Fish Tails and Anarchy

We woke up bright and not so early in the morning, and despite too many drinks, I felt quite well.  We were hitting the docks for a fishing trip in the morning. Typical of most Leta mornings, it was a hurry up and wait sort of scenario.  After grabbing some coffee, we piled on to the boats by gender for a little friendly fishing competition. 

We had two extra girls over the boys, but it seemed like a fair enough fight to me.  On the boat ride out of the harbor, we saw Fungie (fun-gee) the dolphin, who has lived in the harbor for the last 30 years, and seems to have no interest in leaving.  The ride out of the harbor was gorgeous, and it was a beautiful day for fishing, slightly overcast but mostly warm, with a light breeze.  Our captain handed us poles with three hooks per line, and set us on our way.  Immediately, two girls each caught a fish, including Lauren.  We certainly were traveling through schools, because periodically everyone would be catching three fish at a time all simultaneously, and for long stretches we caught nothing at all.  I caught a little Pollock, but my captain threw it back before I got a picture of myself with it.

Primarily we caught mackerel, and we all became fairly proficient at unhooking the fish.  At one point, I had three flopping mackerel all at once, and was trying to get them off the hooks.  But they have spikes behind their dorsal fins, and are incredibly strong.  One had a hook through the eye, and was therefore bleeding everywhere, but I couldn't get him out.  I kept telling him that I was sorry, until eventually I got him clear of the hook and tossed him in the bucket.  I attempted to take a selfie with the fish bucket, but I was punished by the sea gods for taking a selfie, and was thrown to the deck just as the picture snapped, so there is a great photo of my hand and the fish bucket.

We initially attempted to keep track of our catches individually, and would add them at the end, including the ones we threw back.  Not everyone did a very good job of this, so it wasn't until we got back that we had a good count.  We played with Fungie the dolphin, who likes to ride in the crest of the wake beside the boat, and made our way back to the dock.  We counted 101 fish.

That's a lot of fish, my friends.  We didn't know what to do with all these fish, so the captain took some, but we didn't know if we should fillet them or not, so our captain left us with four bags of 25 fish, and we waited for the boys to come in.  Much discussion ensued, as always happens, and finally we found out from the ice cream lady at the dock that we were meant to have the fish filleted and take them to John Benny's in town for dinner that night.  Well, by now our captain was long gone, and we didn't know who else could process these fish for us.  Eventually, it was declared that we would take the fish to John Benny's and see what he would do with them.

Upon arrival, he declared that he wouldn't take them with the heads still on, so we needed to have them processed.  So we all headed back to the dock to see if the boys had gotten in yet.  They had, and their captain was filleting some of their fish, of which they had caught and released a total of 94 (girls won!).  The boys' captain had quite the pile of fish to process, and he did a good job of it, but didn't get them all done.  We ended with two hefty bags of fish fillets, and he took the rest for himself.  I felt bad for myself during the John Benny's conversation, because he was acting like we didn't understand English as we were trying to explain that we don't have anyone to process our fish, and I felt bad for the captain of the boys' boat, because he tried twice to tell me that he would take the fish, but I misunderstood him.

Anyway, Lauren and I sorted the whole fish situation, and met with several of our group at The Diner for lunch.  I had a veggie burger, which was more of a black bean refried patty, but it was tasty.  I also had a coke, which was such a pleasure because the coke in the can here has too much mineral water and not enough high fructose corn syrup.  The fountain stuff was just right.

Lauren and I then went for a little walk, checked out John Foxy's hardware store pub, and the cute bartender was there (I found out later that his name is Patrick, which would be very funny, if Irish pub boyfriend became a reality).  We also went to The Strand House, which is an Irish products store like the Woolen Mills.  I ended up buying this really gorgeous cocktail dress that is red and black, and I'm sure you'll see it in some of our company photos during the next week or so, because with a jacket on, it is quite charming.  I bought it for 15 euro, and I thought that was too good a deal to pass up, and better than getting any more cheap stuff at Penney's.  Those shoes I bought the other day  in Dublin are peeling their maroon coating.

We also stopped in at Murphy's ice cream parlor, which is akin to Molly Moon's, with off beat flavors.  They had sea salt, gin, carmelized brown bread (which was delicious), and black currant sorbet.  I had lemon and black currant, and I am coming to really love black currants.  We will have to buy some juice for my Guinness when I get home.  Lauren loves ice cream, and she had raspberry sorbet and chocolate ice cream, and good combo.  We took our ice cream and ate it outside the Dingle library, because we didn't want to be taking ice cream into the jewelry shop.

The place was called Brian de Staic (stack), and there is his workshop near the harbor, and his shop on Green Street.  He does the traditional omagh (ohm) lettering that the Celts used to write in Irish Gaelic on bracelets and necklaces.  I didn't much care for them myself, because they all were vertical panel shaped pieces with the lines engraved on them.  I will admit, as Irish trinkets go, it is certainly a more contemporary, and subtle art form.  But it was just one step too modern for me.  I would rather have a good Claddagh ring, or something with little Celtic knots on it.  Lauren got a bracelet with her name engraved on it, which was a very sensibly priced and sensible looking piece of jewelry.  We would be back to pick it up the next day. 

Lauren and I made our way back to the hostel, and had just got set to write about our trip to our families, when Marnie said she needed help picking prizes for the biggest fish caught and the most fish caught.  So we marched back to The Strand House, and got a pair of lucky Irish drinking socks and a deck of cards with pictures of Irish monuments on them.  By the time we were done with that, it was off to dinner at John Benny's to eat our fish.

We had the mackerel, and it seemed like it was probably very good.  I ate a bit before I recalled shouting my apologies to the fish with the hook in its eye, and suddenly I couldn't eat the rest.  I think Corbin or Alex ate the rest of my fish.  It occurred to me how strange it is that fishing was so popular.  The day before, when Leta had asked, everyone wanted to go fishing, including all of the girls.  I remarked to Alex about this, because if she had asked if we wanted to go deer hunting or something, everyone (probably including many of the boys) would have balked, but when she mentions fishing, everyone gets the bloodlust.  He also thought it was strange.  We wrote our names on a dollar bill to post on the wall of the pub, and took our leave.

As a group we stopped again for ice cream at Murphy's, and I got black currant and the brown bread on a cone.  My least favorite thing about ice cream on a cone is watching other people eat it.  They use so much of their tongues, and it is all very rape-y.  I tried to communicate this to my group, and none of them seemed to appreciate the grossness of tongues, or my use of the new phrase "rape-y", and indeed, they were so surprised by my disgust that the whole incident became referred to as "the thing that happened with the ice cream."  Tanner was really going at it, and it was grossing me out.  The point at which the whole cone goes in your mouth, ugh.  No body eat ice cream on a cone, please.

Most people seemed set to go out (as per usual), so Tanner went home to sleep off his cold, and Dale and Lauren and I went back to the B&B to play cards.  Lauren taught us a game called Up and Down the River.  The basics are this:  everyone is dealt one card in the first round, two in the second, and so on, until you run out of cards (so with the three of us, 18 rounds, but usually 13 for four people), and then you can keep playing until you go back down to one card.  Upon seeing your hand, like hearts or spades, you guess how many books/tricks you think you will get that round.  The person to the left of the dealer goes first, continuing clockwise, and then that person will throw the first suit.  Whatever the first person throws is the suit for the round, and you must play in suit if you can.  Jokers are trump cards, and always win, and if you throw one at the beginning of the book, you can decide what suit that must be.  Scoring is fairly simple, you get one point per book collected.  If you get exactly the number of books you expected to get, then you get 10 extra points for that round.

It was quite a fun game, and by the time you get to 13, 14, 17, 18 cards per hand, it gets very complicated very quickly.  Dale is very good at most every game, and he won, but happily I got my strategy together, and learned how to play to lose (thanks dad), and came in a close second.  Not that I want to wish ill on Lauren, because I love her, but I was happy to beat her at her own game, for once.  (Unlike my poor sportsmanship during rummy, spoons, and my poor performance during the hand game.)

After that, we wanted to play chess, but Marnie wasn't done watching her episode of Criminal Minds (it's seriously all she talks about), so we had three people for a game of chess.  So we created a game called Anarchy Chess, where Dale and I played each other, and Lauren got to be God and make up rules and change the board or the pieces whenever she wanted.  So by the end, pawns could move sideways and sometimes backwards, the kings were queens and the queens were kings, if you touched your face you had to move your knight, and she pivoted the board so many times I can't remember which side was the right way, and every time Dale would almost win, she would switch the colors and I would be given all my pieces back.  Eventually Marnie did join us, and she became Lord of the Pawns, and she would move pawns in and out as she wanted, even in the middle of game play, and sometimes Lauren let Marnie play for us.  And one rule had us pick a piece of the other player's that we wanted to move, and she would switch our two pieces.  It was complete anarchy!  It was fantastic, because when the drunk people came home and asked if we wanted pizza, they all had to come watch us play this ridiculous game.

We stayed up until midnight, and then I headed toward bed, and I think a naked Byron might have gone by, but I can neither confirm nor deny anything.  But I'm pretty sure he ate the piece of grapefruit that Emy had given me.  Either way, I no longer had a piece of grapefruit, and I had to claw my eyes out.