Make and Break Harbour

How still lies the bay in the bright western airs
 Which blow from the crimson horizon
 Once more we tack home with a dry empty hold
 Saving gas with the breezes so fair
 She's a kindly Cape Isander, old, but still sound
 But so lost in the longliner's shadow
 Make and break, and make do, but the fish are so few
 That she won't be replaced should she founder
 It's so hard not to think of before the big war
 When the cod were so cheap and so plenty
 Foreign trawlers go by now with long-seeing eyes
 Taking all, where we seldom take any
 And so the young folk don't stay with the fisherman's way
 Long ago, they all moved to the cities
 And the ones left behind, old, tired, and blind
 Can't work for "a pound or a penny".
 Chorus:
 In Make and Break Harbour the boats are so few
 Too many are pulled up and rotten
 Most houses stand empty, old nets hung to dry
 Are blown away, lost and forgotten.
 I can see the big draggers have stirred up the bay
 Leaving lobster traps smashed on the bottom
 Can they think it don't pay to respect the old ways
 That Make and Break men have not forgotton?
 For we still keep our time to the turn of the tide
 And this boat that I built with my father
 Still lifts to the sky! The one lunger and I
 Still talk like old friends on the water.