The Lochaline Triffids

A fine Sunday evening here at our berth in Lochaline, with ‘wee dug’ and meself just back from a good walk along the shore of the loch towards Ard Tornish House https://ardtornish.co.uk/ .

Wikipedia’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardtornish picture and not mine Me, I left the good camera back in the caravan

We do like it here the ‘wee dug’ and I,

she gets lots of attention from the public and crew, and we can go for leisurely walks in the evening and at lunch. Not only that but I can roll out of bed and onto the ferry in a matter of minutes

  

Even though the working day is much longer here with a 7:00am sailing, I don’t actually need to get up any earlier and am ‘home’ much sooner. There’s a great village shop just a two minute walk up the hill and loads of great local services http://www.morvern.org/community/services/ even a self service fuel pump. At this time of year there’s much going on and if I was ‘so inclined’ the Lochaline Social Club https://www.facebook.com/lochalinesocialclub?rf=212323538786470 is ‘just outside my door’ so to speak Perhaps that’s not a good thing come ‘chucking out time’ right enough but I’ve certainly no complaints.

Lochaline Boat Charters http://www.lochaline-boats.co.uk/ operates out of here

with their two Aquastar boats, Brendan and Peregrine both of which will drop divers on awesome wrecks, reefs, cliff and drift dives in the local area and beyond. As a destination for diving holidays Lochaline could not be better equipped and that’s coming from an ‘anorak’ who spent much of his early adult life and beyond doing the ‘trainspotting’ equivalent of scuba diving Sad I know but I’ve always had a ‘soft spot’ for this little corner of Scotland. Never in a million years did I ever think I’d actually get paid for staying here

Sunday

So, despite the normal Sunday service here at Lochaline not starting till 8:45, the skipper and I were aboard the good ship Hallaig at 6:30.

One of the very expensive ABB  http://new.abb.com/low-voltage/products/switches/motor-operated-change-over-switches motorized battery switches had failed and we were going to change it prior to sailing.

  

There are four of these on the ‘hybrids’ and at almost £900 apiece it’s a fecking disgrace that they fail with such regularity. Allegedly ABB say they are good for 5000 cycles but ours fail regularly at half that. Luckily we carry spares aboard and had it all sorted prior to sailing.

Failure of one or more of these switches does not stop the ‘hybrids’ from sailing but it does mean you cannot utilize the 600kWh LiFePO4 battery banks Anyway, that’s all sorted now, and a sternly worded email is winging its way to ABB It’s not like they have these things in stock, there’s a six to eight week ‘lead time’ which I think is ‘ABB speak’ for camel ride from ChIndia or wherever they churn these things out from! No kidding, I pulled the old one apart and it’s made out of the same ‘Micky Mouse’ metal

  

that my Dinky toy Morris Minor was made of.

I kid you not, here we have an £11,000,000 ferry with a £1000 switch broken cos of a 3pence part which the manufacturer refuses to supply separately. The world has gone mad!!!

The Triffid

Anyway’s, we got that sorted, sailed on time and had pleasant enough day here at Lochaline, after which the ‘wee dug’ and I went for that walk I mentioned earlier.

   

Along the shore, past the sand mine towards Ard Tornish House.

  

It was here that we spotted the Triffids!!! never seen anything like em before but they were growing on the shore and pretty much what I’d imagined John  Wyndham’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffid plants to look like OK, perhaps not exactly but they were odd and that’s for sure.

The damage I could do with one of these A proper ‘dumper’ from the sand mine.

This really is the ‘Rolls Royce’ of sand

 

The ‘office’