Chased by rainbows :-)

It’s been a while since I was on here, though it’s not been through lack of trying, well at least not last night anyway. Sunday night was a busy evening despite finishing work early but somehow I just never seemed to be able to get it together to post.

It was a fine enough day that greeted me with a new born Soay lamb,

the first one this year to our three ewes.

It also saw the first signs of an increase in power from our ‘Stream Engine’ water turbine in almost a week. It was only .9 of an amp, around 45w but it was rising all the time thanks to the recent bout of rain, reaching a respectable 200w by the time I arrived home from work today (Tuesday).

Leaving for work early I caught sight of the coaster Lyrika heading south ready load Raasay’s timber.

http://www.baltnautic.lt/en/fleet/ship=6

At 1909 gross tons and with a length of over 86m her ‘air draft’ can be reduced to 6m by lowering her masts and wheelhouse. A crucial factor as much of the timber is going to Belgium under some very low bridges.

 

The lowlands of Belgium being a far cry from the dramatic scenery of Raasay, here’s Dun Caan and ‘The White Face’ on Raasay’s east side just a mile or so further down the road. I really hate drudge of the daily commute to work

It may have started off fine but by the time I arrived on the Loch Striven the day had gone downhill

Two hours later the coaster was tied up in half a gale of pishing rain alongside JST’s floating pier at Suisnish.

However by late afternoon it had cleared up and the Lyrika awaited patiently for Monday and the end of the Sabbath

The day at work was the usual mellow day of drills, cleaning and maintenance  before heading home for a belated birthday treat of roast Ginger, Ginger being our now frozen five year old Tamworth boar He had a good life, created dozens of piglets and had a quick end. Ginger will not be forgotten

Tolerating Molly stealing his food, playing football with the boy or helping me cut firewood, Ginger was one of the family

That was about it for Sunday, after dinner I helped wifey pack the boys bag ready for the Raasay primary school trip to Edinburgh on Monday. Well when I say help it was more of moral support rather than actually doing anything, it’s going to be very difficult for me and the swineherd this next week, we’ll have to start talking to each other

Seriously though he’s only eleven and in not much more than a few weeks he’ll be leaving home or at least staying in the hostel when he goes to Portree High in August, where does time go ????

Monday

Monday, if I recall correctly was a slightly better day than Tuesday insomuch as the showers were further apart

The 20 000ton cruise ship Discovery was anchored in Portree http://us.voyagesofdiscovery.com/ship.php?ship_id=367&type=33 bringing much needed dollars to Skye’s capital.

Here she is on the ‘AIS’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System along with the Lyrika during the afternoon.

There was other stuff but I’ve forgotten it, that’s what happens when your 55 I did try to tell you all about it but HYLAS wouldn’t let me for he seemed to be having an ‘off day’. In all fairness the ‘ highly adaptable satellite’ that has been providing me with ‘broadband’ this last two weeks has preformed far better than the previous offering from http://www.avantiplc.com/ my ISP, but yesterday he just didn’t want to know.

 

He probably got distracted by those nymphs http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/pictures/hylas-nymphs-1896/

Tuesday

Well there was much more to Tuesday than this but I’ll leave you with it anyway as it’s time for bed.

 

Hard working clam divers off  Sconser Lodge.

A piper tuning his pipes at Sconser

in readiness for piping someone to their ancestral home

A rainbow over Inverarish

 

with its other end on the old pier and the Lyrika.

Another one for tying up in the pouring rain,

one for guiding me home,

one at Brochel,

 

one at the end of the road

and finally one at home

I almost like it part II :-)

So where was I before the chilli ? which will of course make no sense whatsoever to anyone reading this post before  http://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/i-almost-like-it/ but here goes

So, the ‘One armed bandit’ and I arrived at Arnish around 17:30 and after making dinner and then falling asleep on the couch I went to bed before anyone else. I was up this morning before anyone else too but it wasn’t because I was particularly early, in fact it was after 8:00 when I arose.

My heart sank when I saw this from the front door, and knowing that the pigs would feel the same way I gave them extra rations to help ward off the cold. Well not so much the cold as the outside taps had not frozen but they’d not be doing any foraging in this weather.

The first task after the ‘breakfast round’ was to give the trailer a good power washing out, re fill it with fresh bedding then tow it back out for George, Ed and Bee.

Utilizing a couple of pallets for steps and jacking it solidly in position just in time before the three tenants returned to check it out.

 

They went straight in and wasted no time in making a nest ‘at the end of the road’

It really was a miserable start to the day and at after 10:00am with no sign of the snow plough we had a run down the road a mile or so.

The visibility being so bad that you could barely see across Loch Arnish

 

and a quick look down ‘Calum’s road’ made me think that we’d be unlikely to see the gritter before Monday

I really do hate the snow, this is the third time we’ve been ‘cut off’ this winter and it’s only the beginning of January. I know that I can get up and down the road in the ‘Old girl’ so we hardly stranded but it means using the trailer to move pigs is out of the question. The Land Rover uses twice as much fuel as wifey’s car and must be used for every journey the pigs need more feed and the water is usually frozen, I FRIGGIN HATE IT And if anyone who has nothing better to do than watch TV all day tells me ‘it lovely’ I’ll thump them

 

After a late breakfast of our home made bacon and the Co ops eggs the day took a turn for the better and the ‘One armed bandit’ and I went up to the shed site to cut wood. Now I knew that wood cutting was a little optimistic in weather like this but I’d left a quad and trailer up there on Thursday and was blowed if I was going to bring it down empty.

A respectable load back on the croft and a good pile of logs that had been stored dry, split, we set off for Torran to check over my mates hydro turbine and clear the snow off his solar panels.

Feeling all nostalgic, probably after seeing Gary’s fantastic aerial images http://www.scotaviaimages.co.uk/

we left the quads there and walked along towards Fladda  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilean_Fladday .

For a couple of years I, and my fellow fish farm workers would walk this track daily,

though it wasn’t every day we had a helicopter visit Only once every two years, usually in April, the smolts would arrive from the hatchery slung under a helicopter in that specially made aluminium bin. The pilot would lower the bin into the cage and the orange float on the side would stay on the surface and release a catch that tipped the bin and opened the lid. Once the bin was empty of its precious cargo the bin would be carried to some nearby spot to have the lid closed and the oxygen turned off before heading back for a refill.

I can’t remember how many trips the chopper or even sometimes choppers would do but it was allot, this day the operation was straight forward as it was done on land but sometimes we would do it on the cage on a platform barely 2m square. The pilots skill was amazing for they could only see you through a mirror for a good deal of the time and in all the times we did this it only went pear shaped once. I say pear shaped but what I should have said was ‘the only time it did not go perfectly’. It was on a cage and he misjudged it slightly so the bin landed in the wrong position, as he lifted off for a second go I clearly saw his face in the mirror saying ‘whoops’  

It was only fifteen or so years ago, imagine doing a ‘risk assessment’ for that nowadays Well we walk along this two mile long rough track to our work with no communication with the outside world. We then scramble down a cliff to our place of work and some dude comes along and drops a big metal bin out of the sky several inches from your head

I can’t remember how many years it is since I last walked the next section but it must be five or six at least, and what a deterioration.

 

The ancient holly tree is still bears DNs scars, I wonder if that’s a certain Donald Nicolson who celebrated his 60th recently The narrow and precipitous track that Calum MacLeod built between 1949 and 1952 is now so overgrown in parts that the heather is knee high.

My favourite part where it snakes between a buttress and large rock however just looked the same, well it would really wouldn’t, not even the hardy highland heather can grow out of solid rock

 

Just before the track passes through the gap is this amazing little shelter,

 

not only does it utilize the natural overhang of the rock to make a fine roof and its base to make a bench but from inside it you can see a little narrow reef just to the south of Fladda. The drying of this reef coincides with the drying of the causeway to Fladda itself some half a mile further on. If, on a poor day you were walking to Fladda with a sack of mail or in your Sunday best you could wait here in relative luxury until you saw the tide ebb clear of the reef 

We pressed on only as far as the highest point before you start to descend the steep path to the causeway  itself.

Lewis was clearly visible in the distance,

as was the old fish trap or ‘caridh’ just before the causeway. These old stone fish traps were a common enough sight on the west coast at one time but this one is a particularly fine example. At one time fish were so plentiful that they would get trapped by the out going tide in these drystone constructions and be harvested by the locals. Whilst they have long since become useless by lack of fish and breached walls I once caught several salmon in here, OK it was almost twenty years ago and they were most certainly escapees from a farm but they were good

The walk back took us nicely up to feeding time, and sure enough by the time we arrived back at Arnish everyone was waiting for us

All in all it had not been a bad day and after the crisp walk I felt that I ‘almost liked the snow’