Home at last and all the omens are good, methinks I should have bought a lottery ticket on the way home. It’s been a hectic old week aboard the good ship Hebrides with some interesting cargoes and a few ‘challenges’ to speed the days along. The weather on the other hand has been pretty miserable for June, probably because I fitted solar panels last week.
Lochmaddy on a driech Thursday morning,
and I bet you can’t guess what that white concrete structure is on that tidal islet behind the yacht Goldrush.
Me, well I was wracking my brains for weeks then gave up and asked the harbourmaster, well it was a magazine for storing explosives 
A long way from home, two Volvos from Slovakia made a brief visit to the islands.
Though I’m guessing that they didn’t count on having to reverse off at Uig 
A serious road roller for the Uists, they obviously repair the roads there.
Some ‘lost sheep’ in Lochmaddy, not a lot of grazing on that rock that’s for sure.
Uig on a Wednesday evening and the ‘handbrake turn’ as we approach the pier.
Another grim start to the day, this time in Lochmaddy with the MV Kylebahn berthed on the opposite side. Jim Kilcullen and his boat from Connell have to be one of the original west coast charter operations from the early eighties, and he’s still on the go. There can’t be many skippers know the area as well as he does, at least from a divers perspective.
A spot of painting for me in the emergency generator room.
A Ford 3000, MF 135, John Deere 2130
and David Brown 950 all heading west,
whilst an immaculate MkIII Cortina 1600 heads east. Gosh, I served my apprenticeship working on cars like this, clunky void bushes, worn out camshafts, rattling steering columns and vibrating propshafts. When I was the foreman at a Ford main dealer we had a mechanic who changed a clutch in one of these in 23 minutes!!! and that included running to the stores for it. I say running because the best mechanics wore trainers, as every six minutes they could shave of the ‘standard time’ was money in their pocket. From memory the ‘standard time’ for a 1600 Cortina clutch was 1.4 hours so he would have been paid an extra hours wage, some guys would easily double their wage every week.
That was it really, I managed to get the 15:00 ferry to Raasay today, got home for 16:00 and got stuck straight into servicing the Land Rover. Much to my amazement when I crawled underneath it I found that all eight grease nipples on both propeller shafts were in line and accessible with the grease gun!!!! In twelve years of crawling underneath the ‘Old Girl’ to grease her nipples it’s probably happened twice.
I know it’s rubbish, I missed out the wine, the pigeons I shot, the fish farm at Inver and a whole heap of stuff but I’m tired now and it’s almost 22:00.
Life at the end of the road 
