Michael Connolly had returned to this stretch of coastline for thirty years, watching the gradual surrender of the Annie May to time and tide. The fishing boat's weathered hull, now permanently wedged among the dark rocks, held memories as deep as the Atlantic itself. He remembered when its red paint gleamed fresh in the harbour, when his father's calloused hands on the rudder guided her through storms that made the sky and sea indistinguishable.

The boat lay like a beached whale, its wooden ribs exposed through peeling paint, seaweed draped across its flanks like funeral garlands. The grey Connemara sky pressed down, heavy with untold stories, while distant hills stood sentinel over this maritime graveyard. Each visit revealed another small defeat: a new crack in the stern, another plank worked loose by winter gales, the steady erasure of his family's legacy by salt and time.

He often found himself tracing the faded letters of the boat's name with his fingertips, remembering summer mornings when the hold brimmed with silver mackerel and his father's quiet pride in teaching him to read the sea's moods. The Annie May had been more than just a vessel; she had been the archive of three generations of Connolly fishermen, each adding their own layer of stories to her wooden bones.

Now, as Michael stood on the slippery rocks, hands deep in the pockets of his weathered jacket, he realised he was no longer mourning just the boat. He was mourning a way of life that had slipped away as surely as the tide, leaving behind only these calcified remnants of memory. The gulls wheeled overhead, their cries carrying the same plaintive note that had accompanied his father's last journey out to sea, when the fishing grounds still promised abundance and the horizon held possibility rather than resignation.

The boat would never float again, yet somehow, its presence anchored him to this coast more surely than any working vessel could. In its slow dissolution, the Annie May had become something else: a monument to all the fishermen who had read their futures in the waves, only to find those futures rewritten by time's implacable tide.