Hanging on in there

In Denotation and Connotation: enjoy!, I was exploring the connotations of a word in Eleanor Catton's story "Two Tides", where what it denoted was straightforward. But clearly, if you get stuck on the basic meaning of a word, you're less likely to also pick up the connotations of it. That whole first sentence goes like this:

The harbour at Mana was a converted mudflat, tightly elbowed and unlovely at any tide but high.

But some readers stuck on what, in physical terms, was denoted by the...