On the following Sunday he happened to be crossing the same bridge at about ten in the morning, and stopped to look at three boats, packed with young men, a few carrying fishing-rods, starting off down the river. The fishing-rods were there right enough, but something seemed wrong; the men looked too purposeful, and, moreover, eight or nine young men in a boat with a couple of rods is an unusual sight. Blake watched the boats disappearing fast down the river, and wondered what would be the right word to substitute for fishing. After a while he realised that there was not a boat left on the river, and, further, that if all the boats had carried as many passengers as the three he had just seen start, over three hundred young men from Ballybor had gone a-fishing that Sunday morning, the majority of whom, if not all of them, were shop-boys, the most dangerous element in the town. The barracks commanded a good view of the reach of the river where the boats were usually moored, and next Sunday at an early hour Blake told off Sergeant O’Bryan with a pair of field-glasses to report how many boats and how many men went out a-fishing. At eleven o’clock the sergeant reported that, as usual, all the thirty-seven boats had started, carrying two hundred and fifty young men, and that among them he had recognised most of the prominent Sinn Fein shop-boys of the town. But he did not add that he had seen Walsh and Lynch. Five miles below Ballybor the Owenmore river, from being roughly two hundred yards wide, suddenly becomes an inland sea, with a width of over three miles and a length of a mile. Between this inland water and the open sea runs a long narrow range of sand-hills, commonly known as Seal Island, nearly three miles long and with an average width of four hundred yards. Blake came to the conclusion that the fishing expeditions every Sunday must be connected with this lonely island; but except for drilling—and sand-dunes did not seem a suitable place for a parade—he could think of nothing to which this island would lend itself. Moreover, he knew that if he tried to find out what was going on by observing from the mainland, he would be spotted and the alarm given, and that if he tried to approach the island in a boat from the seaside the fishermen from Dooncarra would give him away.