Just after eight fifteen PM here at the ‘end of the road’ and the end of a rather grey day, which is, in fact why I’m here at the laptop and not outside ‘tinkering’ 
The ‘wall to wall’ sunshine we’ve been having of late never materialized.
That was what greeted me this morning
and that’ll be tonight’s feeble excuse for a sunset 
Having said that, just ten miles south in Inverarish it’s been baking with blue skies Can’t complain though it’s been an awesome spell of weather for the best part of three weeks now and we’ve been ‘lapping it up’. Tools left outside, car windows left open and double watering the garden every day. We didn’t even see a midge until June arrived and I can count the number of bites I’ve had on one hand. That gentle north wind we’ve of late keeping Sonas on the whole ‘midge free’.
Hence the lack of activity on the blogging front, truth is I’ve not been in the house until after 21:00 recently, whereupon a glass of red in front of the ‘one eyed monster’ with darling wife has been the ‘order of the day’.
Well, with most days ending like this, it would be a crime not to have a glass of red wine hey
In the water at last
Camilli’s current obsession has been getting the Avon Searider, getting ready for sea and making a place to recover it safely at Arnish. The latter is still very much ‘work in progress’ but we’ve been ‘on the case’, despite it being a little warm for concreting.
Still, I took the opportunity of ‘press ganging’ my mate into helping for one good ‘mix and pour’ of a couple of tons. Looks pretty rough but that’s deliberate so as the next batch will get a good key to it. On a 5m tide I’d be able to get the Searider out here with the Land Rover or dumper but going down just past that mesh means 4m would be doable.
I spent an inordinate amount of time fitting a Garmin 95CV sounder to the boat, a job I could have done in a couple of hours but managed to string out for two days. To be honest I was just enjoying the weather and doing things at a very leisurely pace. The month’s holiday had been quite physical and the ‘two weeks on’ had seen us working manically painting the Hallaig so it was good to just ‘potter’ about. The Searider actually came with a perfectly adequate sounder for finding good ‘scallop ground’ but there’s a few wrecks I’m planning on looking for and visiting and the new Garmin’s ‘side scan’ facility will make this far easier.
Flat out at Raasay Distillery
It was great to get my son back from Heriot Watt for the summer but no sooner had he arrived home than he was ‘head hunted’ for a job with R&B at https://raasaydistillery.com/ OK, perhaps a bit of an exaggeration but they have started letting out some rooms to the public and it has been doing very well. No surprise really cos the rooms are absolutely beautiful and the setting idyllic. And, who wouldn’t want to stay in a distillery hey https://raasaydistillery.com/luxury-raasay-accommodation/
So, my son and I aint been doing quite as much of the ‘male bonding’ I’d have liked, him being working pretty much full time since he arrived Anyway’s, we did at last manage to get the Searider launched on Saturday and headed north to Loch Arnish for a spot of clam diving
Nikon Coolpix W300
Sadly, not much in the way of photographs cos my Nikon Coolpix W300 died again
The very expensive camera I purchased as Christmas present to meself last year is friggin useless, at least in the water. I could have got something better for half the price but this camera is allegedly good down to 30m. Aye right, the first one flooded in less than 7m and this one died at 25m. You can see the yellow seal by my thumb nail has failed. I am most dischuffed
Still, seeing the boat sitting happily on its mooring a ‘stones throw’ from home made up for it,
as did our bag of clams.
Scallop recipes
Guess what we had for dinner Having made a living clam diving for much of my adult life I’ve tried them most ways but that was afore I had the Internet Now you can just ‘Google’ for inspiration, so I did https://damndelicious.net/2016/02/12/bacon-scallops-with-garlic-butter-sauce/ came up with a variation on that.
Never been much good at following recipes so I just melted a quarter of a pack of butter, fried 5 rashers o chopped bacon in it, added basil, oregano, chili flakes and three cloves of garlic, cut the roes off the clams, chopped em up and threw them in the pan for the last 30 seconds or so then served with linguine. It was good but missing some cream and salt, I figured the bacon would be salty enough but was wrong. Today we had something similar for Sunday dinner but used all the roes, mixed in some Munro’s black pudding and half a pot of double cream at the end with some chopped parsley. Now that was awesome
And the weather has improved too
