The Roseland Peninsular is a quiet tip on the southern coast of Cornwall. A place for walks by muddy creeks where the pleasure boats thin out and all that can be heard are cheerful calls from unrecognised birds.
It’s where sailors bring their boats on a high spring tide and lay them to rest.
Once a dream. Paid for from savings, bonuses or inheritances.
Now left to slowly sink into the mud.
Memories of summer holidays are left in a box of faded prints or reels of incompatible cine film. Waiting to be discovered when the sorting starts after a family member departs.
Pored over with rose-tinted nostalgia.
When everyone was younger and fitter.
Happy times. When nobody had died or left home.
Sunny days spent in sunny coves. Moments of elation as the sail took the wind and the boat glided through the waves.
On calmer days, mackerel lines trailed off the stern. On gusty days, the windswept satisfaction that you held the weather at bay.
But holidays on boats can test families too. The cramped, damp spaces and the argumentative, hierarchical relationships.
Me? I was the youngest. I loved the big waves. Licking the salt off my lips. Inhaling the fresh sea air. The ‘iron rations’ - fun-sized Mars Bars which were never big enough and took on the taste of bilge if they been left in the locker too long. The comical stories my late brother made up of Freddie Snake and Bad Gawy-Ga which passed the hours drifting in the Channel. They made me shriek and laugh as I somehow ended up the hero with the aid of our trusty spaniel, Whisky.
Fond memories.
Mum. 4th July 1929 to 23rd October 2023. She didn’t like boats, but she loved us all.
Photos taken on my trusty Leica Q on 11th and 18th October 2020, and 21st October 2023.
In related news,
wrote this wonderful piece about Nostalgia in Photography.
Beautifully poignant Andrew - especially the final photo in the piece - bitter sweet memories no doubt. My sympathies for your loss.
Abandoned ships. They seem so forlorn, as if they wanted 1 more chance to shine, as it were. In my next life I'd like to live by the ocean, or any sizeable body of water, a chance to explore. I guess it's because my late father was a Navy man.