Home and no bath :-(

The first thing I did upon my arrival at the Premier Inn Greenock was have a bath, mains water may not be quite so tasty but it’s far more dependable than our tiny spring at home. Most people take their water for granted, not the eight households at Arnish, Torran and Fladda who have been rationing water at this time of year since the advent of flushing toilets and washing machines. The fabulous builders and stonemasons of the past never envisaged people having baths every day let alone  floating their ‘jobbies’ away with a gallon of perfectly good water

The first house at the north end of Raasay to have running water was at Torran and that was not added until many years after the house was built, in the 1950s or 60s. Most dwellings up here followed suit shortly after Murdo Nicolson installed the first black plastic pipe at ‘the north end’ but the solid rock and thin soil mean that most springs reduce to a trickle in the summer and few supply pipes are buried deep enough to prevent freezing in winter. Consequently none of the regular inhabitants of this beautiful place are surprised when a tap is turned on and nothing comes out of it, it may have dried up, frozen or simply have a newt or frog stuck in the end

So not only did I have a deep bath but I flushed the toilet every time I had a pee, something banned in our house for a couple of weeks now

After the much needed bath I went for a walk along the dockside that was just feet from my hotel, lying just opposite was the MV Clansman, awaiting repair of one of her massive MAK 8 M32 engines

which has done something serious with it’s crankshaft

 

M 32 C

 

 

Which at 4000Kw or 5440HP and 46 tons could have been catastrophic

If you’re a sad ‘anorak’ type like myself that enjoys watching the ships go by then I can’t imagine a better place to do it.

All these pictures were taken within feet of the hotel and I suppose if you were lucky enough to have a room facing the Clyde then you need never step outside

Here’s the aluminium passenger ferry Ali Cat entering the dock for the night.

Here’s a regular visitor to the ‘Inner Sound’ the MV Kingdom Of Fyfe, belonging to Briggs Marine she can quite often be seen from Brochel Castle on Raasay. For the two days I was in Greenock and Gourock though she was swinging at anchor just ‘up river’ from the Maersk Baltimore.

Serco Denholm’s tug Dexterous was also tied up in the dock on my doorstep as was the suction dredger ‘Shoal Way’ but she did not put in an appearance until it was too dark to take pictures But there’s some nice ones here http://pbrstreetgangsrandomstuff.blogspot.com/2010/04/shoalway-new-dredger-for-river-mersey.html

Anyway, as I said in the last post, I met ‘The Purser’ so we had a bit of ‘craic’ in the bar and turned in early for our course on Thursday. It was only a couple of miles down the road at ‘head office’ in Gourock but it’s almost 23:00 now and my bed time so I’ll finish this off tomorrow