And the cots are no more, like the men who sailed them. And the racing curraghs of Connemara at this time of year, slimmer and more predatory than the regular curraghs, they, too, are an exact icon of the hardy men that turn them into flickering, dancing streaks of buoyant beauty on the bays where the curragh regattas are held. Light as the feathers of rooks, and just as dark, with hawked noses, just a skin stretched over ribs, the racing curraghs when in full flight are in total visual harmony with the men who oar them fiercely through the cutting waves. Your curragh man strips to the waist often for races like this. Then you see that he is as lightly but strongly made as his craft, the flexing ribcages pushing against the dark skin, both man and boat looking like something more of Spain than of the craggy Irish coast.
Men are like their boats.
In the same Galway Bay the great hookers still sail, the workaday draughthorses of the past now deployed for pleasure. The broken hulks of many of them littered the coastline before the restoration. Today they gather in Kinvara and elsewhere along the coast through the summer and the faces of those who sail them, the descendants of those who have always used them, are somehow both of the past and the present. And there is a place where boats and those who sail them on the waters truly come together. Up the coast there is the island of MacDara, off the purpled Connemara bulk of Carna.