Record numbers ??

 

Gosh it’s Easter already and it’s kind of crept up on me without noticing it. Long gone are the days when I had a ‘proper job’ in the city and used to count the days down from Christmas to Easter and the first proper holiday of the year. The vacation was always well planned in advance, usually around the start of the year and inevitably on an island, usually Mull. It would invariably involve diving and towing a boat at least 400 miles behind a Land Rover, or latterly the relative luxury of a Range Rover, though that was in the early eighties so not that ‘latterly

The trip would be meticulously planned with ‘slack water’ calculated for all the wrecks that we’d have lined up for ‘bashing’. Bashing being attacking anything and everything  on the seabed that looked like non ferrous metal 🙂 I think in those days we got between £800 and £900 a ton for copper and brass with lead fetching a measly £40 so not worth lifting and we rarely bothered with it. Now it’s ten times that to the detriment of many a church roof and railway signal cable 😦

Nowadays Easter just arrives, still very welcome but no where near as eagerly awaited, probably because I consider a great deal of my life a holiday :-) 

The weather might not have been up to much but that certainly didn’t stop people visiting Raasay,

or, as in the case of ‘Green van man’ revisiting Raasay 🙂

For yesterday on Good Friday we had 106 cars, 2 mini busses and three commercial vehicles, though I’m sure a few of them will be leaving with punctures and suspension damage 😦 I know the roads are atrocious on Raasay but some of these Audis, Volkswagens, Volvos and Fords are so low to start with they don’t stand a chance when full of families and luggage. Many of them struggle getting on the ferry, let alone up Calum’s road.

Apart from loading and unloading cars not a great deal was achieved really, my fairlead project being abandoned due to wind and rain. With the sudden drop in temperatures this last week or so, the last thing I expected to see on my way home from work was a flowering rhododendron bush.

The weather certainly has gone barmy, if not balmy, we’ve barely had any frost this winter and I saw one of these still in flower in October once.

https://lifeattheendoftheroad.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/for-a-few-watts-more/ OK, it past its best but this is the west coast of Scotland not Devon 🙂

After that it was straight home to bed, well, after a chat with ‘Green Van Man’ who kindly gave me a bottle of http://www.butcombe.com/beers/beers.shtml# which I’m going to sample when I get home 🙂

This morning started off with a huge tide that had just stepping straight onto the boat at deck level.

The equally impressive low tide enabling us to give the tide gauge a good clean.

The tide actually being around 100mm below ‘chart datum’, but me thinks that Balfour Beatty’s ‘chart datum’ is actually higher than the real one 🙂

During my lunch break I went to look at our new home 😦

 

It’s going to take some getting used to 🙂 Still I’m sure I’ll keep you all well entertained when I tow it to Arnish behind the Land Rover 🙂

I did manage a little more work on the ‘fairlead rollers’ and some seals on the pressure washer

but the pressure washer pump had a cracked ceramic piston

so that was only 99% successful 😦

Still, all I have to do is phone Bruce at http://www.washdownsupplies.co.uk/ in Cumbria and a new one will soon be in the post. The pressure washer on the good ship Loch Striven certainly gets well used and the Ehrle one that we have hard wired and plumbed into the ‘forward voith space’ is a bit like the ten year old broom that has had three heads and two handles 🙂

Having said said most off the damage has been caused by abuse rather than poor quality of the Italian pump and Polish motor, which brings me onto Bruce. Whilst the German made http://www.ehrle.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=38&Itemid=75&lang=en is a fine bit of kit the spares cost an arm and a leg. A W140 pump bought from them will cost you around £500 whereas buying one from Bruce who purchases them direct from http://www.interpumpgroup.it/interpump/uk/Default.htm the Italian manufacturer will cost you half that. Same goes for the motor, £400 from Ehrle, £200 from Bruce. Not only that but he’s on the end of the phone for advice and really knows his stuff.

I know, it’s a bit boring and lame but it’s 7:00am now on Easter Sunday and I’ve to go and ‘roll a pig’ 🙂 well more a case of catch three and put them in a crate. Then I have to go and look at our new shed/house site that Lachie and Hooky have been working on 🙂