Generations of tourists enjoyed summer afternoons on the beautiful, wildlife-rich Copeland Island off Co Down, but dwindling interest and bad weather means the last boat sailing to the island will soon cease to make the trip, writes Fionola Meredith
With a pristine white lighthouse perched on the end of its limestone harbour, and a clutch of colourful boats bobbing in the water below, the quiet Co Down seaside town of Donaghadee has a faded picture-postcard appearance. Barely changed since its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the place remains preserved in another era, when people really did send each other picture postcards instead of text messages and e-mails, and when it was common for holidaymakers from Belfast and other parts of the North to rent a house by the iron-grey Irish Sea, rather than catching a cheap flight to Fuengirola.
In those days, the harbour was the heart of the town: the sun-warmed stepped walls were crammed with families licking ice-creams and watching the Pierrots perform. But the big attraction was a trip to the Copeland Island, the largest of three green outcrops a mile or so north of Donaghadee. Every day in summer, a flotilla of brightly painted boats ferried hundreds of holidaymakers over for an afternoon spent picnicking in one of the rocky coves, or exploring the fern-clotted sheep trails that criss-cross the island, or fighting off the dive-bombing gulls outraged at the presence of uninvited visitors.
At one time, more than 15 of these distinctive open half-decker boats were in service, and their lyrical names still resonate in the memory of Donaghadee people - Miss Josephine, The Laura, White Heather, the Carpathia (named after the Titanic rescue ship), Lady Franklin, Miss Dorothy, The Mercedes (named for the first English woman to swim the English channel to France in 1927), The Star of Ulster.
They are all gone now, except one. The last boat to offer trips to the Copeland Island, The Brothers, owned by Quinton Nelson, is still moored in Donaghadee harbour. Quinton's jaunty red 1950s-style noticeboard, advertising daily sailings to "the island of birds and seals", is still on display at the end of the harbour. Every day, Quinton comes down to the harbour at 2pm, just in case anyone has turned up. But potential passengers are few and far between.
Quinton Nelson's family have been running trips to the Copeland Island for 70 years on The Brothers, built in 1935, and Quinton himself has been working on the boat since the mid-1960s. But after a rain-sodden summer with only a handful of trips, he's finally - reluctantly - preparing to call it a day. This season, he says, will be his last. It seems that no one wants to visit the island any more.
The summer ritual of a trip to the Copeland Islands marked the passing years of my own childhood, in the 1970s and 1980s. My memories are still vivid: the saline slap of the breeze as we left the harbour and headed for the choppy open sea, the red and green marker buoys (they too even had their own names - Governor and Deputy) that showed the way.
The island itself was a wild, mysterious place for a child to explore, with secret clear-water springs where you could dip a cup and drink, and an ancient overgrown graveyard, dark and dripping with red fuchsia flowers.
My father, who was born and brought up in Donaghadee, recalls grand summer picnics on the island: a huge party of family and friends would spend the day there, picnicking, swimming, and boiling spring water for tea on campfires, before the boat came to collect them late in the evening.
So where have all the day trippers gone? Standing on the windswept, deserted harbour, Nelson says, "People's ideas have changed. When the railway was here, everyone came and stayed for a month. But the railway's long gone, and it's all cheap holidays and flights abroad nowadays. All the guesthouses and boarding-houses in Donaghadee have gone, and there's no hotel in the town. It's just a place to pass through as far as most people are concerned.
"But it's the weather that really destroyed it for me this season: last year was terrible, and this year is the worst. I reckon I'm down 75 per cent on last year. It used to be that even on a bad day, people would be down at the harbour. They'd be huddled up in coats, but at least they would be there. Now there's no-one."
Back when Donaghadee was a thriving holiday destination, the boats' schedules dominated daily life in summer. It wasn't just excursions to the Copeland Island that were on offer.
In the mornings, the boats took holidaymakers deep-sea fishing, while jaunts to the island were the afternoon treat. In the evenings, the boats went stream-fishing in the waters between the main Copeland Island and the smaller Mew and Lighthouse Islands, often returning well after dusk.
Nelson recalls how sometimes, when they were out stream-fishing late on a summer night, they would see people waving wildly at them from the high point of Copeland Island.
They were day trippers who had managed to miss the last boat home from the island at teatime, and were marooned there for a night under the stars.
With visitors to the North increasing markedly every year, Nelson is frustrated that no help has come his way from the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. He says that his own takings are so small that he cannot afford to splash out on large scale advertising.
"Yes, a lot of it is down to marketing, and it seems to me that we are just not promoted to our full potential. It looks like the tourist board is only interested in big attractions, such as the Giant's Causeway, or whatever the latest up-and-coming thing is. But even a bit of help is the difference between me stopping or keeping going."
Nelson adds that, of the few people who have turned up on the harbour wanting to take the trip to Copeland Island, most have been international visitors, who have only heard of the excursions by chance.
"There've been people from the Philippines, France, Poland and Russia here," he says. "That's great to see. But I still wonder where all the local people have gone."
All three islands have been declared areas of special scientific interest, and they are important sites for breeding seabirds such as Manx shearwaters (which nest in the rabbit burrows that honeycomb the islands), eiders, black guillemots and Arctic terns; in fact, the Copelands host the largest Arctic tern colony in Ireland.
Grey seals and common seals are often to be seen sunbathing on the rocks with their pups, and porpoises are sometimes spotted. Yet it looks as though this rich island life will no longer be accessible to the public. Short of a miracle, Nelson will pack up his boat and his board for the last time. at the end of this month.
"I'd sell The Brothers, but I'd hate to see her broken up," he says. "She was my father's and I don't want her to go out of the family. The old boat is fine, she still does the job admirably - if only we could get the passengers we did in the old days."