam De Valee, resowned ballad singer on radio Eireann. It swept past the Abbeygate street mansion (now a bank) where James Lynch Fitzstephen hanged his own son from his own window for murdering a guest, with never a thought for this first Judge Lynch's "stern and unbending justice." It was thinking of happier things - An Totstal and Irish dancing on the Promenade, instead of the footingless air - and of the corragh races.

It was as though all Toronto was running to see the finish of the swim across Lake Ontario. Salthill Promenade is like Sunnyside, only far pleasanter. Galway has a good bus service, but the parade, and horsedrawn cars, inside-cars and outside cars, and the baby carriages, and all the motor cars, jammed traffic so that citizens on foot - of whom Schooner Days was one in many thousands - made the best time.

Thus, panting, we reached the terrace of the Golf Links Hotel in time for the crack of the starting gun. In the best of company, too - Duffys and Gills and Folans and O'Donnells - cattlemen and corragh men and fishers we knew, like the Olivers from the Claddagh, from Aran and Clare Island and Mayo; the president of Galway University and some professors; Dr. Charles Conor O'Malley, chief of his name and nation, and his lady wife, both practicing physicians; a cousin of Porroch O'Connaire; and more O'Malleys. All "friends of Granuaile."

The rarin', tearin', divil-may-carin' corragh champions of all Erie finished fresh as daisies. They were big lads, slender, great-shouldered, though the youngest was only 15, and the oldest 18. Two brothers and a cousin they were, two O'Flahertys and a Mcdonough, scions of seagoing clans since the days of the Granuaile. As modest and as clean mouthed as Saint Brendan the Navigator, the first man recorded to use a corragh. They worked for their living on the west coast of Galway, and practiced race-rowing for an hour every evening for the preceding month.

After three hours of interrupted pulling at top speed in a smashing cold wind and tidetorn sea they stepped ashore breathing as easily as if they had been dapping for trout with May flies. Not the least sign of the distress of collapsing. Oxford-Cambridge winners or marathon swimmers did they show.

Nor did they need a finger to help them out of their boat. They beached her smartly, spring out dry shod, picked her up, poured out the little salt spray they had shipped, and set her down softly as a silk hat.

She was a borrowed boat. It costs £20 to build a 3-man corragh, what with the price of nails and wood and canvas 'n everything.