Lobster off the boat, straight from Mulroy Bay

It started with a birthday. We were weighing up the local options for Nihal’s birthday dinner when she looked out at the water and said the thing that set the whole evening going: wouldn’t it be something to get two lobster out of that bay and cook them ourselves.

Never one to turn down a challenge, I said mission accepted and made a couple of calls. It was Madge, who looks after the place for us, who put me onto Oisin. He’s a cousin of one of the lads who works with her, and he offered to run some lobster in to us that same afternoon.

The plan was set: meet Oisin at Mevagh boatyard at half five, fingers crossed he’d have something worth putting on the table. He did not disappoint. He was good enough, too, to let me take a few photographs and ask him a pile of questions.

She’s a catamaran called Natasha Marie, a boat I had watched coming and going on the bay for a good while without ever knowing whose she was. Oisin bought her in Galway in March of last year. She was built back in 2011 and first went by a different name, the Donna Julie. A later owner renamed her after his partner, Natasha, and when Oisin took her on he kept the name exactly as it was. You don’t change a boat’s name, he said. You keep it for luck.

Oisin is one of the Taylors from Downings, though Taylor is the by-name and McBride is the family name. The fishing came down to him through the family: his granduncle Anton built boats here and fished the bay, then Oisin’s father fished, and then Oisin took it on.

The work itself is relentless. He runs around twelve hundred pots and lifts about six hundred a day, fishing the whole year round and easing back to a shorter string from the middle of December. What comes up is crab and lobster: brown crab, green crab, and the lobster you see in the photographs. Not every pot is a keeper. You might take ten crab out of one, he said, and hold on to one or two. The small ones go back over the side to grow on.

Nothing is frozen. On the way in, a sprinkler keeps seawater running over the crab so they travel live and fresh, and the catch is held in store pots down in the water until it’s collected. The two lobster in the photographs were landed that morning, claws banded, still the deep blue-black they only lose once they hit the pot.

It isn’t an easy living. Bait and diesel are the big costs and both have climbed. He goes through about six boxes of bait a day, and marine diesel has gone from somewhere near ninety cent a litre to a hundred and thirty. I asked would he tell a young fellow to take it up. Only if the interest was there, he said. He plainly has it himself.

If you’re staying with us and you’d like seafood as fresh as it comes, lobster or brown crab landed that morning in the bay below the house, Oisin is happy to look after Davey John’s Forge guests directly. Give him a ring or a text on 086 452 7732, tell him you’re staying with us, and he’ll sort you out with whatever he has in.

The kitchen’s there to cook it however you like. We boiled ours, split it, a bit of butter, and that was Nihal’s birthday dinner sorted.

My thanks to Oisin for the chat, the photographs, and the lobster.