Purified :-)

Gosh, almost 21:30 and I’ve only just started typing, where has the day gone, well a good portion of it was spent cleaning an oil purifier but I won’t bore you with the details of that. Well, apart to say that the gunge that I removed from it would have filled at least one good sized Raasay pothole. In fact that is just what the muck from the purifier looks and smells like, bitumen, and it’s about the same consistency as the stuff the council use, only minus the stones  

  

That’ll be the one I was cleaning today on the left, though I did the hard bit underneath the shiny spinny thing The ‘Third’ did the clever bit in the middle The Finlaggan has four of them for lube oil, marine gas oil and the heavy fuel oil that the main engines run off, they need regular attention and are very messy Reminds me of when I left school and started an apprenticeship at a garage, the apprentice always had the pleasure of under sealing the new cars

Anyway, the day started off several miles and islands away from where I am now in North Uist, it began cold clear and frosty on Raasay with me struggling to wake up the Dude. For Monday had come around all too soon and both the boy and I would be leaving home once more for the week. He to the hostel and me to cabin 420 on the MV Finlaggan, the ‘holiday’ was over It was only two days and three nights at home but it felt like a holiday, the weather was that good and we achieved so much.

Leaving home just after 7:00 we dawdled down ‘Calum’s road’ initially, soaking up the pink skies, long shadows and of course the potholes

  

This beauty being a section known as A Lon Chomhnard, The flat bog, which these days is anything but flat Less than a mile further on we came to the part of the road that crosses from east to west, I wont attempt its Gaelic name but it has something to do with ‘the men of Oscasig (maybe).

 

I have always called this stretch of road ‘The valley of the eagle and the pee’ on account of me seeing a golden eagle there on my way to view http://www.iosea.co.uk/3sarnish.shtml when I bought it 23 years ago. I just stepped out of the car to take a leak when a golden eagle that was perched on a rock nearby took off right above me. Since then I’ve often seen both golden and sea eagles here but this fine morning there were FOUR sea eagles circling above and a kestrel hovering nearby. It’s no wonder we never see any rabbits nowadays

 

The last few miles were a bit of a rush after all our sightseeing but we made the ferry with time to spare, whereupon the Dude exited the Land Rover with his bag and pretended not to know me

 

Probably not much has changed in the thirty odd years since this picture was taken, well apart from one of those schoolboys being master of this ferry another having a hand in building my house and another serving in the engine room with me I think that photo of the Raasay children going off to school for the week with all their bags was taken around 1977 and came from the http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/ nowadays my son is the only ‘lodger’ at the hostel.

 

Forty minutes later I parked up in Uig and joined my ship for the week,

Ferguson’s ‘Harvest Anne’ was on the pier and the ferry marshalling lanes packed with cars. I enquired to the chap dealing with them all “what’s all the traffic about”, “twitchers” says he “apparently there’s a rare duck in town”

 

 

http://www.birdguides.com/species/species.asp?sp=027127 

You gotta laugh at its Latin name

(Histrionicus histrionicus)  

 

When someone drives all they way from the south coast of England to see a duck, stays one night in a B&B then drives all the way back home the day after, then I’d say that was pretty ‘histrionical’  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histrionic_personality_disorder .

 

There was/is more, but it’s almost 23:00 now and I’ve still got stuff to do, so I’ll just leave you with the evening sky over Kilmuir

and that lump of rock outside Uig