Poets, dolphins, octopuses in town
The poet Dylan Thomas called this the “cliff-edge town at the far end of Wales,” but lately it has become better known as the place where the octopuses crawled out of the sea.
Brett Stones, who runs a local dolphin-watching business, spotted the creatures in October and shot a video of the unusual sight, which he posted online. The BBC saw it and quoted him saying it was like “an end of days scenario.”
“Yes I did say that,” Stones said, as we went out on a final dolphin-spotting cruise one recent day. “But you had to be there. And they seemed quite with it, not like they were dying.”
Some were even spotted walking on their eight arms up the stone ramp to the lifeboat station.
The octopuses did not hang around long. Conservationminded locals plopped them back into the sea; fishermen scooped them up and took them home. Stones said he hoped his octopus discovery would generate publicity for his business, SeaMor, and bring a surge of customers for the last weeks of the dolphin-sighting season before winter set in. Instead, his phone was soon ringing off the hook with journalists and a few scientists calling from around the world, and none of the tourists could get through to make a booking.
Before he brought his boat up on the beach under the curve of the old quay (it was new in 1834), Stones did one last cruise of the bay and within minutes came across a small pod of bottlenose dolphins, not more than two football fields out.
New Quay is a photogenic place, even after most of the boats are pulled up for winter. From the Cnwcy Glap, or Chat Corner, a stone-built hangout on the clifftop main street, it is easy to see what Dylan Thomas meant about the curved quay “shouldering out to sea.”
On the hill behind is what the poet referred to as a “hill of windows,” rows of stucco-fronted houses painted in bright colours. The poet never mentioned that bright palette; apparently, it’s a modern phenomenon.
In Thomas’ time here, only 1944-45, it was a fishing village, a place for sea captains to retire “sober as Sunday.” Now the pubs greatly outnumber the churches, probably because of the new tourist trade, though there were plenty in the poet’s day.
Winston Evans, 78, remembers when the fishing was so good that he had to go out only five days a week to make a living. Then prices rose in the 1970s, “and we all bought bigger boats, so we had to go out seven days a week to pay for them.” Then prices fell, and restrictions on catches came in, and times were hard again.
Then, as he recalled, in the1990s, a local conservationist, Alan Bryant, “discovered” the dolphins.
“We didn’t even know they were dolphins; we used to call them tumblers,” Evans said. “He showed us these were bottleneck dolphins, and that started the ball rolling.” Evans soon bought three dolphin-sighting boats. “Dolphins, it’s the best thing that’s happened to New Quay,” Evans said. There are three dolphin-spotting tour companies in town these days.
“They should rename it Dolphinville,” Stones said.