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My request caused some anxiety. The crew muttered and shook their heads. But I insisted. Eventually they agreed, and off we went rather gingerly. Everything turned out splendidly. The curragh skimmed away through the troughs and crests, then turned handsomely as the waves curled under her. My crew beamed with pleasure, and so did I. Now I knew for certain that the curraghs of Brendan’s homeland were not just inshore skiffs. They handled like true sea boats. The voyage was one step closer.
    Back ashore I paid off my curragh men, who were evidently delighted with such apparently easy money, and asked them who could tell me more about their “canoes.” They were unanimous in telling me that John Goodwin of Maharees was my man. No one else, they said, knew as much about canoes or built them so well. Yes, I had to see John Goodwin.
    So it was that I met the curragh-builder of Maharees, whose advice was to underpin a major part of my boat-building. Seventy-eight-year-old John Goodwin was the last man in the Dingle Peninsula who made curraghs for his living. He was the only survivor of an industry that had once seen a curragh-builder in every coastal village. A number of the Dingle farmers still knew how to build themselves a curragh in a back shed during the winter months, but John Goodwin was a professional. More than that, he had spent his lifetime accumulating information about curraghs because he loved them. As a young man he had emigratedbriefly to America, only to return to the Dingle to take up his father’s trade and his grandfather’s trade before him. He even used the tools he had inherited, a few hand drills and wood chisels, a knife and a hammer, and a small selection of wooden battens marked like yardsticks that were all John needed to measure out his work and produce the sophisticated and elegant curraghs for which he was famous.
    Just as important for me, John loved talking about curraghs. For hour after hour he plied me with stories about curraghs and their crews, about building curraghs, about the days when every creek and cleft in the coast had its population of these small boats, hundreds upon hundreds of them, when the mackerel fishing was so rich that Dingle men living in America would come home just for a few weeks in the summer to reap the sea’s harvest. Proudly John showed me a photograph of himself and his three brothers sitting bolt upright in a racing curragh in which they had been champions of Kerry. Walking past a row of upturned curraghs, he would stop and point out minute differences between each boat; indeed, he had built most of them with his own hands. Once I showed him a faded photograph taken in the 1930s of a curragh frame, and without a second’s hesitation he identified the man who had made it. Another time I asked him about the days when curraghs were sailed as well as rowed. After a moment’s thought he began rummaging around in the rafters of the tarred shack where he built his boats and pulled down an old sail. It was a museum piece, and he let me measure and copy it, while he spent another half hour telling me how to rig and sail a curragh to best advantage. It was advice that was to prove vital.
    One story in particular stayed in my mind. On a wintry day earlier this century, John said, a steamer had been driven into a local bay by a terrible storm. The vessel was in real danger, but she managed to get down an anchor to hold her temporarily. Her master sent up distress rockets to call out the lifeboat from Fenit before the anchor broke. But the storm was so fierce that the Fenit lifeboat was unable to get out of the harbor, and had to turn back after suffering damage. Then two local curragh men decided to help. They carried their frail craft to the rocks, launched her into the raging sea, and with great daring rowed out to the steamer. One man leapt aboard and persuaded the steamer’s master to hoist anchor. Then he piloted the vessel through the shoals and reefs to safety.