Catfish & Sea Cows

Set in 19th century Ireland, at a time when most women wanted to settle down and marry, Mary Ann Donnan set her sights on becoming a fisherwoman. How difficult would that be? Enormously difficult given women were not employed on boats or even allowed to step onto them in case they brought bad luck. In 1841 Mary Ann was born into a poor family who could not help finance the purchase of a fishing boat. Even if she could buy her own vessel, there was no tradition of women captaining or crewing boats.

Catfish and Sea Cows is a 97,000-word historical fiction novel, inspired by Mary Ann Donnan, of Kearney. In Victorian Ireland Mary Ann was a midwife, a layer-out of corpses and captain of She Cruiser with an all-women crew. With her girls and occasional help of her long dead siblings she defied convention and prejudice to fish and loot shipwrecks for a living and was persecuted for it.

Follow the story of Mary Ann from the age of six until forty as she struggled against the conventions and culture of the day. This is a roller coaster of real life in the middle to late 19th century in, what is now called, Northern Ireland (then the north of Ireland within an all-Ireland).