Well, that’ll be the telly fixed It died a couple of months ago and cos I rarely watch it I never got around to fixing it, what with all my other ‘wee projects’ on the go. I’d kinda been putting it off on account of where the antennae resides, which is in the loft above 900mm of insulation. I’d a feeling it wasn’t a good idea fitting it up there when I installed it 3 or 4 years ago as it would obviously be loosing some efficiency through the slate roof. However, external TV antennas and dishes in these latitudes usually get battered by the wind, loose signal and inevitably leave rusty streaks down your walls. Anyway, I’d traced the fault to the booster which was no longer showing its ‘powered up light’ and fitted a new one with a built in amplifier and 4 way splitter. That was of course after carefully peeling back 3 x 300mm layers of insulation from above the loft hatch and carefully picking my way through it complete with breathing mask and gloves. Boy does that stuff irritate or what. So, now I’ve got my gazillion TV channels back but after a quick look through them tonight I figured I’d be as well off on here
How is it possible to have so many channels full of 5h1te?
Thursday
Yesterday I once more borrowed the neighbours ‘Tank’ to go and get stone from Sconser Quarry, this time 20mm ‘chuckies’ for the drive around ‘Callum’s shed’.
Thanks to a Windoze or Firefox update I’ve lost most of me pictures right enough but I was really chuffed with the outcome
MV Loch Bhrusda, the noisiest ship on Scotland’s west coast and FV Sarah the best clam diving boat on the planet Don’t let looks fool you
Friday
Sure Thursday did have a great deal more to offer but as I mentioned previously I lost all me pictures thanks to an update Why do we need all these friggin updates (please don’t answer that). My first laptop was an old IBM Think Pad with a pirate copy of XP on it running Firefox. I had that laptop for years and cos it had this pirate software on, it never had a single update installed in all the time I had it. The thing preformed faultlessly for years until the actual laptop keypad failed and even then I fixed it temporarily by putting it in the freezer overnight. Every time install a Windoze or Firefox update something barmy happens
is it just me?
Anyway, with the weather being so settled and me having ‘worked my butt off’ this last wee while I figured I was due some ‘me time’. So after getting the Searider all ready for sea and polishing up my diving gear I went for a ‘blast’ I had spent the morning dropping off my neighbour and collecting cement from Sconser then returned home to take generator, mixer, poker and wot not down to the shore at me slip. The tides were just about as small as they could be with a HW of only 4m at 13:05. They do not get much smaller than that and my goal during all my slipway ‘civil engineering’ had been to make my slip usable at ANY ‘high water’. Well today I did it
I managed to launch the Searider around an hour before at around 3.93M
Sure the wind was from the east and the pressure high so it was probably even lower than that but I was ‘well pleased’.
And after a quick tour of Loch Arnish
and a visit to the ‘Horses Cave’, which looked like it had suffered another ‘roof fall’, I sped around through the Fladda Narrows into Loch a Sgurr for a dip.
That’ll be the ‘Huntsman’s Leap’ on Fladda, legend or is it ‘nonsense’ has it that someone jumped the gap on a horse ‘aye right’ Anyway, it’s pretty spectacular and as you can see from the vegetation devoid of sheep and deer
Managed to drop my anchor almost on top of the first scallop this ‘clam diving’ is a bit like ‘riding a bike’
I gotta say though that I was severely disappointed with the water clarity, it was a tad murky, which was a surprise after all the settled weather. Perhaps it was a plankton bloom cos the water temp was 8 degrees!!!! which from memory is a good 2 degrees higher than normal for this time of year.
Once I’d finished ‘catching dinner’ it was a mad rush to Sconser quarry to load up a couple of tons of aggregate ready for tomorrow’s mix, if it ever happens
Aggregate back home, dugs fed and then back down to the shore to recover my trailer, diving cylinder and dinner. I gotta say, it’s much easier with a digger than Land Rover I had just one scallop for me dinner fried in the same pan as a cod fillet and some chorizo, it was boodly amazing